A new Web site, Open Educational Resources Center for California, brings together information on free and open textbooks and course materials in one location. Though the Web site was designed for California's community-college faculty members, it could be a useful resource for anyone trying to find learning materials in the public domain.

California Assembly Bill 2261, which was signed into law in the fall of 2008, authorized the center as a statewide pilot program for California's 112 community colleges "to provide faculty and staff from community-college districts around the state with the information, methods, and instructional materials to establish open education resource centers." The center is managed by Foothill College, in Los Altos Hills, Calif.

The center was designed to give California's community-college...

Rich Pickett is in tears.

The San Diego State University chief information officer has been flying people and supplies back and forth to Haiti since last week. Now, as he talks to a reporter by phone from Florida before stepping into “the bird” for yet another flight, it’s the image of one child that leaves him struggling to speak. 

He had taken down some balls on one flight. A fellow relief worker distributed one to children. “She noticed that the boy who had it, dropped it,” Mr. Pickett says. “And she turned to look and noticed the reason he dropped it is because his arms were gone. So it bounced on the ground. And he used his feet and just juggled with it.”

Stephen Kinsey wanted to find a more personal way to connect inventors at his university to businesses that might be interested in their creations.

So he let researchers do the talking, explaining their work in videos on a YouTube channel created at the University of Maryland at Baltimore last month.

Mr. Kinsey, technology-licensing officer for the university's department of commercial ventures and intellectual property, said the short videos aren't intended as a hard sell. Rather, they're an opportunity to let researchers shine in a way they might not in written descriptions of their work.

"Their passion for the technology comes through," he said. "A lot of times they're giving you a little more than you're going to get in a very specific technical description."

Mr. Kinsey said several universities have...

The U.S. Department of Justice has weighed in on Google Book Search Settlement 2.0, saying that despite "substantial progress, substantial issues remain." In a statement of interest filed on Thursday, the department said that the revamped agreement "suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: It is an attempt to use the class-action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation." As a result, it concluded, the deal "purports to grant legal rights that are difficult to square with the core principle of the Copyright Act that copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright."

As in its

Software developer ScrollMotion announced this week that it will make textbooks compatible with the new Apple iPad for four major publishers: McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, and Kaplan Publishing. The e-books, in addition to providing the original content of textbooks, will allow users to highlight text in multiple colors, take audio and printed notes, search content in different ways, take quizzes, and watch videos.

ScrollMotion has worked with other publishers to adapt more than 7,000 titles for the iPod and iTouch, but the new deal with the textbook publishers "represent tens of thousands of textbooks," said Josh Koppel, chief creative officer and a co-founder of ScrollMotion. Although his company is "platform neutral," he said, the electronic textbooks it is developing are now compatible only with Apple devices.

Rik Kranenburg,...

A large library reference publisher has acquired one of the world's biggest online libraries of copyright-cleared books, and hopes to add to both collections.

Gale, a division of Cengage Learning, announced that it had acquired Questia Media last week, with undisclosed financial terms. Questia, a subscription-based online information service, lets users access more than 75,000 books and millions of journal, magazine and newspaper articles; Questia Classroom is a course-management system tied to that online material.

John Barnes, Gale's executive vice president of strategic marketing and business development, said Questia subscribers will still be able to use all of the service's regular features. He also said the merger will expand an existing agreement to give each service some of the other's useful materials, such as e-books or journal articles.

Judith...

Thomas McNeal wants students to become "geohistorians."

In the latest effort to turn cellphones into learning tools, his Geo-Historian project at Kent State University plans to put students to work creating multimedia content about historic sites.

The technology behind this idea is a program that ties the information to a bar code. Then you could leave that bar code on, say, the memorial commemorating the 1970 Kent State shootings. Visitors could get access to the student-produced audio and video clips by scanning the bar code with their cellphone cameras.

"All of the students have it now," says Mr. McNeal, director of the desktop-videoconferencing project at Kent State's Research Center for Educational Technology. "Instead of being afraid of it,...

Students have long turned to Wikipedia for answers -- often to the frustration of professors, who complain that the user-written encylopedia is not always accurate. But students at McGill University have taken their love of the free resource guide to a new level by starting a Wikipedia club on the campus.

The university's student government granted interim status to Students Supporting Wikipedia last month, making it a bona fide student organization. It might be the first officially sanctioned Wikipedia club on a college campus.

"I wasn't surprised when the group applied, because Wikipedia is so often used by students now that it wouldn't be long before students somewhere rallied round to show support," said Sarah Olle, the Students' Society vice president responsible for clubs.

The main purpose of Students Supporting Wikipedia is to raise money and...

Stanford University reaffirmed its commitment to Google Book Search today, announcing that it has a signed a new, expanded agreement that makes it a full partner library in the book-digitizing project. In a written statement, the university called the deal "a milestone in Stanford's commitment to the program and to the provision of public access to millions of its books." The university joins the Universities of Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin at Madison in signing stronger participation agreements with the company.

Stanford also expressed strong support for the revised settlement in the Google Book Search lawsuit.  "We are highly supportive of the amended settlement,...

The University of California at Los Angeles has stopped posting copyrighted videos on course Web sites after complaints from an educational-media trade group, leaving other colleges worried about repercussions.

The Association for Information and Media Equipment contacted the university in the fall, alleging that it had violated copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, which were accessible only to students then enrolled in specific courses. The university temporarily stopped using online videos beginning this semester and is negotiating with the trade group.

Current copyright laws allow "fair use" exceptions for teaching and research, and one specific exception in copyright law lets instructors use legally made audiovisual material in face-to-face teaching activities. The university argues that posting the material to password-protected sites falls...