State Farm Hall will have study area and classroom walls painted with whiteboard paint allowing any wall to become a dry erase marker whiteboard.  The Thorpe Center in Ames Library has an area painted with whiteboard paint that was done as  a test area to see how the paint performed and to see how the area would be used.  Here is a great example of how the space was used this week as a study space.

The Educause conference will be held in a few weeks and we have opted to web stream a number of excellent talks live from Philadelphia.  We will be viewing the following in Beckman Auditorium. Please join us! Snacks will be provided.

Wednesday, October 19th from 7:00 a.m. – 8:45 a.m.
Speaker: Seth Godin
General Session: Invisible or Remarkable?
Description: The most precious commodity available today is attention. Best-selling author Seth Godin will describe the realities of our postindustrial world. It turns out that ideas that spread win, that stories rule, not facts, and that remarkable products and services are the most profitable and most likely to succeed. He will discuss how to avoid serving the meatball sundae, mismatching the new marketing with the old, and maintaining the status quo. He will also address how to ship products that make a difference, leadership as the most effective form of marketing for a new generation and a new economy, the privilege of becoming a linchpin, and the obligation to “poke the box.”

Thursday, October 20th from 9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Speaker: Danah Boyd
General Session: Privacy in an Era of Social Media
Description: There is a widespread myth that young people don’t care about privacy. Embedded in this myth is an assumption that participation in public social media services indicates a rejection of privacy. Yet, just because people want to participate in public life doesn’t mean that they want everything they do to go down on their permanent record or to be publicized for the whole world to see. This talk will examine the strategies that young people take to secure their privacy in highly public environments like Facebook and Twitter and why those in higher ed should care.

Several ITS Staff and students took part in First Year Orientation sessions this morning!  We met with all of the First Year students on campus in several computer labs across campus.  The goal of orientation is to introduce the students to ITS, to run through the registration process so they are prepared for Fall registration that begins at 3:30pm today, and to update their IWU Alert contact information.  Thank you to Rick, Patrick, Lisa, Chris, as well as Jordyn and Katie in ITS.  Thanks to Leslie, Leanne, and Tally in the Office of the Registrar for their participation.  Michael and Curtis also helped clear up any problems with logins and forgotten passwords during the sessions. Thanks for being available so we could get the students fixed up right away so they are ready for registration this afternoon.

The University is still feeling the effects of the phishing scheme to which members of the campus community provided user name and password credentials to spammers by responding to an e-mail request asking for the information.  The IWU e-mail servers are still on several blacklists due to the amount of spam coming being sent from our servers.

We can put as many firewalls and security measures in between our systems and the Internet as we can, but those measures are ineffective if individuals are careless with their log-in credentials.  Providing anyone with your user name and password gives that person total access to your e-mail account, and also provides access to IWU computer systems.

Information Technology Services WILL NEVER ASK YOU to provide us with your user name and password!  You may be asked to personally enter your log in credentials into one of our secure systems, but you should never provide anyone your user name and password via e-mail, phone, text message, etc.

Sprint is looking into an outage on one of our two DS3 connections to the Internet. Internet connectivity is active, but is a little slower than usual.  The outage is most likely due to the scheduled power outage in the Physical Plant which is the location our Internet Service comes into campus.  9:15am

The power outage was the cause of the DS3 outage.  Power for a device was moved to an outlet with backup power to correct the problem – 9:45am

IT Services staff have become aware of a phishing scheme e-mail message that is circulating among members of our Illinois Wesleyan Community.  The subject of the message is “Dear my.iwu.edu Account Owner”  Some of the text from the message is below.

PLEASE REMEMBER:  IT Services staff will NEVER ask you to send your e-mail password to us or any of our vendors.  You are privately in control of your password credentials and should never share your password with anyone.

This email is particularly concerning and, in an awkward sense, timely, as we are preparing our move to Google. During this move you WILL be asked to CHANGE your password, but that request will come through official and established University channels on a secure IWU web page.

If you’ve received one of the fake e-mail messages, do not reply to it.  Simply delete it. If you have replied, please contact IT Services immediately at (309) 556-3900. We’ll work with you on an individual basis to get your account secured and back to working order.

Dear “my.iwu.edu” Email Account Owner,

This message is from “”my.iwu.edu”" messaging center to all “my.iwu.edu” email account

owners.

We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account

center.

We are deleting all “my.iwu.edu” email accounts due to congestion just

to create more space for new accounts.

To prevent your account from being deleted you will have to update it by

providing the below informations so that we will know that it’s a present

used account.

We have been sending this notice to all our “my.iwu.edu” email account owners

and this is the last notice/verification exercise.

CONFIRM YOUR EMAIL IDENTITY BELOW

First Name: ……………..

Last Name:  ……………..

Username/ID: …………….

Password:   ……………..

Date of Birth: …………..

Last week I attended the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) Summit.  NITLE helps liberal arts colleges integrate inquiry, pedagogy, and technology.

The keynote speaker this year was John Seely Brown.  The topic of Dr. Brown’s discussion was A New Culture of Learning for a World of Constant Change

The morning plenary on day two of the Summit began with a wonderful discussion entitled The Future of Liberal Education – Coffee and a Conversation with Drs. danah boyd, Michael Wesch, Bryan Alexander, Katie Conboy, and Rick Holmgren.

Long distance phone service is down.  Campus phones are not able to make long distance calls.  Verizon is looking into the problem and hopes to have service restored soon.  11:30am

Update – 3/29/2011 – 1:00pm – Long Distance Phone service is restored.

We are sorry for any inconvenience the service interruption may have caused.

Please join us on Monday, March 21st from Noon-1:00pm in the Henning Room for an Educause Web Seminar hosted by Educause President Diana Oblinger, and special guest John Seely Brown.

Diana Oblinger and  John Seely Brown will discuss how the vision presented in Brown’s new book A New Culture of Learning is likely to impact higher education.

See http://educause.informz.net/educause/archives/archive_1350478.html

for more details.

Patrick and Rick are in California March 6th – 10th attending the OmniUpdate Users Conference.  OmniUpdate is the provider of the new Content Management System the University is adopting that is replacing the Luminis Content Management System.

The OmniUpdate User Conference provides a a great opportunity to interact with the staff and developers from OmniUpdate, as well as your peers from colleges and universities across the country that are using OU Campus.