AS EMAIL, DOCUMENTS, AND ALMOST EVERY ASPECT OF OUR PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL LIVES MOVES ONTO THE “CLOUD”—REMOTE SERVERS WE RELY ON TO STORE, GUARD, AND MAKE AVAILABLE ALL OF OUR DATA WHENEVER AND FROM WHEREVER WE WANT THEM, ALL THE TIME AND INTO ETERNITY—A BRUSH WITH DISASTER REMINDS THE AUTHOR AND HIS WIFE JUST HOW VULNERABLE THOSE DATA CAN BE. A TRIP TO THE INNER FORTRESS OF GMAIL, WHERE GOOGLE DEVELOPERS RECOVERED SIX YEARS’ WORTH OF HACKED AND DELETED E‑MAIL, PROVIDES SPECIFIC ADVICE ON PROTECTING AND BACKING UP DATA NOW—AND GIVES A PICTURE BOTH CONSOLING AND UNSETTLING OF THE VULNERABILITIES WE CAN ALL EXPECT TO FACE IN THE FUTURE.
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Professors who use Blackboard’s software have long been forced to lock their course materials in an area effectively marked, “For Registered Students Only,” while using the system. Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online.
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In one of her first public appearances as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard this month, Meg Whitman beamed in by videoconference to a meeting of college technology leaders to announce the company's participation in what colleges are calling a "community cloud"—a pool of high-performance computers that researchers can tap into online, as needed, from any participating campus.
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FOR more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority, the university. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and “distributed” learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a videogame. Presumably, for the Friday kegger you go to the Genius Bar.
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