An e-mail scam has hit tens of thousands of users at dozens of colleges over the past few weeks, leaving network administrators scrambling to respond before campus computer accounts are taken over by spammers. Students, professors, and staff members at the affected colleges received e-mail messages that purported to come from the colleges' help…

With money tight, more and more districts are considering remote access as a way to reduce expenses and budget information technology costs more effectively. Remote access allows staff members to work with a hosted software application from any school campus without being tied to a specific physical location. Each school can access critical…

Academic technologists at Lynn University (Florida) learned the hard way just how important a disaster recovery plan can be. Back in 2005, when Hurricane Wilma walloped the region with driving rain and 120 mile-per-hour winds, the storm debilitated Lynn's IT department, causing damage and flooding that thwarted the campus network for nearly two…

The explosion of Web 2.0 into libraries has left many smaller academic libraries (and other libraries with limited computing resources or support) to work in the cloud using free Web applications. The use of commercial Web hosting is an innovative approach to the problem of inadequate local resources. While the idea of insourcing IT will seem…

As the ranks of educators on Twitter grow, more and more are heard about the importance of their "PLNs" (a term reportedly coined by educational technology guru David Warlick). A PLN, or Personal Learning Network, is a group of like-minded professionals with whom one can exchange ideas, advice, and resources. So why shouldn't students have PLNs of…

Low-cost personal computers, wireless access technologies, the Internet, and computer-equipped classrooms allow the design of novel and complementary methodologies for teaching digital information security in electrical engineering curricula. The challenges of the current digital information era require experts who are effectively able to…

The eleventh annual EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey shows some very familiar themes among the top-ten IT issues of strategic importance to technology leaders in higher education. Indeed, all ten of the issues from the 2009 survey are back, albeit in a slightly different order. In addition, Strategic Planning returns as an issue of renewed…

Nationwide, IT breaches rose noticeably across all industries from 2003 to 2006. According to national statistics, hackers account for half of all exposures. Physical loss, theft, and fraud represent the second biggest risk. Security is an issue for all of higher education. Of all higher-education records that were exposed between 2000 and 2008, 4…

In this article, the author relates how he discovered that not all Wi-Fi networks are secure. As such, he developed several strategies on how he can be secured whenever he connects to the Internet through a Wi-Fi connection. He discusses how one can change passwords, explains the process of encryption, and provides suggestions on other security…

Purpose: Grid computing has often been heralded as the next logical step after the worldwide web. Users of grids can access dynamic resources such as computer storage and use the computing resources of computers under the umbrella of a virtual organisation. Although grid computing is often compared to the worldwide web, it is vastly more complex…

Discussions with a central IT organization about integration with existing systems on campus, support costs for the new implementation, and total cost of ownership frequently become adversarial. Simmons College, a small college in Boston with an enrollment of approximately 1,900 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students, reframed these issues in…

While public key cryptography is continuously evolving and its installed base is growing significantly, recent research works examine its potential use in e-learning or m-learning environments. Public key infrastructure (PKI) and attribute certificates (ACs) can provide the appropriate framework to effectively support authentication and…

Computer security is one of the most complicated and challenging fields in technology today. A security metrics program provides a major benefit: looking at the metrics on a regular basis offers early clues to changes in attack patterns or environmental factors that may require changes in security strategy. The term "security metrics"…

Current technology enables schools to provide remote or virtual computing labs that can be implemented in multiple ways ranging from remote access to banks of dedicated workstations to sophisticated access to large-scale servers hosting virtualized workstations. This paper reports on the implementation of a specific lab using remote access to…

Using animated visualization tools has been an important teaching approach in computer science education. We have developed three visualization and animation tools that demonstrate various information security concepts and actively engage learners. The information security concepts illustrated include: packet sniffer and related computer network…