DJ’s at Augustana College’s student-run radio station won’t be spinning over the airwaves much longer.

The college announced this week it will move its station, KAUR 89.1 FM, to an online-only format. KAUR, which now reaches listeners up to 60 miles away from its station in Sioux Falls, S.D., was founded in 1972.

Bob Preloger, the college’s vice president for marketing and communications, said the decision was not a financial one, and that the college has considered the move for at least three years.

“It’s become obvious to us that our students are not listening to the radio station,” he said, referring to the results of a recent campus survey. “Listenership on the radio ranked among the lowest forms of communication on campus.”

Tom Prochazka, the...

Don’t confuse the college with the pornography Web site.

National American University, which has 16 campuses across the United States and also offers online courses, is claiming that the operators of pornography sites named Fast Times at NAU and Naughty American University have been illegally using that name and the acronym NAU since 2003, the Associated Press reported.

According to the news agency, the lawsuit claims that the pornography site, operated by La Touraine Inc., is “nearly identical in sight, sound, and commercial impression” to the university’s.

The university is looking for a judge to prevent further use of the trademark, and for monetary damages.

A man at La Touraine who was contacted by the Associated Press on Thursday declined to...

Just a few months after the Recording Industry Association of America began offering a curriculum for teaching copyright law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a curriculum of its own.

The foundation’s program, “Teaching Copyright,” includes a Web site and five 60-minute lessons that the foundation hopes will give students what it calls “the real story” about their rights when it comes to downloading movies, music, and other media from the Internet.

Tracy Mitrano, who is director of IT policy at Cornell University and also director of the university’s computer-policy and law program, says it’s important to remember that both organizations have their own points of view and motivations.

Colorado State University’s new Global Campus online-education venture laid off more than 25 percent of its operation in recent months as the start-up failed to bring in money at the pace officials had expected, according to the program’s leader.

The reduction of staff and faculty members took place over three months ending in February, a period that followed the abrupt departure of Larry E. Penley, who was chancellor of the Colorado State system and president of the Fort Collins campus. Hunt Lambert, the new chief executive of the Global Campus since March, insists the effort is now on track.

But the rocky start has raised some eyebrows in Colorado higher-education circles. And it marks the latest in a series of struggles at public online-education...

Last week Twitter removed an account claiming to be written by the president of the University of Texas at Austin, William C. Powers Jr., which had actually been written by editors of Texas Travesty, a student-run humor magazine at the university.

“I think it’s game over,” said Ross Luippold, the magazine’s editor in chief and a senior at the university, in an interview Thursday. “It was pretty popular — it actually had more followers than the student government’s” Twitter feed, he said. He said he received an e-mail message from Twitter notifying him that the account would be removed unless he could quickly send proof that he was Mr. Powers (which he’s not).

University administrators had contacted Twitter weeks ago asking it to remove the account, which it did just hours after The Chronicle

As gifts to colleges are beginning to dwindle every penny that can be collected counts.

That’s the belief behind GoodSearch and its sister site, GoodShop, founded by real-life siblings JJ and Ken Ramberg. The sites, powered by Yahoo, will donate money to nonprofit organizations, including colleges, sororities, schools, sports teams, and charities, each time consumers search or shop. More than 80,000 organizations are listed on the GoodSearch site, and users can nominate new ones.

Both sites track and direct their advertising revenue based on the number of searches and purchases made on behalf of each organization. From GoodSearch, users can...

Last week the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the impact of Blackboard’s purchase of rival Angel Learning on competition in the course-management market.

Blackboard filed a report Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, disclosing that the investigation is underway. “On Friday, May 22, 2009, the Company received a voluntary request for information from the U.S. Department of Justice relating to the Acquisition and its related impact on competition under applicable antitrust law,” said the filing, signed by Matthew Small, Blackboard’s chief legal officer.

Mr. Small issued a statement today arguing that the purchase of Angel Learning “was...

Some students at Bryant & Stratton College will have a short commute to their graduation ceremony: All they need to do is turn on their home computers.

On June 10, approximately 40 students in the institution’s online-degree program will sign on to Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world, where they will watch computer simulations of the college’s vice president and a student speaker address them before their names, degrees, and honors are announced.

While several colleges have experimented with Second Life for college tours, debate tournaments, and more, Bryant & Stratton College claims it is the first to hold a commencement in the virtual world. It will also hold traditional...

Massachusetts State Police returned several computers, cell phones, iPods, and electronic storage devices to a recent Boston College graduate after a judge invalidated a search warrant that had allowed police to seize the items from him two months ago.

Boston College police officers, with the help of state law-enforcement officials, searched the dormitory room of Riccardo

Professors are beginning to use Twitter at academic conferences to share proceedings with absent colleagues and to create an online “backchannel” for attendees, but the tool can also be distracting and detract from face-to-face communication at events.

Those were the basic findings of a survey of academics at five recent conferences, in research presented this month at the annual EduMedia Conference in Salzburg, Austria. The paper is titled “How People Are Using Twitter During Conferences.”

Though the findings may not surprise anyone who’s seen Twitter in action at recent scholarly events, the paper does provide a good overview and looks at the...