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 list their offerings and links to their course syllabi.

Why set up a separate Web-science program when other fields already cover the topic? "Most computers science isn't about the Web, and most information science isn't about the Web," said James Hendler, a computer-science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who is a leader of the new effort. He named climate science as another new research area that has emerged in recent years by pulling people from different...

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 copies to the university, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The university has also reached an agreement with Google, which will serve as a third-party distributor, meaning users of the search tool will be able to find the dissertations. Administrators hope the move will save the university money and give students' work a greater audience.

"We have way north of 35,000 bound dissertations on our shelves," Stanford's university librarian, Michael Keller, told the...

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 to English majors this semester, and I asked them to blog immediately after watching a live broadcast of President Obama’s address during the memorial service for those killed at Fort Hood, in Texas. I gave them about 10 minutes and then asked them to read aloud what they’d written. I figured we’d brush up against the limits of blogging, with its inherent pressure to process and post as quickly as possible. Even though I have a thoughtful bunch of students, I didn’t...

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 technology blog, says the company—which is still less than a year old—could surpass Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the largest research-paper database, by April 2010. Mendeley says it is doubling in size every 10 weeks.

Mendeley is more than just a dumping ground for...

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 academic life: how audience members now “tweckle” speakers by heckling them on the micro-blogging service Twitter.

Meanwhile, several readers pointed out yet another tweckling episode, which was not included in the article. This one involved Danah Boyd of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. More on that

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 at Ann Arbor. He is leading the group formed by the colleges, which is called HathiTrust Digital Library. The killer app: HathiTrust's search lists every page that contains a user's search term, while Google's might return a partial list, said Mr. Wilkin. "That's a small amenity, but I think you'll see us continue to devote energy to that sort of tool," he added.

Time traveling is coming to an Internet browser near you.

A new Web site called Memento Web will allow anyone curious about what the Internet used to look like to plug in a date and then browse the World Wide Web as it was on that day.

The site is already live with limited use. Users can enter a URL and the date on which they wish to see a version of the page the URL once called up.

That doesn't mean they'll get exactly what they were looking for. For example, a search for nytimes.com on November 17, 2006, returned a Web page dated December 8, 2007. Some searches don't work at all.

People behind the site, financed by a grant from the Library of Congress, said that they were still working on it and that they hoped to get more money to develop it further.

Michael Nelson, an associate...

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 a computer on the three campuses can now get free online access to the newspaper's e-Edition, for which the company usually charges $99 per year. The e-Edition is formatted to look like a printed newspaper, though it also includes videos and interactive Sudoku and other games. The three colleges participating in the pilot project are Pennsylvania State University, Indiana University at Bloomington, and the University of Missouri -- all of which have long been part of "newspaper readership...

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 from the Dallas Police Department's investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

The Dallas Morning News reports that the university's Digital Projects Unit has put 404 photographs from the investigation on its Portal to Texas History Web site. All the photos had been available to the public on a...

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. class was to conduct much of the course where they are anyway—on Facebook.

So, as he explained during last week’s Educause conference and in a subsequent interview, he uses Facebook as a course-management system by instructing students to “friend” his personal page on the first day of class.

On the scale of pushing the privacy boundary, it doesn't come close to the stuff some...