Join the UW Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Information Security and Privacy Seminar roundtable discussions on February 16 from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. in the UW Tower Auditorium. This event for UW faculty, staff, and researchers (rescheduled from January 26 due to the snow) starts with a 30-minute presentation on data privacy, followed by discussions, including one on mobile device security. RSVP by February 9 to malbin@uw.edu.

Learn about innovative uses of technology at the UW for teaching and learning at the upcoming Ignite! event. Hear 5-minute talks from UW faculty about using the Canvas eLearning system to hold virtual office hours, SQLShare to analyze extremely large data sets, back-channel chat to keep students engaged and more, with a brief Q&A after each presentation. Key findings from UW-IT’s 2011 Triennial Surveys on Teaching, Learning, and Research Technologies will be presented, and Canvas, MyPlan, Tegrity, and Yarn will be available for hands-on demos. It’s January 25, 3:00 p.m. in UW Seattle’s Odegaard Undergraduate Library, Room 220. Get details.

Starting Spring Quarter, UW professors and lecturers can participate in a UW-IT electronic text (eText) pilot in one or more of their classes to experiment with this new technology, help improve student learning, and contribute to this research effort. Two eText platforms (CourseSmart and CourseLoad) are provided, allowing flexibility and side-by-side comparison. Attend an informational meeting on January 26 at 9:30 a.m. in Odegaard Undergraduate Library 220 or February 1 at 3:30 p.m. in Mary Gates Hall 241, both at UW Seattle, or send email to help@uw.edu. During the pilot, students will receive eTexts at no cost. Get details.

To help shape the future of MyUW, your personalized portal to UW resources, UW students are invited to share how they use it and how they think it can be improved. Please take the short, 10-minute survey now or no later than January 27. Feel free to forward the link to your classmates.

This quarter, UW instructors who teach with laptops can try out a new technology that supports teaching and learning. Tegrity, a cloud-based lecture capture service, lets instructors easily record lectures and other class activities from a laptop (or any device with a Web connection). Then students can review the materials online using a Web browser or mobile device. Learn more.

Help the UW Libraries evaluate the research and teaching potential of databases “on trial”. As funding for these databases is limited, your feedback will help decide which ones are added. UW students, faculty, and staff have been given temporary access to these databases, which include historic newspapers, government publications, magazines, eBooks, and video, so take a look and weigh in soon.

Did you know that individual UW faculty and staff can purchase computer services through UW-IT’s Nebula Managed Desktop service even if their unit is not subscribed? Nebula provides a centrally managed, supported Windows environment for UW faculty, staff, academic and administrative units for a monthly fee. Pay-as-you-go, on-demand user support and secured file space also are available. In addition, Nebula provides group access to your secured file space with UW Groups, and Mac users who upgrade to OSX Lion, the UW-licensed Apple operating system, will find it easier to access Nebula’s protected file server drives. See the UW-IT Service Catalog for details.