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 during last week’s Educause conference here.

Students on the real campus get to chat with their advisers face to face. Now online students who never set foot there can do the “exact same thing,” says Shannon Ritter, social-networks adviser for the Penn State World Campus.

Almost the same thing, anyway. Second Life requires users to choose avatars, or graphical representations of themselves. So...

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 had been taken over by an exclusive-rights model represented by Ms. Spears, the pop diva. That model has pushed out another one based on community collaboration—represented by the composer of "Stars and Stripes Forever," who longed for music created by neighborhood singalongs.

The "ecology of education and science," Mr. Lessig said, is inherently collaborative, and it is being strangled by copyright-law principles based on exclusivity.

It is time to fight back, he told his audience, adding: "You geeks have to become...

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 sites accessible to people with disabilities. The survey of 80 universities, presented at the Educause conference here this week, pitted five athletics conferences against one another in an attempt to draw attention to the issue.

The worst of the worst are Villanova University, Baylor University, and Providence College, says the study by Jon Gunderson, coordinator of assistive communication and information technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The study skewered those institutions and 13 others on a list called “Schools Who Need New...

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 hard to explain that the company usually points people to an hour-and-a-half video to explain how it works. It essentially combines several existing services in one interface -- chat, e-mail, word processing, video and photo sharing, and more.

At one point, a college leader asked the panel from Google if Wave would be compatible with IMS Global standards, which helps education software from various vendors work together. "What's IMS?" said Anna-Christina Douglas, a Google product-marketing manager. "That's why we're here," she added,...

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" programs in the curriculum, while his university just got the news they would have to lay off 50 or 60 people by Christmas. By low performance, he meant programs that had low enrollment or produced relatively few graduates.

"They say, 'Isn't music, or philosphy, important to the university, and to life?'" he said, arguing that decisions about cuts should be made on the basis of what is central to his university's mission and that faculty want to keep all programs going while, across the country, nearly half of IT departments responding to the newest...

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 and other new communication technologies have, if anything, a modestly positive effect on the size and diversity of people's friendship networks.

The study found that using the Internet is associated with having more, not fewer, intimate friends. And Internet users are generally no less likely than nonusers to maintain face-to-face ties with their neighbors. Bloggers, for example, are 72 percent more likely than the general population to belong to a local...

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 Pennsylvania psychology course in the institution's continuing-education program. The psychology department had graduates who had become psychologists who wanted to learn more to improve their professional practice, as well as learners who wanted to improve their lives. Nearly a thousand student took the course, called "Foundations of Positive Psychology." The interface allowed students to form their own "affinity groups" based on topics of particular interest. And the entire...

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 keep them up at night.

See the video below the fold for highlights of their answers.

When it comes to budget cuts in 2009, nothing is sacrosanct, not even information technology.

According to a new report from the Campus Computing Project, IT budgets are being slashed in colleges and universities across the country despite a rising demand for resources and services. The report, which surveyed 500 institutions, found that 48 percent of respondents were facing IT budget cuts for the current academic year, as compared with 30.6 percent last year and just 13.1 percent in 2007. Likewise, the number of institutions with more money for IT was down to only 21.4 percent this year from 49 percent in 2008.

“IT has already gone through serious budget cuts after the dot-com bubble burst,” Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “A second decline is not easy to...

This fall, a strange silence has fallen over a Web site that long amplified the voices of hundreds of student newspapers.

UWIRE, a popular service that aggregated articles from student newspapers across the country, promoting student journalism both within higher education and to the outside world, has disappeared. Visits to the Web site in October returned a "problem loading page" message. Student newspapers that relied on the service to republish articles from other newspapers haven't heard a word. Student editors who were paid to scour campus papers to find content for the site received an abrupt e-mail message on October 4 telling them the site was being "temporarily suspended" but offering no explanation as to why. They still haven't received payment for their work in September, some said.

Those who operate UWIRE, which was founded in 1994 and facilitated...