There has been a campus shooting at Northern Illinois University (NIU).
NIU can confirm six fatalities, including the gunman. Four of the dead were female and two, including the gunman, were male. In total, there were 22 injured or killed.
NIU can confirm that the shooter was an NIU graduate student in sociology in the Spring of 2007 but was not currently enrolled.
The University of Rhode Island is located in Kingston, Rhode Island. I created the following panoramic image on a very cold day on the URI campus. I was standing in the middle of the quad on a slightly raised surface therefore the pano has a bit of an arc. The original image is 16,000 pixels wide. To see a slightly smaller image (3,000 pixels wide), click on the photograph.
Oberlin College in Ohio was featured in this month’s issue of Vegetarian Times. Oberlin’s Office of Environmental Sustainability is working on a system to monitor water and energy use in Oberlin’s residence halls. It’s brilliant. The site, “Dorm Energy“, shows electricity usage for 18 Oberlin residence halls.
The University of Iowa has announced that it will become smoke-free by July 1, 2009. I was born in Iowa. Most of my family lives there, so I am thrilled to hear any news on tobacco cessation programs, smoke-free campuses, etc. The last time I went back for a visit I almost choked to death while sitting in the non-smoking version of a restaurant. Excuse me, but the air does not recognize your latticed divider.
The smoke-free dining atmosphere of Corvallis, Oregon is wonderful!
Don’t forget that OSU is going to be tobacco free on July 1, 2008 and Miami University will be smoke-free in the fall of 2008.
I even located a model policy for a smoke-free university…
I’m currently subscribed to 104 RSS feeds. My bloglines is sometimes a bit overwhelming as I peruse content from around the blogosphere. One of the blogs that I always read, no matter how busy I am, is the MIT Admissions Blog(s). The site is written by several MIT students and staffers. I love the breadth and depth of the content on the MIT Admissions Blog. Blog posts are full of student stories, campus and event photographs, and important procedural processes.
In my opinion, it’s the premier admissions blog in the United States in terms of content, diversity of bloggers, comments, and overall aesthetics. A Google search for “admissions blog” places the MIT Admissions blog in the 4th spot on the results page, just below the Oregon State University Admissions blog.
A recent post on the MIT Admissions blog on a talk by Noam Chomsky contains a wonderful mix of text and photographs.
Ben Jones, the MIT Director of Communications, even posted his own, custom made Lolz Catz post!
I think this student-written post on Application Cycles is a wonderful example of informing students about application policies while simultaneously telling a narrative of what it’s like to be a student at MIT.
The MIT Admissions Office has set the admissions blogging bar at a high level. It’s a wonderfully constructed group blog that is impressive within and outside of the admissions blogging context.
Two Penn State students dressed for Halloween as Virginia Tech shooting victims. The following is a letter to the editor of the Daily Collegian by a friend and student affairs colleague.
Waking up the morning of Friday, December 07, 2007 – the anniversary of bombings at Pearl Harbor – I read the Collegian cover story “Va. Tech Mockery Incites Anger.” As someone who studies ethics, which is deep consideration of how we human beings treat one another, I wondered “is this kind of mockery pathological?” and yet wonder if it’s too convenient to dismiss the choices involved as the acts of those with mental illness.
The OSU College of Engineering website design was “borrowed” from the Virginia Tech homepage. I received confirmation from a reliable source that the OSU COE site was designed by a student designer who used the VT site for design inspiration. Apparently, VT was made aware of the COE site design and was “not happy” about it.
I emailed the COE’s webmaster email and asked if they were aware of the site design similarities. I did not receive a response. However, a quick check of my web statistics showed a 54 second visit (referred from a Google Search for my name) from “kleinerpbook.engr.oregonstate.edu.” It turns out that that is the host name for Gregg Kleiner’s computer at OSU. Gregg is the Director of Marketing & Communications for the OSU College of Engineering.
I was surfing the web today in search of good examples of university/college web designs for an upcoming proposal. I had a two-pronged plan. Step one, visit sites for schools that I was already familiar with as well as viewing sites from the colleges of OSU. Step two, visit edustyle for a sampling of the latest in higher education web designs.
I fired up Firefox and surfed to the websites of Virginia Tech and the University of Tennessee – Knoxville. I’ve visited their sites before and appreciated their overall look and feel.
My next step was to open up tabs for each of the College sites for OSU. The College of Health and Human Sciences, Education, Ag Sciences, Science, Forestry, etc.
Then I opened up the OSU College of Engineering website. My jaw hit my desk and my eyes were agape. The Virginia Tech homepage and the College of Engineering homepage were like twins that had never met each other. The color schemes, backgrounds and grids were extremely similar. I wasn’t sure if it was pilfering, borrowing or at best, design inspiration?
The screenshots really tell the tale…
Continue reading Borrowing design ideas?
A lot of comments were submitted after I wrote a post in September titled, “OSU to be tobacco free“.
A smoke-free OSU might soon be a reality…
A new bill introduced in the U.S. Congress this week would reduce the cost of birth control for college students and low-income women nationwide. Because of an error in a previous bill approved by Congress, the prices for birth control this fall quadrupled for female college students who purchase it from college clinics.
For decades drug companies made it possible for college health clinics to purchase birth control at low prices in order to pass along the savings to college students and low-income women who rely on them.
In 2005, however, Congress inadvertently passed a provision under the Deficit Reduction Act, preventing all college clinics, hundreds of safety-net health care providers, Medicaid beneficiaries and Planned Parenthood offices from purchasing birth control from drug companies at a discounted rate.