College students: Tablets will replace textbooks by 2017

The Apple iPad still dominates among tablet owners on campus.

Interest in computer tablets has been consistently high on college campuses since the Apple iPad hit the market in April 2010, but not until this year did tablet ownership spike in higher education.

Only 7 percent of college students surveyed in 2011 owned a computer tablet. In 2012, that number has spiked to 25 percent, and students now see their sleek new tablets as the inevitable replacement for their bulky, pricey textbooks.

Six in 10 college students – and seven in 10 high school seniors – believe tablets will replace traditional textbooks within five years, according to findings from the Pearson Foundation’s Second Annual Survey on Students and Tablets, which was made public March 14.…Read More

The March Madness bracket feared by every campus IT official

UCLA still has the worst campus data breach ever recorded.

March Madness has yet to tip off, and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) has already won a championship. This run through the NCAA Tournament brackets, however, won’t end with campus celebrations, especially in VCU’s IT department.

VCU, a 32,000-student campus in Richmond, Va., that came up one game short of the 2011 NCAA Tournament championship game in its improbable path to the Final Four last spring took home a less glamorous prize March 12, when the university was named the winner of the 2012 Higher Education Data Breach Madness tournament.

Application Security, a database security company based in New York, released a bracket filled with colleges and universities that reported the worst database breaches from the previous year. All 48 higher-education data incidents were mentioned in the bracket, and 16 schools were given bye-rounds.…Read More