For Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies Program, who is emerging as a well-known public intellectual on topics of media and society, the medium is not the message. He is far less interested in the specific medium than he is in how people interact with the popular culture they consume. Which is lucky for me, since I recently managed to accidentally break a collector’s item in his personal media collection.

I got to know Mr. Jenkins while I was researching a profile of the scholar for The Chronicle. He’s a housemaster in a dormitory at MIT, which means that he and his wife, Cynthia, live in a spacious suite right on the campus.

Their living room is packed with media, with shelves full of books, video games,...

When asked about the most powerful trend affecting community colleges, Mark David Milliron didn’t hesitate yesterday. “The biggest trend is that we’re really swimming in a world of learning swirl,” Milliron, a technology specialist and president of Catalyze Learning International, told a crowd on the last day of The Chronicle‘s technology conference in Tampa.

It sounded dizzying. And Milliron meant it that way. Community colleges are taking in students from three generations at once, each one with a different approach to technology and learning. Colleges have to account for all of them, as well as different degrees of tolerance for new technology among faculty and staff.

The three generations are baby boomers, Generation X, and the newest one, the so-called “Net Gen.” Baby boomers grew up with technology such as the telephone...

Tampa, Fla. – College leaders are struggling to find the best ways to set up campus emergency-notification systems. Which of the dozens of service providers best fits the campus’s needs? How do you get students to sign up? Who should have access to the send button?

Technology officials, provosts, and presidents shared their experiences with emergency-notification tools on Tuesday during the closing session of The Chronicle’s Technology Forum. A recent string of campus shootings, including those at Virginia Tech last spring, and weather calamities, like Hurricane Katrina, have led campus officials to look for ways to blast out information to students, faculty, and staff members during a crisis.

Michael L. Dame, director of university Web communications of Virginia Tech, says 54...

Tampa, Fla. — No one envied Roderick J. McDavis’s uncomfortable position. Mr. McDavis got on stage to describe how he and his university had responded to a series of network-security breaches, which made headlines across the country in 2006.

“I know that the majority of you are saying I’m glad it’s him up there and not me,” Mr. McDavis told the crowd at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum today.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted the university in late April 2006 to tell administrators that their networks had been hacked. The FBI found out about the breach, Mr. McDavis said, because undercover agents on chat rooms had seen hackers bragging about breaking into Ohio University’s systems.

A series of breaches followed, which could have led to exposure of thousands of private alumni data...

Tampa, Fla. — It seems like every time Beth Cate walks into a classroom to teach at Indiana University, she finds a thumb drive that has been accidentally left behind by an absent-minded colleague. She wonders whether there might be any private student data on that drive — like graded papers — which could mean an illegal leak of personal student information by the university.

Keeping student data on physical devices like those USB drives is one of the newest legal land mines for campus administrators, said Ms. Cate, who is the university’s associate general counsel, during a panel at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum here. “I really worry about mobile devices,” she said.

Tracy Mitrano, director of information-technology policy and of computer policy and law at Cornell University, agreed that physical security of...

Tampa, Fla. — When Henry Jenkins was growing up, he wanted to be an expert in many things. His models? The Disney cartoon duck Ludwig von Drake (who bragged in his signature song about knowing everything about science and art), and the professor from Gilligan’s Island on TV. “He knew everything,” Mr. Jenkins told a luncheon crowd at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum in Tampa, Fla., “except how to get off the island.”

Mr. Jenkins, director of the comparative media-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did have a weightier theme than cartoon birds and televised castaways. How does technology enable a professor to project expertise beyond the private classroom and into a public space, he asked?

His ideas on this are complex, but one could...

Tampa, Fla. — Campus officials don’t want to be cops. They made that point loud and clear today in Tampa, Fla., in a panel discussion about the digital piracy of music and videos by college students. But a law professor and a representative of the movie industry told them that, in certain circumstances, colleges didn’t have much choice.

Stewart McLaurin, executive vice president for education affairs at the Motion Picture Association of America, seeks education before enforcement. College students are some of the movie industy’s best customers, he said, and his group doesn’t want to sue them. But the multibillion-dollar industry has to protect itself from theft, he went on. He would prefer to do that by educating students that getting a copy of a movie free, with no compensation to the copyright owners, is wrong.

No one disagreed. But...

Tampa, Fla. — The age of technology hype in higher education might be over, and that’s a good thing. That was one theme of the opening session of The Chronicle’s Technology Forum, taking place here this week.

For many years, technology at colleges was in a Cro-Magnon period, said Mark David Milliron, president of Catalyze Learning International. Any decision about technology was simply greeted with a cave-man-like grunt of “Technology, good!”

“People have realized now it’s a lot more difficult than that,” Mr. Milliron said. “Conversations are becoming much less hyperbolic and are happening much more slowly.”

But that doesn’t mean that the age of innovation is over, even if the “velocity” might slow down a bit, he argued. “We’ve got 15 or 20 years of...