Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/57872
there to find out what the interview process is like and what kind of responsibilities they had," she says. Like other online social networking sites, FalconNet enables students to expand their social and professional networks. But it also helps the school continue to providing information on jobs and internships, the online networking community allows students to set up their own home pages. There, they can describe accomplishments, expe- riences, and career objectives, in the same style as pages on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Users can search for classmates or alumni by employer, field, or interests. Such connectivity is incred- ibly valuable to students in their job searches, says Caitlin Blasco, Bent- ley's director of undergraduate career services. "If a student has an inter- view for an internship at Deloitte & Touche, he can contact other Bentley students who have interned interact with its alumni. The connec- tion FalconNet will provide between Bentley and its alumni will be "vital to our institution," says Blasco. GSU Adopts AESOP to Train IT Professionals A collaborative project between Georgia State University in Atlanta and Pennsylvania State University in University Park is designed to help fill the growing demand for IT pro- fessionals. The three-year project will be funded by a $705,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, which will be split between Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business and Pennsylvania State Project Aims to Preserve Virtual Worlds Four schools have been awarded a $590,000 grant by the U.S. Library of Congress for the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, which will explore methods of digital preservation of video games and virtual worlds. The Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University in California, and the University of Maryland in College Park have partnered with Linden Lab, the creator of the online virtual community Second Life. The project will develop standards for preserving digital games and interactive fiction such as Second Life. Eventually, the project will investigate preservation issues through a series of archiving case studies involving early video games and electronic literature. The work is significant because "the worlds we are playing with today will be gone in a flash, with no recordable way of recreating them for future generations," says Andrew Phelps of RIT. The Virtual Worlds project is administered by the Library of Congress under the National Digital Infor- mation Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP). It is one of eight that are part of the Library of Congress's Preserving Creative America Initiative. Other projects will target digital photographs, cartoons, motion pictures, and sound recordings. For more information, visit www.digitalpreservation.gov. University's College of Information Science and Technology (IST). The project's objective is to help GSU adopt Penn State's Augmenting Education of Systems-of-Systems Professionals (AESOP) model for undergraduate education. Leading the project team at GSU are Vijay Vaishnavi of Robinson's CIS department; Richard Welke of Robinson's Center for Process Inno- vation; and Faye Borthick, director of GSU's Center for Teaching and Learning. Leading the project at Penn State is Sandeep Purao, an associate professor at IST. AESOP was developed to meet a growing demand for IT profession- als who possess not only technology knowledge, but also the skills to solve complex problems and succeed on interdisciplinary teams. The "systems- of-systems" concept that drives AESOP refers to the use of technol- ogy to develop integrated systems of small, independent applications, rath- er than large, monolithic, multifunc- tional applications. The advantage of a system based on small independent applications is that the failure of one application does not mean the failure of all. The disadvantage, however, is that systems-of-systems technolo- gies interact across organizations in incredibly complex ways. The AESOP curriculum is designed to help undergraduate stu- dents build and support these intri- cate, inter-organizational technolo- gies. It follows a format of problem solving, exploration, and experiential learning, in which students are given real-world challenges and are expect- ed to find appropriate solutions. Their professors act as mentors and coaches throughout the process. One of the project's objectives is to determine how well the AESOP BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 63