At a time when colleges and universities are struggling to plan the mobile campus of the future, many of those with laptop programs have found refresh programs to be their key to success. Planned well, these efforts establish a strategy to rotate the latest laptop products into the campus technology portfolio, ensuring that schools stay…

Everyone seems to have a different definition for "Web 2.0," but most people agree the phrase describes a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services that aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. Technically speaking, these new technologies include blogs, wikis, folksonomies…

Across the U.S., a growing number of schools are turning to ePortfolio assessment technologies to help them monitor and evaluate student progress in a variety of disciplines--and to help them and their students do even more. Across the board, educators report that their ePortfolio efforts have revolutionized the learning process, and the…

With tuition on the rise, Auxiliary Services departments at a variety of colleges and universities are proving that they can innovate and still save their parent institutions cash. Primary areas of innovation include: (1) With advancements in technology, institutions are moving campus purchasing programs into the wireless space; (2) As junk mail …

In many classrooms, movies are a special occasion--a tool that creative teachers intersperse with regular lessons to supplement the everyday curriculum and make learning fun. At the nine school districts served by the Monroe 2-Orleans Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in Spencerport, New York, movies are becoming part of the…

Advocates of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) say it saves money on long distance calls by sending them over the Internet, improves communication by eliminating the Private Branch Exchange (PBX), and offers a host of neat features such as call forwarding, e-mail accessible voicemail, and more. When it comes to measuring the dollars-and-cents…

Using videotaped lectures to practice American Sign Language (ASL) used to be a pretty tiresome process for hearing-impaired and other students at the University of Rochester (NY). In order to access the videos, students had to trek to the campus library, reserve an audio/visual station in the media center, take out the appropriate tape, and watch…

Metaphysically speaking, the idea of self-reflection has been the subject of discussion for thousands of years. The idea carried human beings through the Renaissance, and an entire movement tied to it sparked a sociopolitical movement called the Enlightenment. In more recent times, thought leaders such as Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Sigmund…