At University of Florida sporting events, you can cheer all you want, but don’t even think about tweeting.

This month the Southeastern Conference, an organization of 12 top-ranked collegiate sports programs, notified its members that it was updating its social-media policy, effectively banning fans from taking video, photos, or updating Facebook or Twitter accounts during games.

But as the St. Petersburg Times points out, the conference is not changing the rules to get its fans to pay more attention to the action, instead of their phones. At the end of the day, it’s all about money.

"A conference spokesman said this policy was meant to try to keep as many eyeballs as possible on ESPN and...

Watch The Chronicle’s video coverage of the Educause 2007 technology meeting. College officials talk about their tech challenges, some corporate leaders describe company-college interactions, a reporter gives a guided tour of the massive—and often silly—exhibit hall, a college CIO talks plain English about hi-tech, and there’s a

Dwight Fischer, chief information officer at Plymouth State University, stopped at the Chronicle booth at last week’s Educause meeting to talk about the increasing demands on campus technologists and the stresses they deal with. The Tech Therapists felt his pain.

In the coming weeks, you’ll hear presidents, CIOs, and other influential people on Tech Therapy. Jan Fox, the CIO at Marshall University, will talk with the Tech Therapists about campus security. Robert Cernock, from Central Connecticut State University, will talk about getting presidents and provosts into the conversation about technology.

And, of course, Cary Sherman of the Recording Industry Association of America will be on the show soon.

If you want to be on the show, or if you want to ask a question, write us at

Seattle — Communication technologies generally improve over time. Computers are faster and hold more data than ever before, cellphones that were once the size of bricks are now razor-thin, and new software features emerge seemingly every day. But computer security continues to get worse — meaning there are more serious hacker attacks than ever — argued Bruce Schneier, a computer-security expert and author of the popular blog Schneier on Security, at the closing keynote speech of the Educause 2007 conference on higher-education technology.

The problem is complexity. All those new features are the indirect cause of security bugs. “As systems get more complex, they get less secure,” Mr. Schneier said. “The Internet is the most complex machine mankind has ever built.”

Seattle — Anyone can add to Wikipedia, the popular online encylopedia, but whether a submission survives is determined entirely by its global community of users — and apparently those users are tougher graders than college professors.

That’s what a few students found out in a course taught last year by Martha Groom, an associate professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington at Bothell. She required all of the 34 students in the course to write an article for their final class project and submit it to Wikipedia. By the end of the term, all of the papers had met her standards — in fact, she said the papers were generally the best she had ever had, since students worked harder knowing their work would be seen by a wide audience. But one of the papers was rejected almost immediately by Wikipedians, and four...

If you want a hint of how serious the U.S. Air Force is about security, just consider its requirements for passwords: They are 15 characters, with at least two uppercase, two lowercase, two numbers, and two special symbols, and they cannot form any recognizable words or follow any keyboard patterns. Oh, yeah — and computer users must change them every couple of months.

Two technologists at the U.S. Air Force Academy used the Air Force password as an example of how burdensome security can be. Larry Bryant, the academy’s director of academic computing, and Richard Mock, its chief information officer, discussed “academic freedom versus network security” at Educause 2007. The main question of the session was “Can you have too much security?” The answer, it seems, is yes.

Mr. Bryant and Mr. Mock detailed some of the struggles they...

Seattle—Colleges now collect a wealth of data on their students. And within that data lies a way to keep students from failing a class by finding early signs of trouble, says John P. Campbel, associate vice-president of teaching and learning technologies at Purdue University.

At a session at the Educause technology meeting here, Mr. Campbell noted that course-management systems now track student participation in assignments.

He looked at 27,276 Purdue students enrolled in 597 courses. By putting together this engagement data with their GPA’s and scores on standardized tests, Campbell developed a model that successfully predicted students who were heading for a grade of C or lower 66 percent of the time.

In a freshman biology class, students who fit the failing profiles were first sent e-mail messages or told by the instructor about study sessions and...

Seattle—“Should our university even be in the e-mail business?” Wendy Woodward King found herself asking last year. Her answer, the director of technology support services at Northwestern University told a session at the Educause technology meeting, was no. And that’s why Northwestern students get their e-mail “@u.northwestern.edu” which is hosted, free of charge, by Google Apps Education Edition.

Bryant University, in Rhode Island, also decided to outsource, but went with another free service, Microsoft’s Windows Live@edu. And in both cases, a prime driver behind the decision was that students were already using one of these services when they came to campus.

At Northwestern, Ms. Woodward King found, “90 percent of our students already had Google’s Gmail. When students forwarded their campus e-mail to a non-campus...

Seattle—On Thursday, a panel of members of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education spoke to attendees of the 2007 Educause conference about the Spellings Report and how technology might improve American higher education.

Mara Liasson, a reporter for National Public Radio, interviewed Robert Mendenhall, the president of the Western Governors University; Charlene Nunley, president emerita of Montgomery College; and David Ward, the president of the American Council on Education.

The group discussed aspects of the Spellings Report, and questions about technology and the future of education were sprinkled into the talk. The panelists said that technology would play a vital role in helping to provide access to higher education, especially among underserved communities.

The panel also said that technology and campus technologists should...

Seattle—There’s discontent about a disconnect between college and the school years that come before it. The complaints are being voiced frequently at the Educause 2007 meeting, and major companies are trying to throw technology in the gap.

“Students are not arriving at college prepared, academically,” says Peter Segall, a vice president for higher education and operations at Blackboard, the course-management software company. So Blackboard just announced a K-through-20 initiative. The company plans to spend $1-million dollars to connect local school districts to college campuses. The general idea is to use Blackboard software as a bridge, letting high-school students participate at some level in college courses, and probably have their performance assessed. Crossing the bridge in the other direction, colleges can provide instructional resources...