The College News Network isn’t much: a bare-bones Web site, expenses totaling $17, and a single advertisement that covered every penny.
But the Ohio University undergraduates who founded the college-journalism content-sharing cooperative hope the new wire-service-style Web site can help fill a hole in the student press.
The [...]
U21 Global, an online university, hoped to have 500,000 students by 2011. After being open for eight years, however, it has only enrolled 1 percent of its goal. Now Universitas 21, an international association of research institutions, is giving up its controlling interest in the ailing program to [...]
This fall, 20-year-old Tyrell Luebker made two mistakes on Facebook. He posted pictures of himself drinking beer with his friends in an album titled "Not Sober Fest." And he confirmed a friend request from an attractive young lady named Jenny Anderson. He assumed he had met her at a party.
In [...]
Think you understand the academic grounding of the TV show Lost? Can you explain in detail how Desmond Hume might actually be able to travel through time using worm theory? Can you see similarities between the rifle-toting jungle woman Rousseau and Jean-Jacques Rousseau? If you answered yes to any of [...]
Joel Tenenbaum can bash the Recording Industry Association of America all he wants.
A judge today rejected the industry's request to gag Mr. Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student who was ordered to pay $675,000 to record labels for music piracy, according to a Wired article. The RIAA had [...]
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won a social-networking scavenger hunt over the weekend, locating 10 red weather balloons tethered across the country in less than nine hours, The New York Times reports. And all it took was a sort of pyramid scheme.
The contest was organized [...]
Fifty-three thousand 18th-century letters. Twenty-three thousand hours of digitized world music. The records of more than 197,000 individual trials held in Britain over 240 years. What can humanities scholars and social scientists do with such large tracts of raw material? This year the Digging Into Data Challenge invited research [...]
For years, colleges have awarded credit for out-of-classroom learning experiences like corporate training, independent study and volunteer activities. But many colleges can’t afford to train their faculty and staff to evaluate those experiences.
A new online service is intended to help translate outside learning into college credit, which should [...]
While Congress is still weighing legislation that could put $500-million into the development of open, online courses, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has stepped up to the plate. The charity is giving $12.9-million to advance technology at community colleges, improving virtual learning environments for both students and teachers.
The [...]
Amazon.com today announced a new textbook trade-in program, which gives students Amazon gift cards if they mail in their used books. The move poses a major challenge to college bookstores, which have long been the main site of book trade-ins for many students.
Amazon says the program will give students [...]
A graduate student at Utah State University is a new kind of Civil War re-enactor. Instead of dressing up in period clothes, the student, Tom Caswell, uses Twitter to send short messages in the voice of Abraham Lincoln and other historical figures.
Mr. Caswell is one of the organizers of [...]
Centuries ago, the best way to reproduce a book was to have a monk in a monastery sit down and rewrite the original, word for word.
These days, digitizing one of those ancient texts can seem almost as laborious: It can take hours upon hours of human work to scan just [...]
With so much archaeological history there, any discussion of possible borders between Israel and Palestine would have to consider excavation sites. And now, for the first time, a searchable map of all archaeological activity since Israel took over the West Bank in 1967 has been created by the University of [...]
In its latest victory over inefficiency, mobile technology is making coffee breaks quicker for some students at North Carolina State University.
The university's library staff has created a new Web site that lets students with mobile phones decide whether to sneak off for a coffee break by watching a [...]
For most college students, there's so much reading, and so little time.
California State University-Dominguez Hills is trying to make students' lives easier by turning some of that reading into listening. About a year ago, a library administrator was tinkering with text-enlarging software, which makes it easier for visually impaired students' [...]
For more than two years, the University of Texas system figured its students and faculty members could handle having multiple usernames and passwords. Not anymore.
After initially refusing in 2007, the Texas system has agreed to join a growing number of institutions in the InCommon Federation. InCommon is [...]
Barnes & Noble says its Nook e-book device, to be released by the end of the month, was not built with college students in mind.
"Nook is not designed to be a textbook reader," said Jade Roth, the company's vice president of books. "Nook is really designed to be an e-reader" [...]
Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale. And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same scenario has played out many times before.
The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web [...]
More than 1,700 private e-mail messages were illegally nabbed from a university-based climate-science lab by computer hackers, with the apparent goal of discrediting the authors' research on global warming just days before a major climate summit begins.
The incident is an unusual one. Though data breaches happen almost every week in' [...]
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, announced a new nonprofit group last week to promote the study of "Web science," arguing that his creation deserves its own specific research focus.
The group, Web Science Trust, has set up a Wiki where universities offering Web-science programs can [...]
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, announced a new nonprofit group last week to promote the study of "Web science," arguing that his creation deserves its own specific research focus.
The group, Web Science Trust, has set up a Wiki where universities offering Web-science programs can [...]
Doctoral students spend years on their dissertations. Too bad the results of their hard work often end up in a cardboard box in a dark corner of a library.
Now Stanford University doctoral students will be able to store their dissertations in a digital repository instead of submitting several bound paper [...]
Leslie Whitaker, a guest blogger for Wired Campus, is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Previously she worked as a reporter for Time magazine.
My first experience with blogging’s potential as a teaching tool occurred last week. I am teaching a class on blogs [...]
Mendeley, a Web service that lets users organize and share research papers, recently announced that it has surpassed 100,000 users, and that its database now includes some 8 million works. The announcement has generated a lot of hype for the fledgling company.
TechCrunch, a popular [...]
A new low for academic life?
A powerful tool to improve conferences?
A shameful act of journalism?
A Chronicle story today about the abuse of Twitter at conferences is touching off an online debate among readers. Dozens of them are arguing about a new trend in [...]
Colleges working with Google on the company's effort to scan millions of library books today unveiled their own search tool to comb the full text of some 500,000 volumes.
The tool has a few features that Google lacks, said John P. Wilkin, an associate university librarian for the University of Michigan [...]
For years major newspapers have given away free copies on several college campuses to try to get students hooked on their print products. Now USA Today has added a digital edition to its free offerings at three campuses, hoping to test how students use its new premium electronic version.
Anyone using [...]
Ever wanted to see a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald's copy of the book 1984? Probably not (it looks remarkably like any other copy of the book), but if you ever do, the University of North Texas has made it easy with its new digital catalog of photos [...]
Some professors don’t let students see their Facebook pages. Some accept students’ invitations but don’t initiate them.
Peter Juvinall insists students friend him.
The Illinois State University instructor decided the best way to connect with a bunch of freshman business students in a short 8 a.m. [...]
Carl Hartung was surprised by the cellphone reception in East Africa this summer. "We were working in villages miles from electricity or running water, but we still had cell coverage," wrote Mr. Hartung, a graduate student at the University of Washington, in an e-mail to The Chronicle.
That was good, because [...]
Two universities say they won't order large numbers of Amazon Kindles until the company releases devices that are easier for blind students to use.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison and Syracuse University, which have both made Kindles available to their students in pilot programs recently, say they won't buy more [...]
November 11 is Armistice Day, which marks the cessation of Great War hostilities in 1918. (Here in the United States, of course, this is now Veterans Day.) In honor of the day and the dead, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, housed at the University of Oxford, chose [...]
Meet the latest acronym in the world of digital humanities: Chain, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks. Born at a meeting at King's College, London, in late October, Chain brings together eight digital-technology undertakings, several based in Europe (e.g., Dariah, or Digital Research Infrastructure for [...]
Meet the latest acronym in the world of digital humanities: Chain, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks. Born at a meeting at King's College, London, in late October, Chain brings together eight digital-technology undertakings, several based in Europe (e.g., Dariah, or Digital Research Infrastructure for [...]
As mobile phones begin functioning more like minicomputers, they also take on more security risks.
That's why the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work toward developing safer mobile devices and telecommunication networks that serve such [...]
Denver -- Plenty of colleges have a presence in Second Life. Penn State is taking that a step further. Academic advisers at the university’s online campus are now required to be available for meetings with students in the virtual world every week, a Penn State official said during [...]
Denver -- Plenty of colleges have a presence in Second Life. Pennsylvania State University is taking that a step further. Academic advisers at the university’s online campus are now required to be available for meetings with students in the virtual world every week, a Penn State official said [...]
Denver -- Plenty of colleges have a presence in Second Life. Pennsylvania State University is taking that a step further. Academic advisers at the university’s online campus are now required to be available for meetings with students in the virtual world every week, a Penn State official said [...]
Denver — The face of evil, projected 20 feet tall on a screen behind Lawrence Lessig, belonged to Britney Spears.
The face of good belonged to composer John Philip Sousa.
Mr. Lessig, the Harvard Law School professor, was giving a keynote address at Educause 2009. He argued that intellectual property in education [...]
Denver – Big East colleges may shine on the basketball court, but they’re getting stuffed by the competition when it comes to the Web-accessibility battle.
The Big East posted the most consistent problems in a new survey of how good a job universities are doing in making their Web [...]
Denver — The face of evil, projected 20 feet tall on a screen behind Lawrence Lessig, belonged to Britney Spears.
The face of good belonged to composer John Philip Sousa.
Mr. Lessig, the Harvard Law School professor, was giving a keynote address that drew a standing ovation from campus-technology officials at Educause [...]
Denver -- A panel of Google programmers wearing green T-shirts talked last night about the company's newest product -- called Wave -- but it was clear that they had come here to learn a few things about education.
Wave is a new kind of communication and collaboration service that is so [...]
Denver-- "This is another sign of the culture war between faculty and IT," said a vice president for technology and administration at a medium-sized state university. The official, musing after a session on budget crises here at the Educause 2009 technology meeting, said professors fought hard to keep "low performing" [...]
Americans tend to have fewer close confidants today than they did two decades ago -- but that isn't because they're all huddled over their computers playing World of Warcraft or reading the Volokh Conspiracy.
A report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that the Internet [...]
Denver -- Continuing education continues to evolve, and e-learning platforms presented here at the Educause conference are vying for attention from universities with promises of enhanced engagement of "lifelong learners" and alumni.
Building on Drupal, the open-source content-management system, a company called GoingOn built a platform for a University of [...]
Denver -- Thousands of college technology leaders have gathered here this week for the annual meeting of Educause, the education-technology group.
During the kickoff reception in the corporate exhibit hall Tuesday night, Chronicle reporters talked with a variety of attendees about what they see as the latest trends, and what concerns [...]
