From the Educause web site: 

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

GIS use in the classroom is extending beyond geology, geography, and archaeology into other less-science based disciplines.

The Bowdoin News archives from March of this year contains an interesting article describing professor Patrick Rael's "The Civil War Era" class. Students used GIS to process US Census Bureau information from the 1790s, mapping out the election that gave Abraham Lincoln the presidency. From the article:

"Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology - a software system that allows users to convert data into detailed maps - his students mapped out voting and demographic information from the period to visualize the impact of social forces, such as early industrialization and slavery, on voting behavior....Rael's project demonstrates the possibilities of GIS-based scholarship and teaching in the humanities, a growing trend among colleges and universities....GIS is crossing disciplines and is being used in areas such as healthcare, law enforcement, environmental research, sociology, and land planning."

From the article:

A scholar of Japanese history at Bowdoin College has developed an innovative website that gives new meaning to the term "web scrolling." Thomas Conlan, associate professor of history and Asian studies recently launched Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, an interactive website that brings to life a famous set of Japanese picture scrolls.

After this summer's Chronicle article "Bloggers Need Not Apply," which discussed the dangers of such a "public display of a [job] applicant's personal eccentricities,"  Slate's "Attack of the Killer Blogs" points out yet another pitfall -- "Many [academics] perceive blogs as evidence of a scholar's lack of seriousness. Shouldn't he be putting more time into scholarship, they wonder, and less into his blog? And if a blogger does have something serious to say, why is he presenting it in a superficial medium, rather than a peer-reviewed journal?"

The Campus Technology Newsletter sent around an interesting article on Wikis in academia. Subtitled "All Users are Not Necessarily Created Equal," it describes the steps that a team at the The Center for Scholarly Technology at the University of Southern California went through to identify and and implement a series of approaches to use of Wikis for teaching and learning.

A number of tech news sites last week had articles about a new software created by Toronto's Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning that translates network and server activity into music. Changes in the music can be interpreted to detect problems in the system.

A visit to the www.soundtomind.com website gives some interesting background on the academic origins of this project:

"iSIC (information muSIC) is an alternative approach to remotely monitoring complex systems like communications networks. It presents information in a synergized acoustical format that provides a holistic and uninterrupted audio model of the system under observation. iSIC is meant to complement, not replace traditional visually based systems. iSIC falls under the broader category of the field of sonification. The purpose of any sonification is to allow users to identify patterns in data through sound.

The iSIC project is the culmination of several years of R&D by a group of students, graduates and faculty at the Sheridan Institute of Technology in Oakville, Ontario. iSIC is a completely unique work of intellectual property producing sound which is rich in information and is ergonomically designed for sustained operation.