Campus Technology

Sun Microsystems this week rolled out version 2.0 of its xVM VirtualBox. The product is a cross-platform, open source hypervisor that supports hosts ranging from Mac OS X and Windows to Solaris and 18 varieties of Linux.

Google's Chrome Web browser--complete with quirky marketing comic book--made a splash when announced Tuesday, but what a difference a day makes. On Wednesday, proof-of-concept bugs affecting the Internet app were disclosed. Chrome is still early in its first public beta.

Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications in China has deployed a campus-wide wireless LAN (WLAN) from Motorola. The WLAN will enable multimedia Internet-based teaching, automatic academic office management, Internet access, long-distance teaching, and other services. Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications is one of the few universities in China to provide complete wireless LAN coverage to every building in addition to the campus' outdoor spaces.

The Pacific-10 Conference (Pac-10), a group of sports teams from 10 colleges and universities, has expanded the use of its BlueArc Titan storage solution housed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to store dozens of terabytes of game footage. In the 2008-2009 season, all of the Pac-10 football, women's volleyball, and men's and women's basketball teams will access opponents' video for competitive analysis from Titan storage.

Problems with cell phone coverage aren't uncommon on college campuses. There are two main reasons: The beefy structure of historic buildings can block cellular reception within walls, and, on more remote campuses outside cities, signal coverage can be light.

Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in British Columbia has selected SunGard Higher Education's Banner Unified Digital Campus (UDC) to integrate its ERP systems.

DVcreators.net has released DV Kitchen, a new video encoding and publishing application for Mac OS X designed specifically for creating materials to be posted on the Web.

NEC this week debuted four new projectors targeted toward education applications, along with a new MultiSync LCD display. The new NP-series projectors are entry-level models started at $899 but are designed to provide high light output, support for closed captioning, and built-in networking capabilities.

Software frameworks are enjoying enormous popularity these days among a range of developers. It's popularity well earned; frameworks provide powerful tools for building more flexible and less error-prone applications. They generally enhance developer productivity with out-of-the-box functionality. And they can free developers to focus on features instead of common coding tasks.

Utility storage provider 3PAR has announced the release of the 3PAR InServ T400 and T800 Storage Servers. The new hardware is built on the company's third-generation InSpire architecture, featuring the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC with integrated fat-to-thin processing.

City University of New York (CUNY) is partnering up with Intel and Red Hat to launch a new software institute dedicated to open source software. The center, New York City Open Source Solutions Lab, based out of the CUNY Graduate Center, will serve as a test bed for government IT professionals in New York who are working with open source solutions.

Adobe has made its ColdFusion 8 Web development platform free for educators and students. The offer is available for all public and private accredited K-12 schools and colleges and universities.

Trent Batson considers a list of back-to-school resources for Web 2.0.

Campus Technology speaks with wiki expert Stewart Mader, who discusses choosing between commercial and open source wiki products, getting started with a wiki, and why Wikipedia is the single biggest stumbling block to wikis in higher education.

The University of Alabama in Huntsville said it has adopted the Angel Learning Management Suite (LMS). The Angel LMS makes course content and a variety of collaboration tools available online for 24/7 access.

It's no secret that enterprise use of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is on the decline. The question is, How far is it falling?

Kaplan University launched MyPath, a program that uses career planning and student success diagnostics to help students craft a course of study that maximizes their career potential. The assessment tools will be used for all freshmen doing studies in the online program, the school said in a statement, to address study skills and career focus before they begin their academic program.

The fate of ECMAScript 4 (ES4) appears to be sealed and, according to Brendan Eich, chief technical officer of Mozilla and the creator of JavaScript, so is the rift between the two factions of Ecma's Technical Committee 39, divided for a year over the future of this standard. Last month the committee officially agreed to ditch plans for the proposed ES 4.0 specification to focus on a more limited, new spec based on the current standard ECMAScript 3.1 (ES3.1).

5 best practices for building your portal in a Web 2.0 world. (Here’s your chance to get it right for 2009 and beyond!)

How will wikis, blogs, social networking, and folksonomies impact your upcoming IT projects?