People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them. That's the idea behind Sorin Matei's project, Ubimark, which embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed.

So far there's just one book available in English, Around the World in 80 Days, with the bar-like codes. (See a YouTube demo here.) A collection of scholarly essays in Romanian, Mr. Matei's native language, will be available soon. Mr. Matei, an associate professor of communication at Purdue University, says that the initial book is just "an exercise in pushing the envelope as far as we can," and that scholarly publications will be available in the future with the embedded feature. 

When a reader of the book photographs a code accompanying a chapter, map, or illustration, a Web browser can use that image to link to a corresponding Web site. A chapter...

Put a glide in your stride, a dip in your hip, and come on down to Funk University.

Bootsy Collins, a legendary bassist who played for James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic, is starting an online program for bass players. Professor Bootsy's fledgling funkateers will commence their schooling July 1.

"Wow, I just can't keep all this funk to myself," Bootsy explains in a video laying out his vision for the school.

According to SoulTracks, that vision got started with one message to the 370,000 people who follow Bootsy's Twitter account: "If You Build It, They Will Funk."

And funk they did.

Announcements of new online programs rarely get any attention, but Bootsy's e-learning debut is going viral. Wired Campus tried to grab a piece of the four-string funk for Chronicle readers. Unfortunately, the P-Master of the Universe was unavailable for an interview.

Ever since Mark Gasson got a virus, his cellphone won't work, and he can't unlock the door to his building on campus. But those are the kind of symptoms humans can expect when they get infected with computer viruses. 

Mr. Gasson, a research fellow at the University of Reading, in England, has a radio-frequency identification chip implanted in his hand. It's the kind of computer chip that is sometimes used to track animals, but Mr. Gasson uses it to activate his cellphone and unlock doors. He also uses it for research that explores the potential risks of implanted devices, which he expects will become more common in humans. When he infects the chip with a virus, he can then transmit that virus to another computer.

Mr. Gasson stresses that the virus in his chip is spreading from implanted technology to a computer, not from a human being to a computer. Still, he says we should consider...

"Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity," wrote Max Weber.

That may be so. But some of Weber's intellectual grandchildren—i.e., the leaders of the American Sociological Association—believe that it also helps if instructors bring to their lecture halls a well-designed syllabus and a decent idea of how to engage students with the material.

To promote those smaller virtues, the association has just unveiled Trails, a digital repository where sociologists can post syllabi, lesson plans, bibliographies, and other teaching resources. The site already holds more than 2,700 items, and its doors are open for new submissions.

Not every submission will be automatically archived. Materials will be assessed by peer-review committees for their fidelity to a set of principles of high-quality teaching that have been identified by the...

Drawing a huge following on Twitter does not necessarily mean that your tweets will have much influence. It turns out that some noncelebrities with meager followings have the greatest ability to start discussions and spread ideas.

That was the conclusion of a team of researchers who analyzed some two billion public Twitter messages to see which users had the most influence, measured by the number of times the tweeters were mentioned by others or their messages were forwarded to others (or "retweeted," in the language of Twitter use). The scholars presented a paper on their findings Monday at a conference on "Weblogs and Social Media" organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

"Having a million follows may not be everything in terms of influence," said Meeyoung Cha, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, in the presentation, held at...

Last week was a big one for Google fans in higher education. Google Wave opened its doors, and Google Voice now lets students get calls forwarded from their old numbers to their new phones.

Google made one more announcement last week—about a new course-scheduling system, CloudCourse—that could potentially have implications for higher education.  CloudCourse is integrated with Google Calendar and allows users to schedule classes, look up user profiles, and sync the service's data with internal university systems. CloudCourse was built entirely on Google's App Engine, which allows users to build and host Web apps. Google hopes that CloudCourse can serve as an example of how to use the App Engine.

One potential use for CloudCourse is to manage class rosters with tools that allow users to look at enrolled versus waitlisted students, mark student attendance, and change a student's...

Perry Samson, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, liked the concept of personal "clickers" in class, but he felt that they weren't dynamic enough for the kinds of questions he wanted to ask in his meteorology courses. So he created Web-based software that combine personal-response technology with other kinds of interactive tools that students can use on their laptops in classrooms.

Lecture Tools, the system Mr. Samson created, lets students use their computers during classes to pose anonymous questions, mark up lecture slides, and answer questions posed by the instructor in real time. For meteorology courses, students can answer questions by pinpointing a location on a weather map on their screens, and the answers all show up—anonymously—for everyone to see. He started using the system about five years ago, and now 30 other instructors at...

Students can get information about colleges from an endless number of sources. Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana hopes to cut through that clutter by essentially crowdsourcing its marketing.

In a new contest, the college is asking current or prospective students to upload videos on YouTube explaining why they deserve a scholarship. It promises up to $3,000—roughly a year's tuition—to the three people whose videos get the most views.

The strategy has helped positive messages about the college go viral "without us having to figure out how to crack this nut to get some message from us to go viral," says Jeff Fanter, vice president of communications and marketing at the 150,000-student statewide college.

But could Web-savvy students game the contest?

Asked about view-count fraud, Michael Wesch, a Kansas State University anthropologist who studies new media, directed Wired Campus to a...

Google Wave has switched from an invitation-only offering to one open to all interested users, the popular service announced Wednesday.

Google also announced a batch of special features and tweaks to Google Wave, which allows real-time communication online. Google introduced the project in May 2009 and put out a limited preview release in November. Some educational institutions have used the service as a way to do collaborative work more efficiently.

Gregory D'Alesandre, product manager at Google, said one of the biggest changes users are likely to notice is more user-friendliness, so that new users can adapt quickly to the service. Google Wave plans more changes meant to cater to new users in coming months, although Mr. D'Alesandre declined to give specifics.

Google Apps domain administrators at universities and businesses will now be able to enable Google Wave for all their users....

At the University of Florida, a Facebook application lets students be choosy when looking for tutors.

The application, Tutor Matching Service, lets students search for tutors by subject, class, or tutor name. They can see ratings and comments on tutors, when tutors are available, and how much they charge. Tutors can also post pictures and videos of themselves.

A little more than a year ago, the student-government president at the time created the application with Group Interactive Networks, a technology company, to supplement the university's on-campus tutoring center. Though the center offers free tutoring to students, it has limited hours, does not have tutors for every class, and offers no information on the quality of tutors.

More than 120 students have registered as tutors on the application, and when class is in session, 50 to 100 hours of tutoring are arranged through it each...