Two recent graduates of Yale University's law school have settled their lawsuit against several people who posted derogatory comments about them anonymously on an online forum for graduate students.

The case, filed in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut, was a rare legal challenge to harassing speech made on gossip Web sites, which have proliferated in recent years and sparked controversy on many campuses.

At issue in the case was a string of comments made about the two law students on a Web forum called AutoAdmit, which describes itself as "the most prestigious law-school discussion board in the world." The comments about the two women, who filed the suit anonymously, included sexual remarks and fantasies about them, along with insults.

Mark A. Lemley, a lawyer and a professor at Stanford Law School who helped represent the women, would not discuss...

According to Gloucestershire College, in England, Facebook and other social-networking Web sites can do more than provide a platform for vacation photos, favorite quotes, and status updates; they can help reduce dropout rates, the BBC reports.

The media-curriculum manager at the college, Perry Perrott, says that with the advent of social media, students have been better at keeping in touch with faculty members, which has lead to a “significant improvement in retention.”

After seeing how popular social-networking sites were with students, Mr. Perry says the college decided to embrace the technology as a cost-free way to further engage the campus.

The BBC also points out that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says sites like...

An 18-year-old student at St. John’s University, in New York, has been arrested after allegedly posting messages on Facebook in which he threatened to kill people on the campus with a “Virginia Tech attack,” referring to the 2007 campus shootings that killed 32 people, law-enforcement officials said today.

Radames Santiago is being charged with making a terroristic threat, and if convicted he could face up to seven years in prison, according to a written statement by Richard A. Brown, the district attorney in Queens. The messages were posted on Monday and Tuesday.

Officials say Mr. Santiago posted messages on Facebook saying he was going “crazy” and wanted people to “watch CNN or something every day after” he...

Is your college Twittering to reach potential students?

They're not listening.

That, anyway, is one conclusion you could be tempted to draw from the headline on a new piece of research. “Teens Don't Tweet; Twitter's Growth Not Fueled By Youth,” the Nielsen Company reported in a finding picked up by Mashable.

The figures fit with what Tanya M. Joosten, a lecturer in the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's department of communication who tweeted about the new numbers, found in a survey of her own students.

“I think most of the students don’t even...

Jason Mittell, a professor at Middlebury College, has been on five faculty search committees. During each search, he found that prospective employees were very nervous about the committee’s lack of openness, and sometimes close to paranoia if they didn’t get a call back for weeks. He remembered feeling just as anxious when he was applying for teaching positions.

“The entire process seems so draped in mystery and obscurity,” says Mr. Mittell. “Anything that can be done to counter that is very valuable.”

When he became the head of a search committee for a new position at the college’s department of film and media culture, he tried to think of a way to seem more open and inviting.

He decided to advertise the faculty search on his blog, which gets approximately 150 visits each day, but then he started wondering: What...

The creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, famously started the popular social network from his dorm room at Harvard University. Ben Mezrich fills in some juicy details of that story (based on interviews and court documents but with imagined dialogue) in his new book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal. Mr. Mezrich argues that the student created the site out of frustration over getting rejected from an exclusive "final club" at Harvard, and that the social-networking site was his attempt to build a new kind of elite club online -- one that he could control. As Mr. Mezrich tells it, the student and his friend, Eduardo Saverin, essentially created the site as a way to pick up girls.

Mr. Mezrich's previous work includes Bringing Down the...

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...

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...

The University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde has no problem with her students using Wikipedia. In fact, she hopes others use the information her students have posted in their own research.

Law professors across the country have struggled with how they can use technology in their classes and teaching to their advantage.

Some professors have banned laptops in their classes, saying they can just be a distraction. In California, one group began teaching law courses in virtual reality using Second Life.

When Ms. VanderVelde was preparing to teach a class on employment law last semester, she was trying to think of a new way to teach the complex differences among states’ laws. She decided to divide the states up and give a few to each student to research extensively, and to post their...

Facebook and Wikipedia are just the beginning. The real power of social networks will be showcased by projects that unite far-flung participants to help track disease outbreaks, revolutionize neighborhood-watch programs, encourage energy conservation, and serve other civic and community goals, according to a group of researchers calling for greater government and university investment in social networking.

More than a dozen researchers met at the University of Maryland at College Park last week to draft a white paper calling for the creation of “a National Initiative for Social Participation.” They argue that computer-science programs at universities and federal agencies need to move faster to support research into social-networking technology, which they see as the next frontier of innovation.

Not everyone in higher education sees Wikipedia as a...