Colleges are keen to support Sakai, the open-source course-management system that has emerged as an alternative to Blackboard. But the software has been plagued by “fairly serious usability problems,” says e-Literate, and attempts to fix them have been “sporadic and fragile.”

Now there’s reason to be optimistic, e-Literate says: The nonprofit Sakai Foundation, which oversees the software’s development, is jump-starting a project intended to make Sakai more user-friendly. The project was devised this year but was put on hold while the foundation searched for a new executive director.

Michael Korcuska has now filled that slot, and the initiative, which is to last for six months, is back on track. Five institutions — Charles Sturt University, in Australia; Indiana University at Bloomington; The John Hopkins University; the University of Cambridge, in England; and Yale University — are...

If you’ve ever ended an e-mail message or an instant message with an emoticon, now might be a good time to pause and reflect on the work of Scott E. Fahlman. After all, it will be 25 years ago tomorrow that Mr. Fahlman, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, invented the digital smiley face.

After a colleague joked about a contaminated elevator on an electronic bulletin board, Mr. Fahlman had his eureka moment: He recommended that future quipsters mark their jokes with “:-)” to make sure no one misconstrued their comments.

Since the Net is now overrun with winking emoticons, crying emoticons, and even an Abraham Lincoln emoticon — “==):-)=” — it’s hard to believe that Mr. Falhman felt the need to explain his creation. But he did issue a simple directive to folks confused by the icon: “Read it sideways.” —Brock Read

Few campus officials have stepped into harder jobs this year than J. Brice Bible. In April, Mr. Bible left the University of Tennessee to become chief information officer at Ohio University — whose IT department had been reeling from a string of all-too-public hacking incidents that cost several staff members their jobs.

“I was literally walking into a river of alligators,” says Mr. Bible in an interview with Computerworld, “but that’s not always a bad thing.”

Shortly after assuming the Ohio post, Mr. Bible made headlines by announcing that the university was banning peer-to-peer software. Now, he tells Computerworld, he’s set the institution on a five-year plan to restructure its IT department. —Brock Read

Earlier this month Facebook made an announcement that, at first glance, seemed fairly innocuous: The social network decided to make “limited public search listings” available to people who weren’t using the site.

What that means, essentially, is that search engines like Google and Yahoo will now be able to locate Facebook users who haven’t designated their pages as “private.” Philip Fong, a Facebook engineer, wrote on the company’s blog that search-engine links would only show only the names and thumbnail photos of Facebook users: “We’re not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing.”

But even that information is too much, according to the editors of The Cornell Daily Sun. In a fierce editorial, the newspaper accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, of invading the privacy of his site’s faithful patrons:At an age when most of us are...

Despite its image as an all-American city, downtown Peoria, Ill., home of Bradley University, is also a place of strip clubs and violent crime. For undergraduates, it’s a risky environment in which to conduct field research. Edward L. Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley’s multimedia program, saw a better place in the virtual world Second Life.

Ever since Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based company, unveiled Second Life in 2003, professors and college students have flocked to it. Professors use Second Life to hold distance-education classes, saying that communication among students actually gets livelier when they assume digital personae. Anthropologists and sociologists see the virtual world as a laboratory for studying human behavior. University architects use it as a canvas on which to explore design. Business professors see it as a testing ground for budding...

Course-management systems can put a lot of data at a professor’s fingertips: With just a few keystrokes, it’s possible to see which students are logging on often, and which ones seem to be giving the course Web site nary a thought.

That information can be useful. According to several professors, it can predict whether students will stick with a course or drop out early. “If you could get an early warning that a student is at risk,” writes Michael Feldstein at e-Literate, “you can intervene and hopefully help that student get through a rough spot.”

But just because the information is useful doesn’t mean it should be used with abandon, he argues. Students, after all, may not have any idea that their professors are taking digital attendance. Do professors have an obligation to ask permission before they monitor log-in data?

And once professors start gathering that information, Mr. Feldstein...

It’s hardly surprising that a college course about YouTube is making its debut this fall. But it is, perhaps, somewhat unexpected that the professor leading the class admits she’s “underwhelmed” by much of the material on the site.

Alexandra Juhasz, a professor of media studies at Pitzer College, tells the Associated Press that her “Learning From YouTube” course will do more than just ask students to gawk at viral videos. The course will probe some weighty issues, she says, like the implications of “corporate-sponsored democratic media expression.”

Ms. Juhasz isn’t just talking the talk. She’s encouraged students to put videos on YouTube, and she posts recordings of her own lectures as well. The response to those clips proves that YouTube can be a fickle mistress: Some of the videos attracted positive comments, but others have already received negative reviews from viewers complaining...

Public computers have helped keep libraries busy even as patrons spend less time in the stacks, and demand for the machines seems to be holding strong. But many librarians are struggling mightily to expand their computer stations, according to a new report by the American Library Association.

Only one in five libraries say they have enough computers, the association reports, yet the number of publicly accessible machines has not grown substantially in the last five years. The main sticking point, unsurprisingly, is cost: Many budget-strapped libraries have to scrounge up donations to afford basic technology, and some institutions say they’ve been forced to choose between cutting staff and postponing computer purchases.

And according to the Associated Press, some libraries just aren’t built to accommodate large computer stations: Librarians report that they don’t have the space, or the...

It’s bad enough that the University of Notre Dame’s storied football team has been trounced this season by squads from Georgia Tech and Penn State. But now a YouTube prankster has added insult to the Fighting Irish’s injury.

In a six-minute video posted on the video-sharing site, the unidentified man showed how he slipped deep into Notre Dame Stadium before the Georgia Tech game, passing ushers and security guards by disguising himself as a Roman Catholic priest. YouTube officials have already taken the video offline, according to the Associated Press.

In the meantime, Notre Dame is reminding stadium staff members to ask visitors for credentials. The university says it has no plans to pursue criminal charges against the trespasser. —Brock Read

China’s attempts to filter Web surfing might well be keeping citizens away from sites about Falun Gong and the Tiananmen Square incident. But even if the Web blockades are working, that doesn’t mean they’re especially staunch.

In fact, researchers at the University of New Mexico argue in a new study that China’s fire wall is surprisingly sievelike. Instead of simply blocking certain Web pages, the nation watches data passing through the Internet and filters out banned words and Web addresses on a case-by-case basis. According to the New Mexico researchers, that system allows Chinese Web surfers to browse freely, at least on occasion, and it causes the fire wall to become “particularly erratic” when a lot of people are online.

Still, there’s little doubt that the online surveillance restricts the flow of information: As the researchers told BBC News, many Web users censor their own searches...