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...

Open access is in the air. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a national laboratory managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, just announced that all of its scientists have to place their published journal articles in OpenSky, a new digital repository that will be open to anyone who wants to read those articles.

Well, not completely open. "The repository will be free and available to the public, but access to the works it contains will depend upon the policies of their publishers," the laboratory and its managing corporation said in a written statement.

What that really means, says Mary Marlino, director of the center's library, is that the repository will be open, but some articles will be closed. "We will honor publishers' embargoes," she says. Major journal publishers -- in...

Forget tour guides. A new iPhone application may be able to replicate the quintessential college tour, minus the huge crowds and backward walking.

The application, created by a Yale University student and two high-school students, provides information on about 100 different locations on the campuses of four universities -- Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If approved by Apple, the four tours will be available for $10. The students hope to add tours of other colleges and universities as well.

People with iPhones can get information on campus landmarks if they hold their devices in front of them as they walk. Using the iPhone's tracking of GPS coordinates, the program can figure out the user's location. Using a compass, it can determine what buildings the person is facing, and then match that information with 100 key locations on...

Researchers at the University of Utah have created new iPhone applications that help people study anatomy and medicine.

One of the applications, called AnatomyLab, allows students to view a body in different stages of dissection. Researchers dissected a cadaver and photographed it at 40 different stages of the process.

“It’s aimed at students who want to learn anatomy,” Mark Nielsen, a biology professor, said in a statement. “There’s no...

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...

Stephanie Bellevue, a student at American University, held down the “5” key on her cellphone, and a loud alarm soon began to ring in the cramped operations room of the university’s public-safety office. On one of the facility’s many computer monitors, the student’s location popped up as a dot on a campus map, and next to it was a photograph of her and a list of details to help find her: height, weight, hair color, and eye color.

In this case it was a false alarm — the student rang the system to demonstrate it to The Chronicle. The university’s director of public safety, Michael McNair, explained that cellphones have become an important additional safety feature on the campus — used for more than just sending mass text messages in case of emergencies. Since just about everyone on the campus has a cellphone these...

Blackboard unveiled a free application for the iPhone today to let students check their grades and get updates about their courses at colleges that use the company’s course-management software.

The application, called Blackboard Learn for Apple iPhone, can be found in Apple’s iPhone App Store. Blackboard designed it so it will immediately work with any versions of its software made since 2006. Colleges’ administrators can choose to turn off their Blackboard server’s compatibility with the service if they have concerns about security or other issues.

Students can’t take tests or dig into course content using the iPhone application — the focus of the system is to notify users of when new material is ready for them in the full Web-based version of Blackboard.

The application may have extracurricular uses as well...

Duke University has become the latest institution to join the mobile-application arms race, announcing today the release of “DukeMobile,” a suite of programs for students who use the iPhone and iPod Touch. The applications weren’t actually designed by Duke students, though—they were developed by a company run by students at Stanford University.

Among other functions, the software allows users to watch Duke content on YouTube and iTunes, look through the university’s course catalog, and pinpoint the location of campus events on a searchable map. By March 30, those using Blackberrys with multi-touch capabilities will also be able to use the software.

Similar software bundles have been developed at other campuses, including the University of Cincinnati and University of...

An experiment this semester at Houston Community College compares two sections of the same course, one in which students are given iPhones and another in which students use old-fashioned PC’s to view course materials online. The question: Will students with the smart phones spend more time watching course videos and interacting with peers than those without them?

The course, called “Anatomy and Physiology II,” is a hybrid of distance education and traditional classroom teaching — the students meet in person once a week and are asked to watch lecture videos and follow assignments online for the rest of the material. There are 20 students in each section, and the only difference between the two is that one group got iPhones on loan at the beginning of the semester and the other did not.

The professor, Lifang Tien, an instructor at the...

A homemade iPhone application at the Georgia Institute of Technology has gained a following — and won its student creators some fans.

The application, called GT Login, is essentially a cellphone-friendly interface to several existing Web-based campus services. With a few taps, users can read their campus e-mail, see which laundry machines are available, or check when the next shuttle bus will arrive using their iPhone or iPod Touch. The application is free, but it requires a Georgia Tech account to access the services.

Adrian Smith, a senior at the university majoring in computer engineering, made the application for fun — because he wanted to learn how to program applications for the iPhone. He has now teamed up with some fellow students to form a company to build other iPhone applications, and he...