Teaching science to undergraduates always seems to be an uphill battle. To help the beleaguered professor, the Science Education Research Center at Carleton College has bundled a bunch of teaching resources into a new Web site, Pedagogy in Action.

Can’t get numbers across to students? The site has modules on teaching with data simulations (a way to help students visualize and relate to abstract statistical concepts) and getting students to devise and test conjectures (which makes them active participants in learning and is a crucial part of the scientific method of inquiry).

There is also a section on “studio teaching”: de-emphasizing lectures and turning the laboratory into a series of interactive workstations, where students meet in groups to tackle in-depth problems, moving from one workstation to the next. The section cautions, though, that the method requires redesigning...

Voices and images from the civil-rights movement are now on the Web at the Civil Rights Digital Library, created by the University of Georgia.

The library features 30 hours of historical news footage showing such events as the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., and Martin Luther King Jr. accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

The site also holds images of historical documents, diaries, and letters. The library joins other sites, such as Columbia University’s Amistad Digital Resource, in documenting the civil-rights era. —Josh Fischman

As many as two million people in the United States use American Sign Language, but not every user knows what every one of the thousands of signs mean. And there is no dictionary in which to look them up—sign dictionaries are organized by the written definition of the sign, not by the physical movement.

Now a team of researchers at Boston University is working on an interactive video project that would allow someone to trace an unfamiliar sign in front of a Web camera and have a computer program interpret and explain its meaning, according to the Associated Press.

The researchers, working with a three-year, $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are trying to capture 3,000 ASL signs on video. Their goal is to develop a “backwards” dictionary that will allow people to look up any unfamiliar gesture.

If a deaf person signs to a someone who doesn’t understand the sign,...

Microsoft has decided to enlarge a service of keen interest to colleges, even as the company last week dumped another offering used by higher education, its Live Search Books program. Now Live@edu, the free Web-based e-mail and online collaboration program for students and alumni, is getting much larger inboxes, the ability to handle bigger attached files, true shared calendars, and the chance for colleges to block student e-mail containing words they deem offensive, the company announced today.

Tired of the 5 gigabyte inbox? Live@edu now offers accounts with 10 gigabytes, and the capacity to handle attachments up to 20 megabytes in size, says Bruce Gabrielle, senior product manager for the service. The boost is because the company has decided that, in addition to handing campuses Microsoft Hotmail accounts (with university-based e-mail addresses), it will offer accounts on the more...

For no charge, college students can now get their hands on advanced Microsoft development and design tools—the DreamSpark suite of programs—without the software giant or any other outside vendor getting their hands on students’ personal information.

The company said today that it would join the InCommon Federation, a “one-stop shop” that lets a college student access dozens of different outside resources, such as journal archives or Microsoft programs, with just one log-on, rather than remembering different passwords and log-on names for every site they need to access. The first approach, with the single log-on controlled by InCommon and the university, is the cutting-edge in identity-management on the Internet. That second approach, of course, is a royal pain.

InCommon, which is administered by Internet2, the high-speed networking consortium, serves more than 80 higher education in...

In a society where people often pick up and leave one town for another, staying on track for a college degree becomes a problem, since course credits may not move when people do. In Pennsylvania, 32 colleges hope to find a solution to this problem in a new Web site.

The Pennsylvania Transfer and Articulation Center, launched this week, allows users to search for transferable courses and get step-by-step instructions for transferring credit. There are 14 state community colleges, 14 state universities, three private colleges, and one state-related institution on the site. These colleges and universities guarantee that transfer credits will be accepted if students follow the steps outlined on the site.

State Education Secretary Gerald L. Zahorchak said that the current process of credit transfer is loaded with bureaucratic obstacles, and as a result students don’t get the credit they ...

Mobile learning and outsourcing e-mail operations are two of the hottest topics in campus IT today. Find out today how one university has fared, when you can have a live online chat with a college official who has handed out free iPhones and uses a variety of services, including email, from Google.

Kevin Roberts has moved his institution, Abilene Christian University, from a home-grown e-mail system to Google Apps for Education, and overseen experiments in group learning using various Google applications. Roberts, chief information officer at Abeline Christian, also has pushed for mobile computing, providing free iPhones to faculty members and students to create and complete course work from anywhere on the campus. How has it worked out? Can his experiences serve as models for other institutions?

See a transcript of a live discussion with Mr. Roberts, which took place today at...

Kenrick J. Mock says he loves recording lectures for his classes using his tablet PC. And the associate professor of computer science at the University of Alaska at Anchorage also loves projecting computational problems using PowerPoint or the writing program OneNote.

What Mr. Mock does not love is the inability to point to a specific part of the problem for his class. “It’s always bothered me that the pen cursor is a tiny little dot,” he writes in his blog on technology and teaching. “The problem is that I like to use the pen to “point” at things as I give the lecture, but it doesn’t help if the class can’t see it.”

He looked, in vain, for a program that would enlarge the cursor. And finally he gave in, remembered he was a computer scientist, and wrote a program himself.

The result is PenAttention, and it turns that minuscule dot into a minuscule dot with a big colored spotlight...

You’re one of those people who, for whatever reason, can’t get enough public television, right? (After all, you read The Chronicle, and PBS really is a fellow traveler.) Maybe it’s the gee-whiz science of NOVA, or the savoir-faire of David Brancaccio on NOW, or maybe you just really like to watch pledge drives.

Well, we have good news for you, at least if you are at a college in Virginia. VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia, is now providing access to PBS resources for all of its 70 public and private members in higher education. The organization, a consortium of college and university libraries, has licensed 500 hours of PBS programming, in video form, for streaming over the Internet.

But how to keep out interlopers, and ensure that only members get to watch? Seventy colleges with ever-changing populations of students are hard to police. And smaller campuses simply don’t...

The Rolling Stones. The Eagles. The founder of the world’s dominant software company.

Farewell tours by legends are becoming commonplace. But that last one, featuring Bill Gates, is coming to his final stop on a multiple-university tour, as he prepares to step back from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. This Friday, at the University of Washington, Mr. Gates will deliver a lecture called “Bill Gates Unplugged: On Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Giving Back.”

The time of the event is 3:15 p.m. Pacific time. And you can tune in through UWTV, available in Seattle through broadcast, elsewhere on satellite through DISHnetwork, and (of course) over the Internet.

For a preview, check out Carnegie Mellon’s student newspaper, The Tartan, which reported on a Gates college stop back in February. Interestingly, they described it as the last stop. Well, the Rolling Stones have had ...