India’s ministry in charge of higher education says it will make low-power laptops available, at a cost of just $10 apiece, to the Indian market within six months — as part of a major initiative to increase the number of students going to college, The Indian Express reports.

R. P. Agrawal, India’s secretary of higher education, told the newspaper that online courses are the only way to bring quality education to remote areas of the country. He added that the ministry is working out ways to beam lectures from the Indian Institute of Technology across the country. “We will be providing free e-content to students,” Mr. Agrawal said.

A prototype of the computer is expected to be unveiled next week. It will come with wireless Internet capability, expandable...

These days, facilities staff members are constantly immersed in sustainability, what with their roles in planning campus construction, dealing with campus energy systems, and supervising odds and ends like campus waste — all of which are directly tied to sustainability priorities.

The average chief information officer is fairly removed from this world — and that’s perhaps why “green IT” is getting attention much later than more mainstream sustainability issues. Only recently have people really started paying closer attention to the power use and waste generated by campus computing.

One of the first steps in getting a green-IT movement going on campus is to get the facilities manager talking to the CIO, says Warren Arbogast in the latest episode of Tech Therapy. At...

That is, of course, a wild exaggeration. The Henry Madden Library at California State University-Fresno does need a bunch of tables and chairs—nearly $8-million worth—but the new facility is set to open on February 19 anyway. After all, it does have online services and books and staff to help faculty and students find things.

The California state budget crisis has put a lot of furniture on hold at the $105-million building. But Peter McDonald, the library dean, points out that the essentials are in place, in a revealing interview with the Library Journal Academic Newswire.

“The collection level below the first floor is arguably the largest single-floor open compact shelving in the...

Do you know what your kids are up to on Facebook? The social-networking service has become a major online hangout for many young people (especially college students), and one Stanford researcher who studies the service argues that parents should join, too — and befriend their children.

The researcher, BJ Fogg, director of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, announced this week a free, noncredit course he plans to teach at the university called “Facebook for Parents.” He has teamed up with his sister, Linda Fogg Phillips, who has eight children of her own, to teach the course. You have to get to the university to take the course because the sessions will not be broadcast online.

The instructors have built a Web site with their top five tips for parents concerning Facebook. They also...

A new online community billed as “a question-and-answer site for research-oriented graduate students” is set to open publicly next Friday.

Called Gradshare and developed by ProQuest, the Web site follows on the heels of other social-networking sites aimed at graduate students, like Graduate Junction. However, Gradshare’s developers hope that the site, which opened in beta form last October, will carve out a niche with its question-and-answer focus.

“Gradshare will become a way for graduate students to use peer mentoring to get answers to questions that they’re either not comfortable asking their advisors or unable to ask their advisors,” said Jeff Lang, a Gradshare spokesman....

Some folks following the blog have asked me why I have not commented on the issue of privacy, since a significant amount of my work over the last few years in electronic surveillance or the use of social-networking tools has touched on this subject. Okay, you asked for it! Here is a more comprehensive take on the subject. Have at it!

Privacy has long been interwoven into democratic rhetoric. In ancient times, citizens of Greece or Rome were granted certain protections for their families from public spaces. “Privates” in Latin means “not belonging to the state” or “not in public life” and tracks well with contemporary definitions. As we move rapidly into a global information economy, privacy in the current U.S. law applies to a small class of torts, public laws over certain kinds of information and electronic-surveillance rules. Privacy...

Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library, is worried about whether we’re saving enough—not enough money, but enough of the digital evidence of our times. In an essay in Sunday’s Observer, Ms. Brindley worries that whole chunks of national memory are being lost and that “historians and citizens of the future will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.”

She cites two examples (no jokes about the ephemeral nature of the Bush legacy, please):

At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House Web site, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the Web site had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About...

Colleges do a poor job preparing students for careers designing Web sites or for related positions in Web development, often because they teach out-of-date curricula and fail to hire instructors with recent experience in the field, according to a survey of top Web designers and developers.

The survey, “Teach the Web,” was culled from interviews with 32 prominent Web designers and developers. Many of them said that colleges often forgo teaching the fundamentals of making Web sites in favor of teaching narrow skills like Flash and Photoshop, leaving students unprepared for getting a job.

“I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them,” said James Archer, chief executive of...

“What will the library of the future look like?” has become a hackneyed question for academic librarians, and yet the need to plan for digital future remains an on-going challenge. Anne Kenney, University Librarian at Cornell University, has taken an organizational step forward in that direction with the creation of a chief technology strategist. Dean Krafft, who is also a senior research associate in Information Science, occupies that role and works with the library, technology and academic community to think through an architecture. Below is a brief video conversation I had with both Anne and Dean about the opportunities and challenges of today. —Tracy Mitrano

Police charged Andrew Tatum, a former employee of Mobile Campus, with third-degree felony charges for misuse of computers, after he used the University of Florida’s emergency-alert system to send a text message to more than 42,000 students, professors, and staff members last week.

Mr. Tatum, 24, said he was showing a friend that he still had access to the alert service when he typed the message “The monkey got out of the cage” into the system. He said he did not mean to actually send the message.

Some students interpreted the message as a racial slur, believing it was a reference to the swearing-in of President Obama, since the mysterious message appeared on Inauguration Day. Mr. Tatum