In a recent debate with Twitter investor Mark Andreessen of Netscape fame, Paypal founder Peter Thiel observed that the millennial generation grew up watching flying cars on their Saturday morning TV shows. But today, all we have for evidence of innovation is Twitter, he argued. Then he went on to poke fun at that 140 character limit. Have the graduates of 2013 been shortchanged? Are they victims of an educational system that stifled innovation? Do they miss the flying cars?

Among the many differences between college and career is the simple matter of neatness. In class the questions and answers are usually straight forward, but on the job it’s a different situation. Things can get messy, and that’s one of the big lessons students learn during the capstone project, a requirement of Computer Information Systems majors.

March 8, 2013 wasn’t just another day. That day, the rubber met the road at an important meeting with our executive advisory board about new proposals we were making to improve our academic programs – a day when our plans and next-step groundwork would either play well or come flying back in our faces. There were a few fire-breathing dragons around the table, but in the end, we found areas of consensus on many issues. Now our work is cut out for us in order to report back with major progress at our next EAB meeting.

The current James Bond movie, Skyfall, delivers the action and effects we’ve come to expect of the 007 franchise. M15 always issues Bond ingenious and futuristic gadgets to enable him to dodge danger and complete his assignment, but in Skyfall, the technology supplied by British intelligence to its famous asset isn’t that far-fetched. In fact some of it is already deployed – and not necessarily just in spy craft. In this video, department chairman Michael Goul talks about James Bond and Q -- M15’s technical wizard, and how the story mirrors some of the trends threading through IT today.