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The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 requires all campuses to certify that they have plans to "effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents" and to "offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property." After months of drafting, debate, and discussion, the Department of Education has issued the final regulations for enforcing these requirements.

The November/December 2009 EDUCAUSE Review is now available online. This issue offers IT leaders' ideas and insights on campuses and the greener future, climate change and higher education, low-carbon computing, above-campus IT services, the role of technology in service delivery, and good communication for successful IT organizations. Click the orange RSS sidebar graphic on the EDUCAUSE Review homepage to access the XML required to subscribe.

Thank you for joining us last week in Denver for EDUCAUSE 2009. Select session recordings are now available online. We will send participants an e-mail in the coming weeks, which will include access information for many more resources including webcasts, podcasts, slide presentations, various social media summaries, and more.

EDUCAUSE announced last week during the EDUCAUSE 2009 Annual Conference that it has joined the InCommon Federation, the U.S. identity and access management federation. In an identity federation like InCommon, participating identity providers (such as colleges and universities) and resource providers (like EDUCAUSE) agree on a set of shared policies, processes, and technology standards. This greatly streamlines collaboration among multiple organizations because federation members agree on these policies and processes once, rather than each time they sign a contract with a new partner. Read more in the press release.

EDUCAUSE announced the appointment of Linda Thor, president of Rio Salado College, to a four-year term on the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors effective January 1, 2010. Thor’s appointment was confirmed by a unanimous vote of the board at its November 2 meeting. Read more in the press release.

ELI has released a new white paper, Learning Environments: Where Space, Technology, and Culture Converge, by Thomas Warger (EduServe International) and Gregory Dobbin (EDUCAUSE).

Google Wave is a web-based application that represents a rethinking of electronic communication. Users create online spaces called “waves,” which include multiple discrete messages and components that constitute a running, conversational document. Users access waves through the web, resulting in a model of communication in which rather than sending separate copies of multiple messages to different people, the content resides in a single space. Wave offers a compelling platform for personal learning environments because it provides a single location for collecting information from diverse sources while accommodating a variety of formats, and it makes interactive coursework a possibility for nontechnical students.

Universities have served important functions in society for more than a thousand years. They have done so in part by creating places that promote reflection, discussion, discovery and learning. For many people, the university-as-place is central to the purposes of the university. The university is also an idea and, increasingly, ideas—in the Internet—have enormous power to stimulate learning and discovery. Indeed, what many now describe as “Web 2.0” is a view that the web is evolving into a social environment that has the potential to extend the influence and reach of institutions and individuals.

EDUCAUSE announces the release of the Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report. It summarizes findings from the 2008 EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS) survey, in which nearly 930 colleges and universities provided detailed information about their IT environments and practices in fiscal year 2008.

In the latest issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly, large and small campuses report on their green IT initiatives, from awards won to measuring progress to best practices across campus affecting desktop systems to the data center. EDUCAUSE Quarterly is also available via RSS feed. Click the orange RSS graphic on the EDUCAUSE Quarterly home page to access the XML required to subscribe.

EDUCAUSE announces a new EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) study, The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009, by Shannon D. Smith, Gail Salaway, and Judith Borreson Caruso, with an Introduction by Richard N. Katz. This 2009 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study is based on quantitative data from a spring 2009 survey of 30,616 freshmen and seniors at 103 four-year institutions and students at 12 two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 62 students at 4 institutions; and review of qualitative data from written responses to open-ended questions.

EDUCAUSE, ACUTA, and Internet2 today sent an open letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski in which the organizations expressed strong support for the Chairman's recent announcement that the FCC will initiate a public proceeding on the question of net neutrality. Read the letter.

The call for proposals is now open for the EDUCAUSE 2010 Southeast Regional Conference, "Higher Education IT in Today's World: Making the Most of the Economic Reality," April 2–4 in Atlanta. This leading event in higher education IT will follow these tracks:

• Leadership and Management
• Managing the Enterprise
• Supporting E-Research and E-Scholarship
• Teaching and Learning
• Corporate and Campus Solutions

Submit a proposal before December 16.

In the past decade, the proliferation of Web 2.0 tools for sharing and creating knowledge, coupled with the creation of open-access journals, databases, and archives across the web, has begun to redefine the concept of “openness” in higher education. Advocates of the open-access campaign argue that free, virtual access to scholarly works and research advance scientific discovery and lead to faster knowledge dissemination and richer research collaborations, throwing open the doors that once restricted knowledge sharing and exploration. Critics of the movement have doubted its economic sustainability and raised concerns about its impact on peer review. Regardless, open access requires a new examination of campus copyright and publishing policy.

Collaborative annotation tools expand the concept of social bookmarking by allowing users not only to share bookmarks but also to digitally annotate web pages. Rather than simply pointing to particular web pages, collaborative annotation lets users highlight specific content on a web page and add a note explaining their thoughts or pointing to additional resources. Students who use these tools for academic research can, over time, build a collection of their own studies and observations in much the same way generations of students have saved texts with dog-eared pages, highlighted passages, scribbled comments, and sticky notes.