Sixty-nine percent of university research libraries plan to increase spending on e-books over the next two years, according to a recent study published by Primary Research Group Inc. This finding and others were based on a survey of 45 research libraries in countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan.

Clearly e-book technology has improved dramatically in a short period of time. Only a year-and-a-half-ago college librarians were saying that e-books were not ready for the campus environment.

The study shows that the larger the library the more interested it is in purchasing e-books. And it also shows that foreign libraries are more attracted to e-books, than libraries in the U.S.—Andrea L....

A group of tech-savvy professors are claiming punk music as inspiration for their approach to teaching. They call their approach Edupunk.

Punk rock was a rebellion against the clean, predictable sound of popular music and it also encouraged a do-it-yourself attitude. Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.

Jim Groom, an instructional-technology specialist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, coined the term, and this week on his blog he declared himself a poster boy for the movement. He says he is worried that Blackboard’s latest release, which attempts to incorporate the latest social-networking tools, will end up presenting a watered-down version of what pioneers of Web 2.0 technologies have done in their...

A new court ruling limiting a student’s speech on the Internet—though the student in question is in high school—may prove worrisome to college students and freedom-of-speech advocates.

The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that a Connecticut high-school student could be barred from running for student government after posting a blog entry calling a school official a “douchebag” and encouraging other students to write or call the official to annoy her, the Hartford Courant reports.

The court, in a decision on a pretrial motion, ruled that the post, on the site livejournal.com, violated the school policy that student-government representatives show “good citizenship.” The court also said the post created...

Some recent college graduates and a Stanford University doctoral candidate in social network theory—all of whom are remarkably ambitious—have created a free social-networking site for entrepreneurs. The site is called YouNoodle, and it is designed to connect people who are involved in inventions, university technology, and business competition.

Businesses featured in YouNoodle include those just getting off the ground and ones that have been up and running for a few years.

The Stanford doctoral candidate who is one of YouNoodle’s creators is Rebeca Hwang. According to the YouNoodle Web site, she is a chemistry and physics “Olympiad medalist” of Argentina, and was awarded a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

YouNoodle has been in beta since March 2007 at a...

Two out of three colleges are at least creating pilot projects of Internet telephone systems, but few have rolled out the technology campuswide, according to a survey released this month by the Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education.

Voice over Internet Protocol, as the technology is often called, uses computer networks to carry telephone calls. Most VoIP systems use handsets that look the same as traditional telephones, but they plug into an Ethernet jack instead of a telephone connection.

Sixty-two percent of the colleges surveyed said they plan to expand their VoIP networks within the next 18 months. The survey was conducted in April at a meeting of the group, which represents officials who handle voice communications on campuses.

Few of the officials surveyed cited security as a concern in this year’s...

Many academic librarians are disheartened by Microsoft’s recent decision to end its book scanning and digitizing project. (Read more in an article in today’s Chronicle) But Joseph J. Esposito, a business consultant whose clientele includes libraries, publishers, and software companies, said in an interview with The Chronicle this week that “nobody should lose sleep over this.”

“Digitization is going on everywhere,” he says. He notes that publishers are doing more to digitize their materials and that a new category of companies has emerged called “digital asset distributors” that disseminate content via the Web. LibreDigital and Ingram Digital Group are examples of such...

A researcher at Trinity College Dublin has software that lets users map the links between Wikipedia pages. His Web site is called “Six Degrees of Wikipedia,” modeled after the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Instead of the degrees being measured by presence in the same film, degrees are determined by articles that link to each other.

For example, how many clicks through Wikipedia does it take to get from “Gatorade” to “Genghis Khan”? Three: Start at “Gatorade,” then click to “Connecticut,” then “June 1,” then “Genghis Khan.”

Stephen Dolan, the researcher who created the software, has also used the code to determine which Wikipedia article is the “center” of...

What is the future of the Web? Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute plans to explore this issue when it launches a new academic program next month focused on the emerging academic discipline of “science of the Web.” The field examines the architectural underpinnings of the Web, its social aspects, and who controls the flow of information, among other issues. The university has titled its program: The Tetherless World Constellation.

The program will be publicized June 11 at Rensselaer Polytechnic where a panel of experts from academe and industry, including Timothy J. Berners-Lee—who is credited with having invented the Web—will discuss its future. Web users across the world will submit questions for discussion.—Andrea L. Foster

A group of seven technical universities in India have teamed up to create a free YouTube library of engineering courses. There are more than 50 courses online already—with all of the lectures delivered in English.

The Open Culture blog notes that the collection rivals that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which for years has been creating free collections of its course materials. “Suddenly MIT is not the only tech powerhouse getting into the business of providing free educational resources,” says the blog’s author Dan Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University’s continuing-studies program. The project is called the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning, and it is a joint effort of...

A Dundee University student has invented a touch-screen turntable that allows technologically-inclined DJs to spin, scratch, and mix digital music, all while mimicking the physicality of DJing on vinyl.

Check out the device in the video below.—Catherine Rampell

Final Product // ATTIGO TT from Scott Hobbs on Vimeo.