|Home | About Us | Products | Services | Programs | NSF Grants | Partners |   Programs > Center for IT Excellence >October 2007   CITE Home   About CITE   Events   Job Shadow   Newsletter   Student Resources Advancing IT Education and the Workforce in Washington State Newsletter October 2007   Events, News, and Professional Development Opportunities for IT Educators and Students Microsoft offers a second chance to pass your Microsoft certification exam for free! Update 2007: Edmonds Community College and Everett Community College host a four-day national educator's workshop for material science, engineering and technical education faculty Third annual Prosperity Partnership Luncheon, Thursday, November 1, 2007   News for the Classroom "Workforce Educators: Strengthening Connections through Social Media" Web offerings spread in ‘battle for desktop’ Breathing life into the lecture hall Microsoft considers a stake in Facebook   Best Practices, Initiatives, Products, and Projects Business Intelligence Tapping IT to fight terrorism, deal with hurricanes Business Technology 10 emerging technologies Electronics makers break out ‘green’ initiatives Database Administration MySQL 5.1 article recap Making database administration easier with Freeware Multi-Media and Web Sound off: is your wireless network a security breach waiting to happen? Reporter's notebook: heading upriver, WiMax wows tech groupies in Chicago Network Services and Computing Systems Florida law enforcement to use Coplink tools Excel multiplication bug unearthed General Information and Computing Technology Greg Oslan and the new war machine U.S. faces competitive disadvantage from lack of women in tech jobs   Announcements Applications of Information Technology: Trends Assessment for 2007 - 2008 (updated version!) 9th annual Working Connections IT Faculty Development Institute was a HIT! A skill validation tool for employers, IT workers, and training providers from CompTIA Subscribe to the Center of Excellence Newsletter (Archives)   Events, News, and Professional Development Opportunities for IT Educators and Students Microsoft offers a second chance to pass your Microsoft certification exam for free! For a limited time, you can get a free, second shot at any IT professional, developer, or Microsoft Dynamics certification exam. Just register for this offer before your first exam, and you will get two chances to pass. But this offer won't last forever. It ends January 30, 2008. Learn the skills you need to get your Microsoft Certification: After you register, you can take advantage of special training and certification deals from Microsoft. Windows Server 2008 Take advantage of free official Microsoft E-Learning courses and a free e-book that will help you develop expertise in this new generation of Windows Server technologies. Exchange Server 2007 Download sample chapters from new Microsoft Press books. Get the information that you need to transition your skill and prepare for the new certifications – from the experts. http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/offers/secondshot/default.mspx   Update 2007, the National Educators Workshop. Hosted by Edmonds Community College and Everett Community College, Centers of Excellence for Washington State. Sunday, November 4th through Wednesday November 7th. Update 2007 is a workshop for educators designed to enhance materials science, engineering and technical education at the university and community college levels, and to provide support to high school teachers in math, science, and technology. Learn from experienced faculty as they showcase experiments, demonstrations, and technical papers. Join leaders in the fields of aviation, materials, and composite research to discuss technical updates. Participants will have an opportunity to tour The Boeing Company's Everett campus, visit the Future of Flight, and tour the Microsoft Home of the Future. http://www.the-mpdc.com/new_update_2007/   Third annual Prosperity Partnership Luncheon, Thursday, November 1, 2007 The Fall Luncheon is the Prosperity Partnership's centerpiece event, attracting close to 1,000 business, government and community leaders each year to celebrate our coalition's accomplishments and prepare for the year ahead. This year, we are excited to announce that Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire will give the keynote address, followed by a moderated panel discussion on the role of higher education institutions in economic prosperity between University of Washington President Dr. Mark Emmert, Washington State University President Dr. Elson Floyd, and Seattle Community Colleges District Chancellor Dr. Charles Mitchell. Register Online For more information, contact Andrew Werfelmann at 206-971-3292, or by email.   News for the Classroom "Workforce Educators: Strengthening Connections through Social Media" Jennifer Jones of Bellevue Community College gave a presentation in late August at the 9th annual Working Connections IT Faculty Development Institute, "Using Ning as a Presentation Tool". She designed the site, "Workforce Educators: Strengthening Connections through Social Media" which provides opportunities for blogging, forums, RSS, social bookmarking, microblogging, and photo/video sharing. As an educator in Washington State you are encouraged to join the network, add groups, and start discussions, as well as share photos or videos. The site can be a great collaboration tool for all of us and here's where you get started...   Web offerings spread in ‘battle for desktop’ Huge gains seen for ,‘software as a service’ mainly for businesses – – but transition to internet-based products might sway educators, too. If any doubt still lingers that popular computing is experiencing yet another fundamental realignment, the skepticism is likely to be erased by the latest salvos in the "battle for the desktop." Read the full story.   Breathing life into the lecture hall Nearly 200 students sat in the large lecture hall, staring down at their professor, Edward F. Redish, holding pencils at the ready to take notes in Fundamentals of Physics. It looked like a traditional lecture course, but appearance is where the tradition ended. Instead of spending 50 minutes putting students to sleep by lecturing about position, velocity and acceleration, Redish, a University of Maryland professor, kept the students awake by getting them actively involved in the lesson – – all 192 of them. Read the full story.   Microsoft considers a stake in Facebook Some people laughed at Mark E. Zuckerberg when he reportedly turned down a $900 million offer last year for Facebook, the social networking Web site he founded three and a half years ago. But Microsoft, Google and several funds are considering investments in the fast-growing site, according to people with knowledge of the talks, that could give the start-up a value of more than $10 billion. Read the full story.   Best Practices, Initiatives, Products, and Projects   Business Intelligence Tapping IT to fight terrorism, deal with hurricanes Business intelligence takes on a new meaning when it's used to make sure that mission-critical equipment like night-vision goggles makes it to the right brigade in Iraq at the right time. Getting equipment to soldiers is but one way the U.S. Army's Communications-Electronics Life Cycle Management Command Acquisition Center is using BI software, said Matthew Meinert, group chief of the business systems and technology division of the center, speaking Tuesday at Computerworld's BI Perspectives conference here. Read the full story.   Business Technology 10 emerging technologies Of the numerous technologies now in gestation at companies and universities, we have chosen 10 that we think will make particularly big splashes. They're raw, but they'll transform the Internet, computing, medicine, energy, nanotechnology, and more. The technology that underpins the air traffic control system hasn't changed much in a half-century. Planes still depend on elaborate ground-based radar systems, plus thousands of people who watch blips on screens and issue verbal instructions, for takeoffs, landings, and course changes. The system is expensive, hard to scale up and prone to delays when storms strike. Read the full story.   Electronics makers break out 'green' initiatives The Dell Latitude D630 laptop contains mercury, a heavy metal that can damage the human nervous system. Not one of its many parts is made of recycled, post-consumer plastics or plant-based plastics. It's packaged in a box made of largely unrecycled materials. Yet it may be the most environmentally friendly mainstream laptop on the planet. Read the full story.   Database Administration MySQL 5.1 Article Recap by Jay Pipes So, someone had a great idea to go back through the Developer Zone, which has become a bit disorganized of late, and put together an article with links and summaries for all the Dev Zone articles that discussed MySQL 5.1 features. I have done so, and also linked in many community member's blog articles and tutorials to give everyone a good dose of the features that make MySQL 5.1 worth investigating. Read the full story.   Making database administration easier with Freeware Depending on your environment, working with and between Windows and UNIX can be somewhat problematic. It seems that no two workplaces are the same when it comes to the network file system. Two of the more commonly seen problems include not being able to get a GUI tool (e.g., Oracle Universal Installer) to display and not being able to have it display at the correct location. There is a freeware tool to help you work around these problems and make your job of administering Oracle (and Oracle products) easier. Read the full story.   Multi-Media and Web Sound off: Is your wireless network a security breach waiting to happen? The security threat posed by wireless networks has been a hot-button issue for years now. Are they still a prime target for hackers? Computerworld editors Preston Gralla and David Ramel take opposing sides on the issue. Read the full story.   Reporter's notebook: heading upriver, WiMax wows tech groupies in Chicago (September 26, 2006) Motorola Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. demonstrated mobile WiMax technology aboard a tour boat moving gracefully along the Chicago River last night, as ecstatic designers and marketing personnel trumpeted the technology for being nearly ready to bring cheap wireless broadband to the masses. What was demonstrated, for about 100 analysts and reporters, worked well enough. But the big questions of how much it will cost and which technologies will be disrupted by WiMax are still up the air. Read the full story   Network Services and Computing Systems Florida law enforcement to use Coplink tools Florida's Regional Law Enforcement eXchange (R-LEX) project will use Coplink crime analysis tools from Knowledge Computing, the company said today. Using a Global Justice XML Data Model-compliant interface, Coplink allows large amounts of data in many disparate forms to be organized, consolidated and analyzed over a secure browser-based platform. The software also makes use of analytics and visualization tools to help law enforcement officials determine patterns of crime. Read the full story   Excel multiplication bug unearthed If you have 850 of something, you might want to hold off multiplying that number by 77.1, at least if you're using Microsoft Office 2007's version of Excel. A bug recently found in the spreadsheet will return an incorrect answer. The bug appears to be only in the 2007 version. Thus far, no other products, that is to say combinations of numbers multiplied together, have been flagged as incorrect. When the formula "=850*77.1" is entered in an Excel cell, the wrong answer 100,000 is returned. The correct answer is 65,535. Read the full story   General Information and Computing Technology Greg Oslan and the new war machine How close are we to cyberwarfare? Pretty close, said Greg Oslan, chief executive officer and president at Narus, a provider of traffic analysis software for carrier networks. The company helps large IP networks see, analyze and manage traffic from a growing number of dynamic applications. Knowing what traffic is on a network and understanding it is essential to providing adequate security because security cannot be achieved today at the endpoint, he said. Not surprisingly, Oslan has a front-row view of malicious traffic passing through the Internet and efforts to ward off full-scale warfare via the network. Read the full story   U.S. faces competitive disadvantage from lack of women in tech jobs A lack of women in academic computer science positions as well as barriers to corporate advancement is creating a talent vacuum in the U.S., according to speakers at a conference at MIT. ...While the number of women and men enrolling in undergraduate and post graduate technology programs has evened out somewhat, women are far behind their male counterparts when it comes to academic positions. Read the full story   Announcements   Applications of Information Technology: Trends Assessment for 2007 - 2008 (Updated Version!) – Published by and available from the Center of Excellence Information Technology Trends Assessment, 2007-2008: Industry, The New Learner and Implications for Education, is an 80+ page research report summarizing economic, employment, industry, technology and demographic trends influencing IT-related programs published by the Center. Decision makers in education, business and government find this trends research focusing on applications in Information Technology current, relevant, and informative. Note: This report may be especially helpful for educational administrators and faculty evaluating IT and technology - related programs and curricular directions and strategies. Copies can be ordered for faculty and educators in Washington state for only $25. Order your copy   The 9th annual Washington State Working Connections IT Faculty Development Institute was held at Bellevue Community College in August 2007 The Institute hosted one hundred and twenty IT, BT, and Computer Science college faculty from Washington state, as well as faculty from Portland Community College and the Bellevue School District for the four-day professional development training. Seven tracks were offered this year: MS Office 2007: A potpourri (2 sections), MS Access 2007, MS Vista for Administrators, Web Design with Adobe Creative Suite 3, Creating Your First Podcast, and Digital Forensics Concepts and Procedures. To read more about the Institute, the annual report is now available online.   A skill validation tool for employers, IT workers, and training providers from CompTIA CompTIA and the U.S Department of Labor (DoL) have developed NITAS on behalf of the Information Technology Industry. NITAS is web-based tool available for all employers to use to train their IT workers that utilizes industry developed and endorsed competencies and a coaching system to validate skills. The competencies have been developed in the following IT job roles or tracks: IT Generalist Project Management Networking & Infrastructure Information Assurance and Security Help Desk Database Application Development To find out more, visit CompTIA's NITAS project.   Subscribe to the Center of Excellence Newsletter To continue receiving the CITE newsletter, please complete the request form. If you wish to discontinue receiving this newsletter, please email CITE. How can the IT Center of Excellence assist your institution? At the IT Center of Excellence, our mission is to be a resource arm to the Community and Technical Colleges and high schools of Washington State. Let us hear from you to discuss your needs and how we can be of service to you. For further information, email CITE or call Maureen Majury at 425.564.4229. Archived Issues of CITE Newsletters Now Available Online Recent editions of the CITE e-newsletter are now archived for reading on the CITE web site. Topics include Mobile/Wireless Computing, Outsourcing/Offshoring, IT Network Security, Business Intelligence/Data Mining, VoIP, and Convergence Technologies.

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