November 2006 – Page 6

In New Jersey, talks of merging three universities

While discussion continues here at UMR about the merits of changing our university’s name, I’m becoming more interested in how other public institutions are dealing with organizational change. This story about what’s going on in New Jersey caught my eye. Lawmakers in the Garden State are studying the feasibility of merging three campus — Rutgers, the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

I wonder what they’d call the new institution? One lawmakers suggests the University of Newark. That’s certainly shorter than something like the Rutgers University of Medicine, Dentistry and Technology.

The next-gen web: like a Swiss Army knife

Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion) has been thinking a lot about the future of the web, and web widgets in particular. He writes that these widgets — chunks of code that can be easily installed on a web page — make it “possible to add so many collapsible modules to your tabs/pages, that you rarely need to go anywhere else.” Thus, with apps like the Google Reader widget, anything and everything you need — from news briefs to meeting notices — will be accessible from your start page.

Rubel shares screen shots of a couple of widgets that “are indicative of what the widgetized web will look like in the years ahead” and adds, “You can see a future where these pages become as essential as a Swiss Army Knife is to a camper.” He concludes that “The future of the web (dare I say Web 3.0?) will look just like a Swiss Army Knife and it’s going to be extremely disruptive.”

I just hope web 3.0 comes with a corkscrew and bottle opener.