Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, was escorted off the campus on Wednesday because of jokes she had made on her Facebook page about wanting to kill students.

On Monday the professor posted this update: "Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ..." In another comment, on January 21, she wrote: "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman, it's been that kind of day."

A student notified university administrators of the professor's Facebook comments, and officials decided to place the professor on administrative leave while they investigated. "Given the climate of security concerns in academia, the university has an obligation to take all threats seriously and act accordingly," said Marilyn Wells, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs,...

This week the makers of Second Life unveiled a new interface designed to make the virtual world more user-friendly, and some professors say it will help their educational experiments.

The new interface, called Second Life Viewer 2, looks more like a Web browser. The designers say their goal was to make it easy to find the navigation controls, and to find other people and events in the virtual space. And the new software makes it easier to browse Web pages within Second Life and watch YouTube videos and Flash multimedia.

Nergiz Kern, who runs a blog called Teaching in Second Life, wrote that the new interface seems easier and will make it easier to get students up to speed to participate in classes in the virtual world.

A recent survey of members of the New Media Consortium, a Texas-based higher-education-technology group, found that the steep learning curve of the old Second Life...

A team at Champlain College wants to educate boys about the effects of violence against women. So they are creating a product using two things that appeal to their target audience: soccer and video games.

The university's Emergent Media Center is working on a project with a grant from United Nations Population Fund to design a game for boys between 9 and 13. The project, created with support from the Population Media Center, features soccer matches broken up by narrative sections, with players facing social decisions on and off the field. The game should appear online sometime in March, and the production team will formally debut the game during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa this summer.

Ann DeMarle, the Emergent Media Center's director, said that the group chose soccer because it is a sport popular around the globe -- perfect for a game that the U.N. and Champlain hope will have ...

San Diego--"We may already be in the red in terms of our ability to store information," said Christopher L. Greer last week to an interested, and vaguely intimidated, audience of scientists and other academics. Gene sequences, distant pulsar signals, YouTube videos, e-mail -- it's all too much to keep track of.

Or perhaps not. Mr. Greer, who works on networking policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was addressing a session called "Managing the Exaflood" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was actually an optimistic gathering, where researchers presented ideas for getting a handle on all this data -- an exabyte is one billion billion bytes -- and using it productively.

Larry Smarr, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, demonstrated a method of coupling genetic sequences from ocean bacteria...

Fort Worth -- Many of Todd McCann's students suffer from a chronic disease.

Call it CRS: Can't Remember Squat.

Now they have no excuse.

Mr. McCann, an English instructor at Bay College, in Michigan, is deploying students' own favorite technology to burn away the memory fog. He blasts his classes text-message reminders using Broadtexter, a free software program used by bands to create mobile fan clubs. Rather than texting tour dates, he keeps the phones in students' pockets buzzing with regular reminders like "Paper 4 is due tomorrow."

The instructor offered the optional service in three classroom-based courses last year, embedded as a widget in the course-management system. Out of about 66 students, 45 signed up, Mr. McCann said during a talk on free tech tools at an e-learning conference that wrapped up here Tuesday. An added bonus: They don't see his phone number, and he doesn't...

The U.S. Senate has received a bill that would create scholarships and fellowships for students who agree to conduct research on cybersecurity.

The House of Representatives passed HR 4061, the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2009, in a 422-5 vote on February 4. The bill, which has been assigned to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, would require the National Science Foundation to develop a postdoctoral fellowship program in cybersecurity and information assurance, as well as reauthorize existing funds for students and research centers in the field.

The measure would also create a university-industry task force on cybersecurity research and development.

Other provisions of the bill, sponsored in the House by Daniel Lipinski (D-Illinois) would:

-- Authorize the NSF's cybersecurity scholarship-for-service program, which would offer scholarships to...

iPhone-toting students at Santa Clara University say they're fed up with AT&T's poor reception on the campus, so they organized a day of complaint to lobby the company for better coverage.

Students and professors made a couple hundred phone calls to the cellphone provider one day this month. Kelsey Houlihan, a junior at Santa Clara who helped organize the event, dubbed "Campus Wide Call AT&T to Complain Day," said that AT&T users can't get reception in many of the dormitories, in the basements of the library and the student center, in some academic buildings, and in student houses near the campus. Ms. Houlihan estimated that between 200 and 300 people called AT&T to complain, based on the number of people who joined the Facebook group for the event and the number of flyers that she and other students passed out. The flyers listed a direct number to call and suggested what to say in the...

Fort Worth — Individual community colleges can’t match the marketing budgets of for-profit institutions that plaster their regions with advertisements. So they’re exploring ways to fight back by going national, pooling their efforts to promote online programs in a new marketing collaboration that was announced Sunday at a distance-education conference here.

The discussions, led by the American Association of Community Colleges, represent a fresh spin on an older strength-in-numbers distance-learning vision called the International Community College, which failed to get off the ground after four years of planning.

The distance-education landscape has changed drastically since that telecourse project. Both for-profits and an increasingly aggressive group of traditional four-year colleges now often recruit by purchasing “leads” on potential students that are parcelled out by online portals –...

By Mara Hvistendahl

Computer-security experts who are investigating the recent online attacks on Google and other companies have identified two institutions of higher education in China as suspected sources of the attacks, according to The New York Times. If those suspicions are confirmed, it would not be the first time one of those institutions has been linked to an international hacking incident: Seven years ago, a student at Shanghai Jiaotong University, claimed involvement in a 2001 hack that brought down the White House Web site.

While that student and others hacked independently, evidence suggests that administrators at Shanghai Jiaotong and its information-security school knew of the students’ activities. Administrators stood by as students formed hackers groups, organized hacking seminars, and exchanged tips on intrusion techniques.

But that doesn’t mean that the institution...

Five states have been awarded more than $300-million in grants to expand broadband access at their colleges. The money will be used in part to increase online education.

The U.S. Department of Commerce said on Thursday that the states are among those that will receive grants aimed at improving high-speed access. The five states whose awards specifically include higher education are:

Florida: The North Florida Broadband Authority will use $30.1-million grant, with an additional $9.2-million match by the applicant, to bring high-speed-broadband access to 14 north and central counties considered underserved. A 1,200-mile broadband network will link 300 colleges, libraries, and government agencies, among other entities.

Indiana: Zayo Bandwidth has received a $25.1-million grant, with an additional $10.7-million match by the applicant, to connect 21 Ivy Tech Community College campuses to...