Information Technology Reference
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The university might also use LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, or another network
service to send messages to students with special interests or with common in-
terests who might want to communicate with each other.
Because students would not be on campus more than perhaps an hour or two
per day, the university would also include links to various e-book sources such
as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Google. Indeed, course curricula and selected
texts would be capable of being downloaded and ordered as e-book packages for
various courses such as testing, estimating, project management, and the like.
The fundamental idea for the university is to consolidate the huge but unorgan-
ized collections of knowledge about software topics into discrete learning pack-
ages that are aimed at specific and important topics such as quality control, estim-
ating, planning, status reports, and dozens of others.
Each of the major professional associations such as the American Society of
Quality (ASQ), IFPUG, the International Software Standards Group (ISBSG), the
Project Management Institute (PMI), or the Software Engineering Institute (SEI)
could have their own virtual buildings and offer both training and membership ser-
vices.
The same concept would be available for major corporations such as IBM,
Google, and Microsoft. They could design and commission corporate buildings on
the virtual campus where training in their products could take place. In fact, some
of the funding for the university would no doubt come from fees paid by corpor-
ations for these structures. Smaller corporations such as Computer Aid, Inc., and
SmartBear might also want to have a presence on campus.
Another unique aspect of the university would be links to major conferences
such as the Japanese Symposium on Software Testing (JaSST) or the IBM Innov-
ate Conferences. The university could have several large conference halls where
those who could not attend actual events in person would be able to participate in
the major sessions and tutorials. Attendance policies for these virtual conferences
would be set by the conference committees and would probably offer reductions
on the fees for attending in person.
The university might also offer occasional guest speakers who are famous in
the software world: Bill Gates of Microsoft, Sergey Brin of Google, Mark Zuck-
erberg of Facebook, and Larry Ellison of Oracle are examples. These software lu-
minaries sometimes do speeches at real universities and conferences. But due to
logistical limits, they seldom can address audiences of more than perhaps 5,000
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