The foundation behind the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, a popular and free courseware-management and group-cooperation system, has announced that it intends to pursue a merger with another open-software group active in higher education, the Jasig organization. Jasig is known for uPortal, a general online gateway for college and university services. The two groups say they will craft a merger proposal to be submitted to both boards of directors in the coming months.

It has taken the University of Colorado two decades to come up with a new student-information system. And one of the first effects has allowed students to bull their way to the head of the line for popular classes, skipping past others already on the course waitlist. But the Boulder Daily Camera reports this week that the university has fixed the $50-million system—for the most part. "We've reduced the chances of this happening," university spokeswoman Malinda Miller-Huey told the paper on August 25. Students interviewed for the article were not so sanguine. "The new system sucks," said one junior.

The problem apparently occurred because the new software, MyCUInfo, held students on class waitlists for long periods, perhaps while checking their eligibility, officials said. Meanwhile, new students could log in and enroll.

Now waitlist status is being reviewed by the software every seven ...

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem—A judge in Tel Aviv's small-claims court has fined Tel Aviv University because the institution refused to stop sending a student unsolicited promotional e-mails.

Judge Ronen Ilan fined the university 2,000 shekels (approximately $525) plus 300 shekels ($79) in costs for violating an Israeli law that forbids sending promotional e-mails against the wishes of the recipient.

The university had argued that it supplied and owned the e-mail service, and that students checked off a box when they opened their e-mail accounts that said they agreed to receive commercial messages at the discretion of the university. The judge said the agreement was too general and must be reversible.

Guy Mor, a second-year law student and a member of the editorial board of the Tel Aviv University Law Review, received an e-mail in February promoting a course in English...

The title is provocative: "College Journalists Are Good at Consuming Multimedia But Bad at Making It. Why?" It sits atop a column published yesterday in The Huffington Post by Michael Koretzky, a journalist who has been an adviser to the student newspaper at Florida Atlantic University. (The university let him go from the official position this spring, but the students running the paper brought him back, on a volunteer basis.)

Students, Mr. Koretzky writes, make the same mistake widely considered to be the downfall of the professional newspaper business: They only care about print. Look at college newspaper Web sites, Mr. Koretzsky says: "Most of the stories on these sites are mere "shovelware," meaning print articles are tossed online without much thought. Or pictures, graphics, or video." The online presentation is bland, derivative, without imagination or verve, he continues....

H. David Lambert is going to be the new president of Internet2, the advanced networking consortium for the research and education community. His appointment was announced today. Mr. Lambert, now the vice president for information services at Georgetown University, gets to run an organization that, along with several partners, just scored a $62.5-million grant from the federal government to build a new network based on facilities run by colleges and universities and regional and state research and education networks. The new grid is intended to connect communities and give them access to advanced, high-speed Internet applications.

Independence Day weekend saw an independent incursion into the Web site of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M University. According to a news report, campus officials said the intruders left a message in the "events" section of the site that read, "Say hi for George Bush. LOL. Saudi hackers...."

A Texas A&M technology official said the Web site's servers were not connected to any sensitive databases, such as those that contain personal information or financial records. So the only incendiary repercussions that day were from the fireworks display over the library.

Although universities have had to trim their budgets, and information technology has not been immune from the cuts, a broadband network that links institutions in more than a dozen northern states could actually grow, according to an Associated Press report.

The Northern Tier Network serves universities in Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Bonnie Neas, North Dakota State University's vice president for information technology, told that state's legislature this week that the system could get money from a $97-million federal grant being pursued by two nonprofit networking groups, Internet2 and National LambdaRail.

That could increase the network's capacity tenfold, according to the report, as well as cut costs to the universities and states behind it.

By Matthew Kalman

Software may know when you are depressed by examining your online behavior.  Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba, Israel, have developed a program that can detect depression in online texts and could serve as a screening tool to direct potential patients towards treatment. Psychologists caution, however, that it hasn't actually been tested on real people.

Yair Neuman, associate professor in the department of education at Ben-Gurion, led a team that developed a computer program capable of identifying language with signs of depression. In a test, the program was used to scan more than 300,000 English-language texts from blogs and from online queries that people posted to mental-health Web sites. After the program identified the texts as depressive, a panel of four clinical psychologists reviewed 200 examples of such writings. There...

Our colleagues on Tweed have noticed that even after much-publicized gaffes, some faculty members on Facebook have not enhanced their privacy settings. And this lets the world see a few off-the-cuff remarks on grading techniques as the semester rushes to an end. "Flag Brew IPA ... makes grading papers a little more bearable," says someone. (Tweed, sensitive to privacy, has redacted identities.) "Chances are you will get an A if your paper is in the last 10 [that the professor] grades," notes another.

But maybe this isn't such a big deal, says a Tweed commenter: "As a society are we really so uptight that A. people can't be tired and express it or B. joke about what they're doing?"

Clay Shirky doesn't like television. The Chronicle's Jeff Young reports this week that the New York University scholar and Internet guru figures Americans spend 200 billion hours each year of their thinking time—or time they could be thinking—on sitcoms and their ilk. He also figures that all of Wikipedia took about 100 million hours of thought to produce. So Americans could build 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year just by writing articles instead of watching television.

He does like reading, however. In an interview online in The Atlantic, Mr. Shirky says he starts his day checking Twitter, then moves to an RSS feed reader to check sites like Al Jazeera (his favorite for world news) and tech sites like Boing Boing. Then there are books and magazines and newspapers and NPR. But in general, Mr. Shirky says, "there's no real breaking news that matters to me. I don't have any alerts or...