Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58060
Technology and the use of blogs and e-mails as tools for marketing. Students will become familiar with a variety of Web analysis tools, including Google Analytics, Clicktracks Pro- fessional, Net Tracker, WebPosi- NEWSBYTES ■ GIFT FOR TECH The Bryan School of Business and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro will receive $2 million of a $3.85 million gift to UNCG from Micro- soft vice president Robert McDowell and his wife Lissa Shelley McDowell. The funds will establish the McDowell Research Center for Global Informa- tion Technology. The center will be among the first in the U.S. to investigate the international applications of IT, says Prashant Palvia, professor and Ph.D. pro- gram director in the Bryan School's department of information systems and operations management. The remainder of the McDowells' gift will support UNCG's art museum and its communication-across-the- curriculum program. ■ INNOVATION LAB Grenoble Ecole de Management in France has launched the first French Discontinuous Innovation Lab (DIL), an international network designed to bring together research- ers and managers to explore new directions for business and create new business models, best practices, and market opportunities. The DIL will be led by the school's Centre for Innovation, Technology, and Entre- preneurship (CITE). 66 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2007 ■ $1 MILLION FOR "COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE" Business Objects, a Paris-based soft- ware company, and Zerofootprint, a nonprofit environmental organiza- tion, recently launched an online community designed to tap the "collective intelligence" of users to solve global problems. The objec- tive is to provide online visualization tools and an environment where academics, scientists, and others can work together. Any visitor can sug- gest a problem to solve—the person who posits the most interesting chal- lenge, as judged by the community, will receive up to $1 million to solve it. For more information or to view the project in action, visit insight. businessobjects.com. ■ INTERNET 2009 The U.S. National Science Founda- tion recently tapped tech company BBN Industries, a government con- tractor, to redesign the Internet from the ground up. According to the Associated Press, BBN will receive up to $10 million over four years to plan and design the new project, which has been dubbed the Global Envi- ronment for Network Innovations (GENI). NSF has funded several sim- ilar projects, but GENI is seen as a way to build a new Internet without yet dismantling the old. The GENI project is set to start in 2010 and is estimated to cost $350 million. tionGold, Wordtracker, and Dream- weaver. They'll also learn basic formulas for determining customer acquisition costs, prepare monthly visibility reports, and make Web sites achieve their market potential. More Faculty See Value In Podcasts, Blogs Faculty are becoming more comfortable using technology, according to a survey by Thomson Learning, a publisher for higher education based in Stamford, Connecticut. Its survey of 677 professors from the disci- plines of business/economics and humanities/social sciences revealed more interest in social networks, blogs, and podcasting. Accord- DATABIT ing to the survey, nearly 35 percent of respondents view pod- casting as a valuable com- munication tool to reach students. Ten percent of faculty actually write their own blogs, compared to only 8 percent of the general population. In addi- tion, of the faculty who reported familiarity with social networking sites such as MySpace, nearly 90 percent said they knew students used the sites to rate their profes- sors. Sixty-seven percent have actu- ally checked the sites to see how they had been graded. The takeaway from the survey: According to the Sloan Consortium, nearly 3.2 million students in the U.S. were enrolled in an online course during the fall of 2005, compared to 2.3 million in the fall of 2004. Faculty need to become comfortable with emerging technologies to teach students how these technologies are changing society, says Shirley Biagi, a professor in the department of communication studies at California State University in Sacramento. Says Biagi, "It is essential for us to pay attention to all emerging technolo- gies as a way to help our students understand the importance of mass media in our lives today." ■ z