BlackBoard was down at 1 am this morning due to a unique system error.  The server was back up and running at 3 am.  We have contacted BlackBoard technical support to help us resolve this problem.

 

Today the FAC Music Mac Lab is officially open.  The Mac lab contains 10 Macs  and a teacher's station.  There are midi keyboards attached to each Mac and the room also has a SmartBoard.  We have some minor tweaks to complete but all of the software for classes has been installed.

 

Working with the Music faculty we have implemented a new approach to staffing the specialized music computer lab.  We are excited with this new approach and believe that music students will benefit.  The lab will be staffed with music student lab aides who know the music software in the lab extremely well.  Therefore, the lab aides will truly be able to help students with both hardware and software problems.  We think this approach will be so helpful that we are extending this approach to the Meily-Swallow Mac lab.  The lab aides in that lab will know the Art and IMS software and hardware very well.

 

The use of video conferencing is increasing.  We have had video conferences with other colleges both in state and out-of-state.  The video conferences have been for training and for meetings.  In fact, our most unique video conference involved interviewing a potential student for a presidential scholarship because he was unable to make the trip to Naperville.

 

We have been notified by the Research and Education Networking ISAC that bots are running rampant on some campus computers.  A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet. There are malicious bots (and botnets) of the following types:

We have traced this problem to 16 student computers and have turned off their network access.  ResNets, student workers for ITS, will visit each student's room and clean their computers of these bots.