And the No. 1 challenge for college IT departments is … “funding.”

While that may come as no surprise to those working in the field, a list of the top-10 IT issues in higher education was released this week by Educause, the higher-education technology group, reaffirming what many already suspected. The 10th annual report blames “diving endowments, hiring freezes, and budget cuts” for insufficient money allocated to IT departments nationwide, taking the top spot on the list from security, which dropped to third. But the two seem to be connected -- the report blames small IT budgets for many security problems.

Instead of only pointing out the flaws they found at the 554 colleges and universities that responded to their survey, Educause also offers advice and resources for all of the problems that made the list.

'Crowdsourcing,' the notion of using the wisdom of the crowd for sites like Wikipedia, could be making its way into academe as a grading method that holds students more accountable.

A professor at Duke University plans to test just that this fall, when she leaves the evaluation of class assignments up to her students, using crowdsourcing to make students responsible for grading each other.

Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says.

"You've got this real mismatch between the kind of participatory learning that’s happening online and outside of the classroom,...

When it comes to rivalries, colleges and universities are up for the challenge. In football, there’s Georgia Tech vs. Clemson and on the basketball court, it’s North Carolina against Duke. And the latest competition among universities is between Texas A&M University and Louisiana State University.

Well, at least on Facebook.

In recent weeks, the two institutions have vied to score the most fans on their official Facebook pages. As of Thursday, the scoreboard has Texas’ Aggies besting Louisiana’s Tigers by just over 800 fans on the social-networking site. And Texas sure is rubbing it in.

In a news release posted online today, Texas A&M said that since its last announcement 10 days ago, the university system gained more than 16,000 new fans on its Facebook profile, compared with a meager 4,000 added by Louisiana State University, the former reigning champions.

“Being the No. 1 university...

By this fall, Taylor Vogt could be connecting to thousands of IBM professionals with just a few clicks through his Facebook page.

Through a Facebook application, which IBM plans to offer in a pilot program in the United States this fall, students like Mr. Vogt, a sophomore at Pace University,  can find mentors to give them practical or career advice, or oversee student projects, said Tim Willeford, a spokesman for IBM.

“We have existing mentorship programs within IBM, so it’s a natural extension that we’re trying to connect experts of multiple disciplines to university students,” Mr. Willeford said. “It’s one of the next steps in education.”

Students would log in to an application that would connect them to IBM experts with similar interests, skills, or career goals. Together they could contribute to message boards, create groups, or develop independent projects. Similar mentor programs...

How can we track how happy we are? Just look at blogs and song lyrics, two professors say.

Peter S. Dodds and Christopher M. Danforth, a mathematician and a computer scientist from the University of Vermont, downloaded more than 230,000 songs composed since 1960, along with 2.3 million blog items posted to WeFeelFine.org since August 2005, and State of the Union addresses. Using a nine-point "happiness" scale for words from the Affective Norms for English Words study, they looked for what sentences using the word "feel."

Their results are reported this week in the Journal of Happiness Studies in an article titled "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents."

And what the two scholars found certainly was interesting. The last U.S. presidential election produced the happiest day in four years. Among the least happy were the day of Michael...

The University of California at Berkeley is moving forward with its plan to create open-source software that would let colleges around the world easily post lectures from their most popular professors.

Originally called “Opencast,” the project – now called “Opencast Matterhorn” – received $1.5-million in grants from the Andrew W. Mellon and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations to begin developing software. The first version is scheduled to be released in July 2010, featuring a scheduling tool, software for uploading and encoding video and audio for distribution on iTunes and YouTube, an RSS generator, and a media player, says Adam Hochman, a product manager at Berkeley's Learning Systems Group.

Those interested in keeping up with the project can peruse wiki forums and sign up for e-mail lists on its Web site.

What if those dystopian science-fiction films depicting out-of-control killer robots foreshadow our future? An unusual meeting of artificial-intelligence researchers earlier this year focused on discussing the dangers of ever-smarter and more-pervasive computers, in the hope of avoiding such nightmare scenarios.

The two-day meeting took place quietly back in February, but The New York Times broke news of it over the weekend. Eighteen top researchers from college and business labs attended the invitation-only event, sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Tom Mitchell, professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, attended the meeting. He said it was a far-ranging discussion, including fears along the lines of the plot of the 1980s film Robocop, in which a gun-wielding machine turns against its creators. Mr....

Students will be able to take a lot more online courses at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee this fall. But they will pay more for the privilege, according to an article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The university will charge as much as $275 per course on top of regular tuition.

The university now is offering 90 more online classes than it did last fall, for a total of 366 online courses, the newspaper says. It also reported complaints from one student about the extra fee for an online class, because he did not feel he had the resources to wait a year for that class to be offered on campus again.

But the newspaper quoted the university's provost, Rita Cheng, as justifying the fees by saying that students were paying for the convenience of taking classes early. "I don't see that as a penalty," Ms. Cheng told the Journal-Sentinel. "I see it as an option students have if they...

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that part of one of Blackboard's software patents is invalid, reversing a decision that forced Blackboard rival Desire2Learn to pay $3.3-million in damages for infringement. Blackboard will now have to repay those damages, according to a disclosure filing by Blackboard.

In Monday's action, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit partly overturned a lower court's ruling that Desire2Learn was violating a Blackboard software patent. Both companies make software that colleges use to provide course materials to students, run online discussions, and track grades.

Since the lower coart ruled, Blackboard has won other, similar patents that are not affected by Monday's ruling and remain vaild. Matthew Small, Blackboard's chief business officer, said that he was "obviously disappointed" by the decision and that the company planned to appeal...

Charles R. Nesson, a law professor at Harvard University, knew he was going to have a rough day before he got dressed to go to court.

Mr. Nesson is representing Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student, who is being sued by Sony BMG Music Entertainment for up to $4.5-million for illegally downloading music. Mr. Nesson had planned to argue in front of a jury that the 30 songs his client had downloaded would fall under “fair use,” since Mr. Tenenbaum downloaded them for personal use.

Although the Recording Industry Association of America had asked a judge to rule as to whether Mr. Nesson could use “fair use” as a defense two weeks ago, the judge waited until hours before the trial to make her decision, which was in the recording industry’s favor.

“He proposes a fair-use defense so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created,” U.S. District Judge...