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From yesterday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin and today’s Honolulu Advertiser come two reports on a recent poll of Hawaii small and medium-sized businesses. The outlook is not good, with reports of decreasing revenues, and complaints about ill-prepared local high school graduates who cannot handle entry-level jobs.

Courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I found links to two articles in the Times of London. In the first article, Professor Tara Brarbazon describes the research policy for her first-year students: no Googling or Wikipedia. Students should consider the authority of the source material, instead of PageRank or convenience. In a response, Times columnist Magnus Linklater portrays Brabazon’s ban as a short-sighted elitist, while praising Wikipedia for its low error rate. Wikipedia has announced that it will conduct a survey of its users and editors, with the assistance of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Of course, balance is important, as I mentioned in my 15 January 2008 article about Wikipedia’s seventh anniversary. Wikipedia and Google are convenient starting points for research, but students need to develop their own search skills.

More library databases are available in surprising ways. This Chronicle article from 7 January 2008 discusses how university libraries are posting their own Facebook applications, to provide their students with easier access to reference materials.

I mentioned OpenDNS on 3 September and 13 July of 2007. This is a free service that looks up domain names. Domain names represent the numeric IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that are used on every server. The Domain Name System (DNS) is highly distributed, and a good target for all sorts of legal and illegal opportunities.

OpenDNS is much faster than the domain name servers I’ve used at other ISPs. Every ISP has to provide DNS services to subscribers. The DNS servers are an important part of maintaining a fast connection, but some ISPs just do not manage their DNS servers well.

OpenDNS a great way to speed up an Internet connection, especially for residential and WiFi users, by outsourcing every domain name lookup request to a dedicated set of very fast servers in North America and Europe.

It’s hard to beat secure, fast and free.

OpenDNS also includes some nice security features. The service will block phishing and adult web sites, using a constantly updated list of known servers. This is a more elegant solution that proprietary security software that usually slows down a Windows or Mac computer.

Late last year, OpenDNS asked users to recommend the service to schools and universities. A recent article in THE Journal reports that over 10,000 educational organizations have adopted OpenDNS services.

Crackers have started to attack domain name servers, inserting false domain name entries that redirect users from well-known sites to forgeries. Schools and educational institutions are an attractive target for these attacks, as their IT security is sometimes less than adequate. In the past, school email servers have been a primary target for botnets. Hackers break into these servers, which can then be used to send spam. The legitimate users of these servers may not realize their email system has been compromised until their ISP cuts off their email access.

Installing OpenDNS on a personal computer is easy to do. I would not recommend that employees do this on their company computer without the support of their IT department, as some companies maintain specific entries in their own domain name servers.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales offered new advice to students and educators at a London conference. The BBC and the Chronicle of Higher Education report that Wales is backing off his previous advice – namely, university students should not use Wikipedia as a reference.

His new advice is somewhat similar to my 24 November article. Wales suggests that Wikipedia is a good “stepping stone” to more authoritative secondary references on topics. Raid the reference list of a good Wikipedia article, but always go beyond that list and do additional reading and research.

As for me, I still don’t want students making direct citations to Wikipedia articles in their assignments.

As mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a new Sloan Consortium report suggests that the higher education distance learning market is growing at almost 10 percent per year, compared to an overall growth rate of 1.5 percent.

1 out of 5 college students are taking a distance education course

These figures are based on 5 years of survey results across 2500 US universities and colleges.

A free PDF of the entire report is available here. This is just another piece of evidence that distance education, including online courses, have become a key success factor for US universities. Distance education is also a very popular delivery method for corporate training – that’s one reason I recommend that college students take a few online courses. The ability to learn at a distance has also become a key success factor for college graduates.