Are universities too cozy with industry? In certain respects, they are not cozy enough, says Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s education product group. The software company is gearing up for a conference in Paris next week, sponsored along with Unesco, called the Education Leaders Forum. In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Gupta said that higher education could be doing a better job of preparing students for life, and work, in the coming century.

“Absolutely there should be a tighter relationship,” Mr. Gupta said, noting that universities could integrate certification in particular software packages into their curriculum. (He cited a few examples of such software, which had Redmond, Wash., as their home address.)

But it’s about much more than creating workers for Microsoft, he said. “It’s about digital literacy,” about equipping graduates with the tools...

Some pornographic downloads by North Carolina Central University staff members have prompted the university to install monitoring software on faculty and staff members’ computers. It’s also prompted concern from the university professors that the institution is going to be spying upon them.

The Herald-Sun newspaper of Durham reported today that the North Carolina chapter of the American Association of University Professors has voiced worries, saying that faculty members doing research may visit Web sites that seem suspicious but are part of their work.

Or sometimes people just make mistakes. The classic one, for years, was when people trying to get to “whitehouse.gov” typed “whitehouse.com” instead. The latter was a porn site until 2004, when it went out of business.

Mistakes and legitimate explorations are ...

The Graduate Management Admission Council has been awarded $2.3-million in damages in a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the operator of a Web site that posted real questions and unauthorized study materials to help students pass the council’s business-school entrance examination, the GMAT, the council announced on Friday.

Students who used the site, ScoreTop.com, to try to improve their scores on the Graduate Management Admission Test may regret it. The council has seized a hard drive from a server used to run the Web site, and says it will notify business schools of anyone who violated its testing policies by using the site. The council, which administers the admission test, will also cancel those students’ scores.

Students looking for the Web site this week instead read the following: “Warning! If You Are Looking for ‘Real’ GMAT® Exam Questions, Think Again!” A ...

So you got a startup grant to get your digital monograph, e-journal, or wiki up and running. What kind of impact will that nifty new project have, and how will you keep it going once the grant money runs out? The answer: know your user.

A new report from the Ithaka group says that many academics have not been thinking hard enough about those questions. Ithaka is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the innovative use of technology in higher education.

The report, “Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources,” calls for “a shift in mind-set” among the creators of online scholarly projects. It concludes that too few have figured out what users need and want, or who those users are. Too few appreciate ...

The Minnesota state college system unveiled on Tuesday its new Accountability Dashboard. The service is based on a Web site that displays a series of measures—tuition rates, graduates’ employment rates, condition of facilities—that use speedometer-type gauges to show exactly how the Minnesota system and each of its individual colleges is performing.

The dashboard makes already-available information about institutional performance easy to access by the public. Yet it’s not clear that the system will prove to be the best solution, Richard Garrett, a senior research analyst with Eduventures, an industry consulting company, told The Chronicle. American colleges appear to be pursuing a “patchwork of measures and metrics and benchmarks” that allow for some comparisons between institutions, he said. But the higher­-education system is so fragmented that tools such as the dashboard can ...

Long a standard reference source for scholarship, largely because of its tightly controlled editing, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced this week it was throwing open its elegantly-bound covers to the masses. It will allow the “user community” (in the words of the encyclopedia’s blog) to contribute their own articles, which will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference pieces.

This seems to be a response to the runaway success of the user-edited online reference tool Wikipedia. (See for yourself. Do a Web search on a topic and note whether Wikipedia or Britannica shows up first.) Scholars have been adamantly opposed to Wikipedia citations in academic papers because the authors and sources are always changing. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, agrees with this, but in next week’s issue of The Chronicle (click back to our home page on Monday for more) he also...

On ACRLog, Stephanie Willen Brown has come out of the closet to report that she has spent a semester in the closet. The University of Connecticut librarian says she was holding office hours.

Ms. Brown says she wondered what would happen if a librarian held office hours outside of the library. Would she be more visible? So she got a converted janitor’s closet in an academic building near the library, hung a sign with her name on the door, and spent one hour a week there. During that time, she says, she saw eight people. But “unofficially, the stats are much higher: I ran into people in the hallway, bathroom, and going in & out of the building,” she reports. And she was able to hand out reference advice.

It was a success, she says, if one considers the “PR value” of being seen in the building on a regular basis. Next semester, if she holds office hours again, she expects more business...

This might upset you: You log onto your university library Web site to research a history assignment, and alongside the literature citations there is an ad for Dell computers or Microsoft Office or several books from university presses.

It’s not happening yet, but it’s one scenario pictured by Martin Weller this week in his post on the blog The Ed Techie as he wonders how to pay for technology that students and universities need.

Mr. Weller, a professor of educational technology at Open University in the U.K., starts with the now-accepted fact that funding is flat, yet demands and costs for technology in education keep going up. How, then, to pay for it?

— Ads on university sites? — Charging students for tech support or accreditation? — Giving students government-subsidized vouchers? — Charging companies, not students, for professional development courses?

Mr. Weller is not...

Before a Memorial Day party even got started, officials at Seattle University told the students planning to throw it to shut it down. The reason: officials were alarmed by a Facebook post advertising the off-campus party, because they felt it had a theme of gender bias.

The Seattle Times reported that, for the party, women “were to wear Victoria’s Secret Pink-brand sweats or Abercrombie & Fitch clothing and talk constantly on their cellphones, according to the invitation on the social-networking site Facebook…. The event was dubbed the ‘Douchebag’ party.”

Students said the party was supposed to be a parody. Still, officials, reading about the party, wrote to the students, warning they may violate the university’s code of conduct and face sanctions. The students decided to call off the party.

Unhappy students say officials have made such before-the-fact moves on other parties. And...

A new court ruling limiting a student’s speech on the Internet—though the student in question is in high school—may prove worrisome to college students and freedom-of-speech advocates.

The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that a Connecticut high-school student could be barred from running for student government after posting a blog entry calling a school official a “douchebag” and encouraging other students to write or call the official to annoy her, the Hartford Courant reports.

The court, in a decision on a pretrial motion, ruled that the post, on the site livejournal.com, violated the school policy that student-government representatives show “good citizenship.” The court also said the post created disruption at the school, warranting the school to take action.

College students, posting public statements or images on sites such as Facebook, are increasingly ...