Newsletter (3/13/01) -
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Published on: 3/13/2001
Last Visited: 1/11/2006
In a recent interview, Brian Donohue-Lynch, the founder of the World Association for Online Education and an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at Quinebaug Valley Community College in Connecticut, argued that IT in the education sector should move toward open source software.He said the open source movement has an affinity of purpose with community colleges, because open source seeks to make software accessible, just as community colleges aim to make higher education accessible.He noted that "appropriate technology" theories, which argue for technology development based on the needs of a particular group of people, also apply to an educational setting because each institution has to make sure that software fits its needs.Open source allows for this level of customized attention, Donohue-Lynch argued, and can also be a big cost saver.As an example of a successful open source collaboration, he pointed to Nicenet, a program in which educators can set up an online course. (Chronicle of Higher Education Online, 20 February 2001)
NCSA CREATES FASTEST IBM LINUX SUPERCOMPUTER IN ACADEMIAThe National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has built the fastest Linux supercomputer for academia out of a IBM Linux cluster.