Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently described universities as an endangered species. The university’s traditional role as creator, curator and distributor of knowledge is under direct threat from the internet. This is a profound challenge for an institution that pre-dates almost ...

Facebook will break the one billion-user barrier sometime in 2012. It already has more than 800 million people signed up and not surprisingly university populations are among the most enthusiastic adopters of Facebook and other social media tools. But the ...

Last week Lindsay Tanner (vice-chancellor's fellow at Victoria University) wrote that: The students of tomorrow will be born digital: they'll have known nothing else but the web 2.0 world. They'll want to be entertained as they learn. They'll demand instant ...

Report on cloud computing potential and an online campus for geoscientists make the news.

The Computer Society will oversee funding to help companies push ahead with research and development. By Beverley Head. The Australian Computer Society Foundation (ACSF) has been accepted as an eligible research organisation able to review and submit applications for the ...

Universities should in theory be in the box seat in terms of the move toward BYO devices and desktop virtualisation courtesy of their student populations, which have for some time been connecting their own devices to university computer networks. However their ...

Innovation fund set up to help develop prototypes for open source learning system. By Beverley Head. A $200,000 eLearning Innovation Fund has been established to identify university developed e-learning projects that could, with a little more work and funding, be ...

Good governance is compromised if management is in the dark about the processes supported by shadow systems writes Mark Ellis. Given the current sensitivity surrounding the international student market in Australia, it may be a little startling to realise that ...

If electricity prices surge post-carbon tax, universities could face huge extra cost burdens because computing is a prime suspect when it comes to sucking up power. Starting this month, many Australians face a significant spike in their electricity bills as ...

Could overseas health concerns about mobile phones affect their use as a learning device here? The debate over the mobile phone and its role as a learning device in the classroom may only have a short lifespan if a European ...