The new online-education program of the University of Illinois, Global Campus, is offering three new courses of study. The university’s board of trustees is supposed to vote tomorrow on tuition charges for the courses, possibly providing additional revenue for the Global Campus program.

The multimillion program got off to a slow start early this year, with relatively few students enrolling. Officials said they had not yet ramped up their marketing and expected interest from students to increase.

One way to generate that interest is to offer more courses. Global Campus now will offer a graduate certificate in a biblical approach to mental health and graduate certificates in business-process management and information project technology management. Each program will begin enrolling students in 2009 and consist of three...

With the backing of some top medical schools, a foundation is calling on physicians and scientists to help them build a huge online encyclopedia of medicine, called Medpedia. Today the Medpedia Foundation raised the curtain slightly on their Web site, giving prospective collaborators a peek.

The effort is supported by Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School, the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, and several health organizations.

The goal is to have, by the end of 2008, a site that covers more than 30,000 medical diseases and conditions and 10,000 drugs, as well as medical procedures and facilities throughout the world. Articles will be contributed and edited by online collaborators, like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Unlike that effort, which allows everyone to contribute, Medpedia is only...

The next-generation Internet is creeping ever closer. Today the contractor developing networking tools for that new creation, called the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, said that it was awarded a three year grant worth approximately $4-million a year from the National Science Foundation. BBN Technologies, the contractor, said the money will be used to construct GENI Spiral 1, a set of functional prototypes. Twenty-nine university-industrial teams will be selected to build these prototypes through an open, peer-reviewed process, the company said. Seventy-four such teams had submitted proposals.

Leaders of the project recently hit reset on the GENI project. Some university researchers had complained that the initial plan for GENI was moving too fast. The biggest question is whether to push to build a massive test-bed computer network that researchers at...

A Web site that invites students to post exam answers online for others to view, PostYourTest.com, has eliminated the ability of professors to request that tests from their courses be banned from the site.

Posting answers made some professors worry that students would use them to cheat on exams. Demir A. Oral, the operator of the site, told The Chronicle last week that he allowed professors to place their courses on a “Ban List” that would exclude their materials from the site. He said that 200 professors had made such requests and he had complied.

But a notice on the site now says “the Ban List is suspended.” It says that already-made ban requests will be honored. Professors must now wait for content to be posted before requesting removal, and submit a form stipulating that they own the copyright to the material and that their request meets requirements of the Digital...

A teenager from New Zealand who helped crash part of the University of Pennsylvania’s computer network in 2006 was ordered to pay the university more than $11,000 but avoided any jail time, in a sentence handed down by a New Zealand court this week.

Owen Thor Walker, 18, a hacker who went by the online name AKILL, pleaded guilty to several charges, including accessing a computer for dishonest purposes and damaging or interfering with computer systems, according to the Associated Press.

The incident, in February 2006, loaded a virus on university computer servers and brought them down.

The court ordered Mr. Walker to pay the university to compensate for computer damage and other costs involved in recovering from the assault.

But at the request of prosecutors, Mr. Walker was not sentenced to prison time. Prosecutors said he had agreed to help them track down other hackers, who...

When people complain about finding filth on computers, it’s usually got something to do with Internet porn. But University of Washington students have found that users don’t even have to hit a Web site to contact another kind of dirt. All they have to do is touch the keyboard. It might have high levels of fecal coliform bacteria.

Keyboards in the undergraduate library and in computer labs at Mary Gates Hall, the undergraduate learning center, harbored the bugs, the Seattle Times reported this weekend. Students swabbed them down and tested for the bacteria as part of an environmental-research project.

Now, before you jump to the grossest possible conclusion, fecal coliform does not always come from feces, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. One genus hangs around paper and textile mills. Still, the presence of fecal coliform can be a sign of contaminated water. And yes,...

The winners of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition were announced Monday night in Paris. The cup is a global contest intended to spur students to innovations in technology. The theme this year was the environment and conservation. U.S. teams did well: First place in the Interface Design category went to a team from Indiana University, which built an application to get students on the campus to reduce energy and water consumption. First place in the Photography category went to a team from Wayne State University, whose photos displayed the role that technology plays in improving the environment. The Engineering Excellence Achievement Award went to a team from the Rochester Institute of Technology, which designed a system of environmental sensors that could be accessed by cell phones.

The winners will get a share of the cash prize of $240,000.—Josh Fischman

“Education” ranks among the top five issue-related search terms that have led Internet users to the campaign Web sites of John McCain and Barack Obama in the second quarter of 2008, according to Hitwise, a New York-based company.

Hitwise analyzed the top 200 search terms that sent traffic to each candidate’s Web site. Education ranked second, behind abortion, in top political-issue search terms that sent people to Senator Obama’s campaign Web site. Education ranked fourth—behind health care, environment/global warming, and oil prices—that sent visitors to Senator McCain’s campaign Web site. In the first quarter of this year, education ranked fourth on Obama’s site and wasn’t among the top five listed on McCain’s site.

“The NSFNet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on.” Twenty years ago, on the evening of June 30th, a network engineer named Hans-Werner Braun sent that text in an an e-mail message to users of the National Science Foundation’s fledgling NSFNet project. The network’s main lines, or backbone, had been upgraded, he said.

And that, according to Supercomputing Online today, was the birth of the modern Internet. In the early 1980s, NSF put together NSFNet as a network connecting regional computer networks around the country. The Department of Defense had already created the Arpanet network, which gave birth to many of the tools and techniques used on the modern Internet, but Arpanet traffic was limited to Defense-sponsored research. NSFNet was designed to be open to all users.

The design of NSFNet was awarded to a team made ...

Armchair archaeologists will have ringside, or dig-side, seats this month at university explorations of the world’s richest collection of rock art and the ruins of a Panamanian village that may once have been spotted by Christopher Columbus’s son, among other expeditions. Instead of swatting mosquitos, all they will have to do is click a mouse.

During July, undergraduates from the University of California at Los Angeles will write blogs from seven locations where they are taking part in archaeological digs. The countries include Albania, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and the U.S.

The blogs are for public consumption. “We want to create the next generation of archaeology fans,” Ran Boytner, director of international research at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and head of the field studies program, said in a prepared statement.

The blogs will be written by students...