Paras Kaul wants you to listen to her brainwaves.

Ms. Kaul, director of Web communications at George Mason University, is better known as the “BrainWave Chick.” With electrodes and digital technology, she has devised increasingly sophisticated ways to perform the music of her mind. (It’s got an eerie, ethereal sound, something like Brian Eno’s ambient compositions.)

To project her brainwaves, Ms. Kaul wears a headband that presses three electrodes against her brain’s frontal lobe. A Bluetooth adapter transmits data to a laptop, where software converts brainwaves to a Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and synthesizers play it.

“All I have to...

Separate surveys conducted recently on two college campuses returned mixed signals on the sorts of capabilities students desire from their mobile devices.

One survey, conducted by Michael Hanley, an assistant professor of journalism at Ball State University, found that 27 percent of respondents on his campus reported owning a smartphone—a mobile device with advanced capabilities, like an iPhone or BlackBerry—as opposed to what nationwide surveys have determined to be the national rate for working adults (19 percent). That study used a voluntary-response sample of 314 Ball State students.

Another survey, orchestrated by Chuck Martin of the University of New Hampshire’s school of business and economics, polled 707 students across the university’s six colleges about how they use their mobile devices and what new features they think would...

The University of Illinois Global Campus, a multimillion-dollar distance-learning project, is up and running. For its March-April 2009 term, it has enrolled 366 students.

Getting to this point, though, has looked a little like the dot-com start-up bubble of the late 1990s. Hundreds of Internet-related companies were launched with overly ambitious goals, only to later face cutbacks and other struggles to stay alive. Most crashed anyway. Some observers now say the Global Campus must try to avoid the same fate of churning through a large initial investment while attracting too few customers.

For more, check out the complete article from this week’s Chronicle.

Computer science is taking on a public-service bent at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where students and faculty in a new program are using code to combat societal problems like homelessness and the spread of HIV.

The program, dubbed “Computing for Good,” or “C4G” for short, spun out of a course taught last spring by Santosh Vempala, a computer-science professor at Georgia Tech, and two other faculty members. Students in the class, which saw its enrollment jump to 50 this fall from 17 last spring, developed mobile kiosks for recording war-crimes testimony in Liberia and built a Web-based monitoring system for blood supplies that the World Health Organization is considering deploying worldwide. Other projects included developing computerized systems for Atlanta homeless shelters trying...

More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube, and this week the popular video service unveiled a new section that brings together all of that campus content in one area.

It had been difficult to find college lectures on YouTube, since they are generally far less popular than the site’s humorous and outrageous clips, and so they do not show up in lists of the most viewed videos on the site. Although YouTube has long had an education category, it relies on users who post videos to decide whether to categorize their videos as educational, and as a result the definition of education is very broad. The new YouTube EDU page includes only material submitted by colleges and universities.

Spencer Crooks, a spokesman for YouTube, said in a statement that the site now...

More than 41,000 Spanish-language songs that go back to the early 1900s were placed online this week by the Chicano Studies Center, a research unit at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The recordings are from the Arhoolie Foundation’s Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, the Los Angeles Times reported. It is the largest repository of Mexican and Mexican-American vernacular recordings in existence. The early works, the archives say, are “the foundation for Latino music today, since the singers and musicians who made these records helped popularize and propagate a number of traditions, including regional Mexican, Tejano, Chicano, and Mexican-American music.”

If you...

Students nonplussed by the absence of certain friends from their Facebook news feeds in the last month may have the church calendar to blame. During the season of Lent—a 40-day Christian holiday during which celebrants traditionally abstain from selected indulgences as a gesture of piety—some students at Texas Tech and elsewhere have reportedly sworn off social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The Lenten season began in late February and ends on Easter, which is April 12. The pope has

Blackboard unveiled a free application for the iPhone today to let students check their grades and get updates about their courses at colleges that use the company’s course-management software.

The application, called Blackboard Learn for Apple iPhone, can be found in Apple’s iPhone App Store. Blackboard designed it so it will immediately work with any versions of its software made since 2006. Colleges’ administrators can choose to turn off their Blackboard server’s compatibility with the service if they have concerns about security or other issues.

Students can’t take tests or dig into course content using the iPhone application — the focus of the system is to notify users of when new material is ready for them in the full Web-based version of Blackboard.

The application may have extracurricular uses as well...

A plan to connect public schools, universities, and business in Idaho with a high-speed broadband network may be delayed after the State Legislature cut the project’s seed money out of its annual budget, the Associated Press is reporting.

The Department of Administration had requested $3-million from the state for the 2010 fiscal year—a sum it hoped to more than triple with federal matching funds and private foundation money—to increase broadband access across the state. This would involve building an “Idaho Education Network”—similar to one in neighboring Utah—that would allow learning institutions to swap interactive videos, among other things.

Google is handing out $4,500 stipends to a select group of college students who will spend this summer contributing to open-source projects, including ones that compete with Google’s own software.

It’s part of the company’s “Summer of Code,” now in its fifth year. Among the 150 open-source projects that Google has included in the program is NetSurf, a Web browser led by a team in England, which is, at least theoretically, competing with Google’s own browser, Chrome.

“We’re really not so worried about competition,” said Leslie Hawthorn, program manager for open source at Google, in an interview. “Competition is par for the course and healthy in open source.”

Google is offering fewer stipends this year than last year — 1,000 this year...