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The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 requires all campuses to certify that they have plans to "effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents" and to "offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property." After months of drafting, debate, and discussion, the Department of Education has issued the final regulations for enforcing these requirements.

ELI has released a new white paper, Learning Environments: Where Space, Technology, and Culture Converge, by Thomas Warger (EduServe International) and Gregory Dobbin (EDUCAUSE).

Google Wave is a web-based application that represents a rethinking of electronic communication. Users create online spaces called “waves,” which include multiple discrete messages and components that constitute a running, conversational document. Users access waves through the web, resulting in a model of communication in which rather than sending separate copies of multiple messages to different people, the content resides in a single space. Wave offers a compelling platform for personal learning environments because it provides a single location for collecting information from diverse sources while accommodating a variety of formats, and it makes interactive coursework a possibility for nontechnical students.

Universities have served important functions in society for more than a thousand years. They have done so in part by creating places that promote reflection, discussion, discovery and learning. For many people, the university-as-place is central to the purposes of the university. The university is also an idea and, increasingly, ideas—in the Internet—have enormous power to stimulate learning and discovery. Indeed, what many now describe as “Web 2.0” is a view that the web is evolving into a social environment that has the potential to extend the influence and reach of institutions and individuals.

In the past decade, the proliferation of Web 2.0 tools for sharing and creating knowledge, coupled with the creation of open-access journals, databases, and archives across the web, has begun to redefine the concept of “openness” in higher education. Advocates of the open-access campaign argue that free, virtual access to scholarly works and research advance scientific discovery and lead to faster knowledge dissemination and richer research collaborations, throwing open the doors that once restricted knowledge sharing and exploration. Critics of the movement have doubted its economic sustainability and raised concerns about its impact on peer review. Regardless, open access requires a new examination of campus copyright and publishing policy.

Collaborative annotation tools expand the concept of social bookmarking by allowing users not only to share bookmarks but also to digitally annotate web pages. Rather than simply pointing to particular web pages, collaborative annotation lets users highlight specific content on a web page and add a note explaining their thoughts or pointing to additional resources. Students who use these tools for academic research can, over time, build a collection of their own studies and observations in much the same way generations of students have saved texts with dog-eared pages, highlighted passages, scribbled comments, and sticky notes.

Virtualization is an approach by which several applications—sometimes running on different operating systems—run on the same piece of hardware, creating multiple “virtual” servers from a single machine. Software manages the different applications and systems, resulting in an experience for end users that is indistinguishable from having each application on a dedicated machine. A virtualized data center uses fewer machines, requiring less physical space and less energy for cooling.

In the 7 Things You Should Know About Virtualization, learn how by avoiding hardware that runs at partial capacity, virtualization provides greater return on IT investments, and a virtualized server environment provides an IT organization with greater flexibility to deploy new applications.

EDUCAUSE institutional primary representatives have elected David Lassner, vice president for IT and CIO at the University of Hawaii, and Pattie Orr, VP for IT and dean of university libraries at Baylor University, to four-year terms on the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors beginning January 2010.

With so many new technologies being developed to address needs at R1 schools, it can be difficult for smaller schools to keep up. In some cases, the solutions implemented at these larger institutions may not even seem applicable. But more often than not, these solutions can have a profound effect on how small schools can improve the services they offer on a regular basis.

Telepresence refers to the application of complex video technologies to give geographically separated participants a sense of being together in the same location. These systems use high-definition cameras feeding to life-size, HD displays with high-fidelity acoustics that, in many cases, localize sound to image, simulating the effect of each voice coming from the video display for each participant. In sophisticated telepresence rooms, the furniture and displays are arranged in ways that further enhance the simulation—participants sit at a conference table and see high-resolution video of participants in remote locations at similar tables, allowing participants to imagine sharing a single table.