PARTNERS IN EDUCATION - A recent Commerce Department report recommends that businesses, governments, and educational institutions band together to train more IT professionals. Taking this advice, the University of Nebraska recently opened its Peter Kiewit Institute, a new computer science center that combines offerings from its College of Information Science and Technology and the Lincoln College of Engineering and Technology. The center is funded by local businesses and the state governments. Further, local businesses are funding scholarships and internships for students of the institute. The institute's curriculum will focus on practical classes that teach students how to fulfill business requirements. To accomplish this, the institute will offer an "experts-in-residence" program, which will invite IT executives from leading companies to teach and/or mentor students for a year or longer. (InformationWeek 08/23/99 Edupage 23 Aug 99)

WELCOME TO COLLEGE. NOW MEET OUR SPONSOR - University of Memphis, University of Idaho, Villanova University and more than 500 other institutions of higher learning will soon be receiving free intranet-service in return for allowing their campus Web pages to be used for advertising purposes. Allowing commercial control of the Web pages and e-mail services of what was once considered a sacred domain - academia - is resulting in contentious debate. However, many universities, particularly public ones that have seen their budgets shrink rapidly but that still must keep up with technological trends to attract students, say the concept is too attractive to resist. The cost for a medium-sized public university to create an internal Web service could be more than $2 million. This is where Campus Pipeline comes in. The startup, which is heavily invested in by Dell Computer, Sun Microsystems, and McKinney & company, among other firms, began offering to set up campus Web sites for colleges late last year. The cost has been free so far to the few campuses that already have had the systems installed, but Campus Pipeline may charge colleges installation costs of as much as $32,000 in the future. (New York Times 08/17/99 Edupage 18 Aug 99)

DIGITAL COLLABORATION FACTORS - Factors driving the corporate demand for Digital Collaboration appear to be:

• Cycle Time: The desire to reduce the cycle time for the distribution of knowledge throughout the enterprise.
• Globalization: The need to hit every corner of the enterprise at the same time (from the Mailroom to Remote Offices)
• Live to Stored: The requirement of taking live events and using elements as the core of stored, asynchronous knowledge offerings.
• Granularization: The reality that many folks only want to participate in a small chunk of a meeting or event.
• Engagement: The need to get immediate feedback and data from the organization on proposed actions.
• Knowledge Management: The capacity to capture, treat and deploy knowledge for strategic objectives. (TechLearn Trends #140 27 Aug 99)