A new Web project out of Indiana University is separating the truth from the "truthy" in political Tweets online.

The project—named "Truthy," after Stephen Colbert's descriptor for misinformation dressed up as fact—mines Twitter to analyze patterns in political discussions and makes the information available online. The software allows visitors to take a closer look at Twitter trends to spot data manipulation by tech-savvy special-interest groups.

"We're trying to study how information propagates online through social networks, blogging, and social media," said Filippo Menczer, associate professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana, who is leading the research. Truthy, he said, attempts to answer the question, "Can we put together our understanding of complex social networks and crowdsourcing to automatically detect the spread of misinformation?"

Through the site's...

The City University of New York is turning to social networking to help foster academic discussion and camaraderie across its 23 campuses with its new Academic Commons site.

The CUNY-only network allows faculty, graduate students, and staff to write and share blogs, join subject groups, and participate in academic discussions. "We're trying to create a kind of online virtual community that is open and organic in its nature," said Academic Commons director Matthew Gold.

Registered members of Academic Commons get their own publicly accessible profile, where they can post information about themselves and link up with friends online. The site also allows users to create and join groups, where they can post to a common message board, share files, and collaborate on wikis. Groups range from open-source publishing and graduate admissions to educational games and New York pizza joints. "It...

SunGard and Blackboard have largely kept out of each other's turf, with Blackboard dominating the market for course-management systems and SunGard focusing on administrative software for student records and other tasks.

Now SunGard is crossing that line. For the first time, the administrative software company will directly sell a course-management system to colleges and universities.

SunGard is making the play through a deal with rSmart, a for-profit company that packages, supports, and hosts freely available software that has been produced through a collaborative "open source" process. Under the partnership, SunGard will sell subscriptions to rSmart's version of Sakai, an open-source course-management system developed by universities.

The arrangement puts SunGard's muscle behind that project at a time when a growing number of colleges are considering open-source systems. SunGard...

Books take up space. That's a problem for any librarian tasked with finding room on overcrowded shelves. It's also a problem for a book-loving scholar who lives in a small New York City apartment with a toddler and more than 3,000 books. Under those conditions, something's got to give. Chances are good it won't be the toddler.

Alexander Halavais, an associate professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, found a partial solution to his city dweller's no-space-for-books dilemma: Slice and scan. A digital file takes up a lot less room than a codex book does.

In a post on his blog, A Thaumaturgical Compendium, Mr. Halavais described what he had done to some 800 of his books so far: "First I cut the boards off, and then slice the bindings. I have tried a table saw, but a cheap stack cutter works better. Then I feed [the pages] into my little page-fed scanner, OCR them (imperfectly) ...

Just when you thought college gossip sites like JuicyCampus had disappeared, more college students are posting salacious, unsubstantiated gossip about their peers on a similar Web site called CollegeACB. (The initials stand for Anonymous Confession Board.) Colleges are again pondering two questions: whether they should ban the site, and whether doing so is a freedom-of-speech violation.

Peter Frank, CollegeACB’s creator and a Wesleyan University student, told The Chronicle in an e-mail that the site got more than 10 million page views from 250,000 unique users so far in September. Viewership has shot up fivefold since JuicyCampus shut down 19 months ago, according to figures Mr. Frank gave to the Wesleyan student newspaper.

That kind of heavy student use was too much for Millsaps College.

Millsaps blocked access to the site a month ago after student leaders suggested a review of the...

University librarians are turning to their patrons for ideas on how to improve library services.

This fall, the new Harvard University Library Lab invited students and faculty and staff members to help enhance the facility's offerings by proposing projects of their own. The lab will pool the proposals—submitted through an online portal—for review by a board of library officials. Once selections are made, the lab will develop the most promising projects with grant money from Arcadia, a London-based charitable fund to protect endangered natural and cultural resources, and with technical support from computer programmers and the library staff.

"The main goal has been to get some grassroots ideas generated and get people excited about contributing to their own efforts," said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science and faculty director of the Office for Scholarly Communication,...

The former information-technology director at Valley Forge Christian College in Pennsylvania was sentenced to two years probation in federal court Wednesday after defrauding the college. He got the institution to purchase computer equipment at artificially high prices and in return received kickbacks from the equipment vendor.

The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported that Craig Stirling had conspired with officials of Intellacom Inc. for two and a half years. Mr. Stirling convinced the college to buy Intellacom equipment at an inflated price. The company would then pay the IT chief a portion of the inflated price, according to The Hazleton Standard-Speaker. Mr. Stirling pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud in May.

U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo ordered Mr. Stirling to pay back the college $27,202 to cover the uneccesary costs and serve the first six months of his sentence on ...

If you're serious about thoroughbred racing, you know the Daily Racing Form, the newspaper that has been "America's turf authority" since 1894. With the help of the library staff at the University of Kentucky, 132,000 pages of the paper—some 531,000 articles—have been digitized and posted online. The articles date from the 1890s, when the paper was founded, up through the 1990s. The selection represents each decade's racing highlights, including Triple Crown coverage and reports on the careers of Seabiscuit, Secretariat, and the other great horses of the past hundred years.

The Daily Racing Form archive is a recent addition to the Kentuckiana Digital Library, a continuing project that provides access to digital archives of material particular to the state. "Nothing says Kentucky like thoroughbred racing, unless it's bourbon," says Mary Molinaro, associate dean for library...

Nothing works.

That's the disheartening suggestion of a new Kennesaw State University study about retention strategies in online education, soon to be published in the International Journal of Management in Education.

Students drop out of online classes at rates 15 percent to 20 percent higher than traditional ones, according to earlier research cited in the study. Kennesaw State saw that problem reflected in its own classes, so a group of the university's professors set up a study to find the best strategies that might improve retention.

Using undergraduates in a business course as their test subjects, the professors experimented with lots of techniques that previous research had suggested could help. For example, they called students at home. They quizzed them on the syllabus. They made more of an effort to steer them through the virtual classroom. They pushed them to develop personal ...

Everybody agrees that communication outlets like Facebook, instant messaging, and texting are creating new rules for dating. But people can't seem to reach a consensus on exactly what the new rules are, says Ilana Gershon, an assistant professor of communication and culture at Indiana University at Bloomington who studied student dating for her new book, "The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media."

For example, should the dumper or the dumpee be the first to break the news on Facebook that it’s over? One of Ms. Gershon’s students insisted the latter, and that’s what all her sorority sisters thought, too. But the "dumpee first" rule clearly isn't universal: Another student discovered her boyfriend had not only broken up with her but was in a new relationship—all through her Facebook news feed.

"I was interested in seeing how people used technology designed for connection" in...