This article presents an interview with Gigi Sohn, president and cofounder, as well as the strategist, fundraiser, and face, of the advocacy group Public Knowledge (PK). Since cofounding the organization in 2001, Sohn has fought alongside major library associations and their allies for the public's interest in the emerging digital world. Sohn is…

This article considers the pace of innovation and technology adoption in higher education and suggests that the rate of change on 21st century campuses is remarkably similar to earlier centuries when it may have taken over 30 years to introduce "modern" inventions like the telescope, microscope, and barometer to students. The literature shows that…

Leaking toilets can cost homeowners big dollars--often before it is even realized. Homeowners do not necessarily hear it leaking. It just does, and when the water bill comes due, it can be a most unpleasant surprise. This article presents a classroom challenge to try to develop leak-detection ideas that would be inexpensive and easily added to…

There are significant privacy, intellectual property, copyright and disclosure risks associated with the ill-considered use of social networking sites, however, the implementation of regulatory actions may also undermine the social and emerging educational utility of social networking sites for young people. Inevitably the burden of dealing with…

Before the 2008 presidential election, when an African American friend asked him whether he thought whites would vote for Barack Obama, the author found himself answering by going back to the 17th century, to the invention of the white race as a buffer class to keep those at the bottom divided, and the way that his own white working-class people…

Over the last decade, experimental and quasi-experimental methods have been favored by researchers in empirical economics, as they provide unbiased causal estimates. However, when implementing a program, it is often not possible to randomly assign subjects to treatment, leading to a possible endogeneity bias. This dissertation consists of two…

While the existing literature has documented the positive impact of new discourses and interventions on nonnative English speaker (NNES) graduate students through Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)-related courses (Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 1999; Kamhi-Stein, 1999; Pavlenko, 2003), long-term effects of those interventions have…

Larry Johnson has been the CEO of the New Media Consortium (NMC) for nearly a decade, and he has worked in higher education for more than twenty-five years. Before joining NMC, he served in roles that include faculty member, dean, provost, and president. In this interview, he talks about the position of NMC in distance education and the challenges…

The author presents an invention contest to help students document the development process of inventions. By developing an invention, writing an inventor's log, and drawing an invention poster, students experience the whole process of invention and understand how to take their own ideas to the next level. (Contains 2 tables.)

A federal jury in Texas awarded Blackboard Inc. $3.1-million last month, saying that a smaller Canadian competitor, Desire2Learn Inc., had infringed Blackboard's patent for a system of delivering course materials online. The case has been closely watched by campus-technology officials, many of whom feared that a Blackboard win could stifle…

The lines between basic and applied research and the sectors of the U.S. economy responsible for each type have begun to blur. No better case for the blurring of these lines and the benefits of technology transfer among research institutions can be provided than the recent phenomenon of corporate patent donations to non-profit research…

Growing incidences of corporate ethical misconducts have revived the debate over ethical reasoning and moral development of corporate managers. The role of information technology (IT) in the ethical dilemmas is becoming more evident as virtual environments become increasingly popular, organizations adopt digital form of record keeping, and the…

This paper provides a review of institutional authorship policies as required by the "Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research" (the "Code") (National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the Australian Research Council (ARC) & Universities Australia (UA) 2007), and assesses them for Code compliance.…

There have been few studies on the long-term performance of university spin-offs (USOs). This paper builds on previous empirical research into the performance of USOs and on the resource- based model of USOs. Several research issues are addressed including, in particular, the long-term performance of Swedish USOs, the distribution of the main…

Knowledge spillovers from universities and other public research institutions (PRIs) are viewed as essential for innovation. Previous studies examining the impact of such spillovers have been confined to the West, and there are no comparable studies using empirical data from Japan that explore the relationship between spillovers from PRIs and…