Ever wanted to see a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald's copy of the book 1984? Probably not (it looks remarkably like any other copy of the book), but if you ever do, the University of North Texas has made it easy with its new digital catalog of photos from the Dallas Police Department's investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

The Dallas Morning News reports that the university's Digital Projects Unit has put 404 photographs from the investigation on its Portal to Texas History Web site. All the photos had been available to the public on a...

Some professors don’t let students see their Facebook pages. Some accept students’ invitations but don’t initiate them.

Peter Juvinall insists students friend him.

The Illinois State University instructor decided the best way to connect with a bunch of freshman business students in a short 8 a.m. class was to conduct much of the course where they are anyway—on Facebook.

So, as he explained during last week’s Educause conference and in a subsequent interview, he uses Facebook as a course-management system by instructing students to “friend” his personal page on the first day of class.

On the scale of pushing the privacy boundary, it doesn't come close to the stuff some...

Carl Hartung was surprised by the cellphone reception in East Africa this summer. "We were working in villages miles from electricity or running water, but we still had cell coverage," wrote Mr. Hartung, a graduate student at the University of Washington, in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

That was good, because Mr. Hartung was in rural Kenya using cellphones to help test and counsel people about HIV. He and other university researchers have developed an application based on Google's open-source mobile operating system, Android, that turns phones into vital data-recording devices: They record locations in seconds using GPS, take video and audio of patients, let counselors and patients fill out questionnaires, scan bar codes that serve as patient identifiers, and then send all these data to a confidential medical-records center in seconds.

Other devices have...

Two universities say they won't order large numbers of Amazon Kindles until the company releases devices that are easier for blind students to use.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison and Syracuse University, which have both made Kindles available to their students in pilot programs recently, say they won't buy more devices until they're improved. Though most Kindles read text aloud, it's impossible for a blind person to navigate their basic menus because they aren't "voiced."

When Syracuse employees first heard that Kindles would have a read-aloud feature, "We thought, yay, this is going to be great" for disabled readers, said Eve Hill, senior vice president at the university's Burton Blatt Institute, which advocates for people with disabilities. But staffers soon realized the device's menu options were not spoken aloud. "If you're blind, you won't be able to...

November 11 is Armistice Day, which marks the cessation of Great War hostilities in 1918. (Here in the United States, of course, this is now Veterans Day.) In honor of the day and the dead, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, housed at the University of Oxford, chose today to unveil its Siegfried Sassoon Collection.

Although it contains photographs and other materials, the collection centers on manuscripts of Sassoon's poems, drawn from holdings at Oxford's Bodleian Library and at the University of Cambridge, the New York Public Library, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A draft of Sassoon's poem "Standing With the Dead" turns up in a June 19, 1918, letter to his friend Robert Nichols.

Meet the latest acronym in the world of digital humanities: Chain, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks. Born at a meeting at King's College, London, in late October, Chain brings together eight digital-technology undertakings, several based in Europe (e.g., Dariah, or Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and a few stateside (e.g., Project Bamboo).The idea behind Chain, the organizers said, is to overcome "the current fragmented environment where researchers operate in separate areas with often mutually incompatible technologies."

No more "working on the highways and byways and wearing, wearing a frown," as Sam Cooke would say. Chain's...

As mobile phones begin functioning more like minicomputers, they also take on more security risks.

That's why the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work toward developing safer mobile devices and telecommunication networks that serve such devices. The project's researchers hope to protect mobile devices from viruses and malware that can steal personal information.

“Since mobile phones typically lack security features found on desktop computers, such as antivirus software, we need to accept that the mobile devices will ultimately be successfully attacked," said Jonathon Giffin, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, in a news release. "Therefore our research focus is to develop effective attack-recovery strategies.”

First,...

Denver -- Plenty of colleges have a presence in Second Life. Pennsylvania State University is taking that a step further. Academic advisers at the university’s online campus are now required to be available for meetings with students in the virtual world every week, a Penn State official said during last week’s Educause conference here.

Students on the real campus get to chat with their advisers face to face. Now online students who never set foot there can do the “exact same thing,” says Shannon Ritter, social-networks adviser for the Penn State World Campus.

Almost the same thing, anyway. Second Life requires users to choose avatars, or graphical representations of themselves. So...

Denver — The face of evil, projected 20 feet tall on a screen behind Lawrence Lessig, belonged to Britney Spears.

The face of good belonged to composer John Philip Sousa.

Mr. Lessig, the Harvard Law School professor, was giving a keynote address at Educause 2009. He argued that intellectual property in education had been taken over by an exclusive-rights model represented by Ms. Spears, the pop diva. That model has pushed out another one based on community collaboration—represented by the composer of "Stars and Stripes Forever," who longed for music created by neighborhood singalongs.

The "ecology of education and science," Mr. Lessig said, is inherently collaborative, and it is being strangled by copyright-law principles based on exclusivity.

It is time to fight back, he told his audience, adding: "You geeks have to become...

Denver – Big East colleges may shine on the basketball court, but they’re getting stuffed by the competition when it comes to the Web-accessibility battle.

The Big East posted the most consistent problems in a new survey of how good a job universities are doing in making their Web sites accessible to people with disabilities. The survey of 80 universities, presented at the Educause conference here this week, pitted five athletics conferences against one another in an attempt to draw attention to the issue.

The worst of the worst are Villanova University, Baylor University, and Providence College, says the study by Jon Gunderson, coordinator of assistive communication and information technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The study skewered those institutions and 13 others on a list called “Schools Who Need New...