“Clickers” allow students to respond to questions during class using a wireless, handheld device. Instructors can then immediately view and display the results, often in the form of a poll. The Chronicle interviewed Derek Bruff, an assistant director at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, who just published

In an effort to broaden access to its image archives, Oregon State University has become the first university to join Flickr Commons, a section of the popular photo-sharing service devoted to making historic images available to the public.

“We’re always looking for new areas of engagement, new avenues for putting our materials out there,” said Tiah Edmunson-Morton, reference and instruction archivist at the university’s Valley Library, in an interview today. “It seemed a base to reach a whole new set of users.”

Flickr, the image- and video-sharing site owned by Yahoo, opened the Commons last year as a space where archival institutions—like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, which are both using the service—can post photos and visitors can comment on them....

I’ve enjoyed blogging this past month for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Working and being associated with a great university is a privilege, but taking the mission of the university seriously also brings with it obligations. There is a natural tendency in times of local or national economic distress to become inwardly focused. It’s a basic instinct and a form of human survival.

The problem is that this instinct leads to behaviors that work at cross purposes to the needs of the current global economy. At the moment, economic nationalism is politically expedient, but we need an architecture for global education that works against the chauvinism that comes with many “wrap-ourselves-in-the-flag” economic policies.

In

An information-technology malfunction early this week at Southern Methodist University offered students a harsh reminder of how heavily they depend on e-mail and other Web-based services and how helpless they are when something goes wrong.

“We’ve all gotten used to the digital age where we expect technology to work all the time,” said Joe Gargiulo, chief information officer at the university, “and when it doesn’t work as we expect it to, it’s a surprise to everyone.”

According to Mr. Gargiulo, a hardware failure in a unit that stored server data for the university’s e-mail and course-management software left many members of the campus community with sporadic or no access to those digital tools from Sunday evening until late Monday afternoon.

While several faculty members seemed

An experiment this semester at Houston Community College compares two sections of the same course, one in which students are given iPhones and another in which students use old-fashioned PC’s to view course materials online. The question: Will students with the smart phones spend more time watching course videos and interacting with peers than those without them?

The course, called “Anatomy and Physiology II,” is a hybrid of distance education and traditional classroom teaching — the students meet in person once a week and are asked to watch lecture videos and follow assignments online for the rest of the material. There are 20 students in each section, and the only difference between the two is that one group got iPhones on loan at the beginning of the semester and the other did not.

The professor, Lifang Tien, an instructor at the...

Where will higher education be the day after the current global economic crisis passes? If you think things will simply go back to the way they were once the economy recovers in a year or two, think again.

Many people seem to accept that the financial crisis will take its toll on a number of universities. Mergers, consolidations, and perhaps even closures are all possible outcomes of the financial crisis. The reaction at many institutions has been to plan for fewer students, fewer offerings, the suspension of sabbatical leaves, and salary freezes — intervention strategies focused on the financial ledger. As someone who lives with the crushing budget challenge, I know that those decisions are painful and risk ripping at the core fabric of the academy. They also don’t get at the heart the challenge.

The structural challenges we face are far more...

Research scientists with egalitarian tendencies toward publication may want to think twice if they also hope to make tenure. A study by a pair of investigators at the University of Chicago has concluded that researchers may find a wider audience if they make their findings available through a fee-based Web site rather than make their work freely available on the Internet.

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Science, say that when a research article is offered online after being in print for one year, the use of an open-source format increases citations to the article by 8 percent. But when a paid-subscription format is used to distribute a year-old print article, the citations increase by 12 percent.

The exception, said the study’s authors, James A. Evans and Jacob Reimer, is the developing world, where researchers were far...

The donation of 200,000 electronic books by Premier Wen Jiabao of China has made the University of Cambridge’s library home to one of the world’s largest collections of Chinese monographs.

Mr. Wen’s “gift is one of the largest single donations received in the University Library’s 650-year history and almost doubles the number of electronic books at its disposal,” the university said in a statement.

Officials say that the e-book system used for the donated volumes was developed by Beijing Founder Apabi Technology Ltd. According to the company’s Web site, it was established at Peking University in 1986 and is one of China’s...

Norman M. Sadeh, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, knows exactly where his research assistants are. He can just pop open his laptop and see their locations on a Google map, represented as push-pin-like icons scattered around the campus. And his colleagues can track him, too — well, at least during weekdays when he’s in town.

Mr. Sadeh’s research focuses on whether location-tracking services can be run in a way that doesn’t creep people out. College campuses are, in many ways, ideal settings for the technology. Students and professors are highly mobile, and they often want to find partners for study groups, meetings, or trips to the bar. I recently visited Mr. Sadeh’s lab to see a demonstration of a system his team developed, and to get a sense of how college life might change if these tools catch on.

Attackers broke into a computer service at the University of Florida last month, exposing the personal information of some 97,200 former and current students, professors, and staff members. The incident occurred just two months after a computer breach at the university’s College of Dentistry that exposed personal details about 330,000 current and former patients there.

The attack hit a university computer system called Grove, which had been the university’s main e-mail hub back in the 90s but was in limited use at the time of the breach. The system contained more than a decade’s worth of records, including names and Social Security numbers, according to a statement issued by the university. The university used Social Security numbers as student IDs until 2003.

University officials...