When asked about the most powerful trend affecting community colleges, Mark David Milliron didn’t hesitate yesterday. “The biggest trend is that we’re really swimming in a world of learning swirl,” Milliron, a technology specialist and president of Catalyze Learning International, told a crowd on the last day of The Chronicle‘s technology conference in Tampa.

It sounded dizzying. And Milliron meant it that way. Community colleges are taking in students from three generations at once, each one with a different approach to technology and learning. Colleges have to account for all of them, as well as different degrees of tolerance for new technology among faculty and staff.

The three generations are baby boomers, Generation X, and the newest one, the so-called “Net Gen.” Baby boomers grew up with technology such as the telephone and television. Gen X was part of the personal...

Tampa, Fla. — When Henry Jenkins was growing up, he wanted to be an expert in many things. His models? The Disney cartoon duck Ludwig von Drake (who bragged in his signature song about knowing everything about science and art), and the professor from Gilligan’s Island on TV. “He knew everything,” Mr. Jenkins told a luncheon crowd at The Chronicle’s Technology Forum in Tampa, Fla., “except how to get off the island.”

Mr. Jenkins, director of the comparative media-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did have a weightier theme than cartoon birds and televised castaways. How does technology enable a professor to project expertise beyond the private classroom and into a public space, he asked?

His ideas on this are complex, but one could gloss them this way: Just throw it out there.

He did that a few...

Tampa, Fla. — Campus officials don’t want to be cops. They made that point loud and clear today in Tampa, Fla., in a panel discussion about the digital piracy of music and videos by college students. But a law professor and a representative of the movie industry told them that, in certain circumstances, colleges didn’t have much choice.

Stewart McLaurin, executive vice president for education affairs at the Motion Picture Association of America, seeks education before enforcement. College students are some of the movie industy’s best customers, he said, and his group doesn’t want to sue them. But the multibillion-dollar industry has to protect itself from theft, he went on. He would prefer to do that by educating students that getting a copy of a movie free, with no compensation to the copyright owners, is wrong.

No one disagreed. But Tracy Mitrano, director of...

The students taking Biology 100 at the University of Kansas were on their game this week. All 923 of them aced Monday’s exam. Perfect scores for everyone!

There were a lot of happy faces in Lawrence—until the students realized that the “clicker” system used to give the tests had crashed, erasing scores for the entire class, reports today’s University Daily Kansan. The instructor’s only option was to give each student an equal score of 100 percent.

Clickers are handheld, remote-control-like devices that let instructors pose multiple-choice questions and students immediately answer by clicking one choice. This particular system was made by the company eInstruction.The university says it does not know the cause of the malfunction, but it is investigating. The system had not failed before.

Nancy Holcroft, the biology lecturer, decided to give all students equal scores because of the...

The two computers weren’t actually running in the couple of dozen presidential primaries and caucuses yesterday. But their Web surrogates were. Barackobama.com is a Mac, while hillaryclinton.com is a PC, according to Web-design experts quoted yesterday in an article on Sci-Tech-Today.com.

The comparison takes off from the Mac spots on TV, featuring a young, relaxed actor exuding laid-back confidence personifying the Mac, and an older, nervous character as the PC.

Alice Twemlow, chairwoman of the master’s-in-fine-arts program in design criticism at the School of Visual Arts, in New York, says that “with Obama’s site, all the features and elements are seamlessly integrated, just like the experience of using a program on a Macintosh computer.” Twemlow is, of course, a Mac user.

The Clinton site, in contrast, is repeatedly described as “hectic,” with messages IN ALL CAPITAL...

Two years ago, some high-functioning patients with Alzheimer’s disease were generous enough to spend a few days showing me how they coped with their condition. Common computer software, they said, was a big help: Things like e-mail, which retains a long thread of replies, aids memory.

Microsoft Research, in recognition of the possibilities, has just given a total of $300,000 to scientists at five universities and one research institution, to support projects that use technology to assist damaged minds. These are the university endeavors: Carnegie Mellon University is exploring a system to help Alzheimer’s patients recall episodic memories more effectively. Claremont Graduate University and Old Dominion University are developing software for smart cellphones that enhance...

The National Science Foundation announced today that it has awarded $50-million to researchers who are creating an online portal to enable far-flung plant biologists to collaborate in new ways. The Web site, iPlant Collaborative, will allow researchers to combine and analyze data from different projects.

The team behind the online portal, which is led by researchers at the University of Arizona, hopes the site will encourage interdisciplinary work. Such research is slated to be discussed in person in April at a conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in subsequent workshops at Arizona. But the Web site itself will facilitate continued interaction and collaboration among scientists.—Lila Guterman

Macs just aren’t as safe as they used to be. Users of Macintosh computers, including many in higher education, have touted their machines’ superiority over Windows and PC’s when it comes to resisting hack attacks and viruses. But according to Sophos, a computer-security firm that just issued a report on security problems, Macs are losing their safety edge.

“Although Macs have a long way to go in the popularity stakes before they overtake PC’s, particularly in the workplace, their increased attractiveness to consumers has proven irresistible to some criminal cybergangs,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in a written statement.

Such criminals have, up until now, largely ignored Macs because so many poorly protected Windows machines serve as ripe targets. But in late 2007, versions of the malicious OSX/RSPlug Trojan horse were planted on Web sites to infect...

Nine is today’s magic number. Nine Louisiana universities and related institutions, throwing their lots together in a consortium, just scored a $9-million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop new high-performance computing tools to speed research into projects like hurricane forecasts and tiny sensors to detect disease. Add in $3-million from the Louisiana Board of Regents and $3.2-million from the participating institutions, and the group will split $15.2-million over the next three years, Supercomputing Online reports.

The nine institutions are: Louisiana State University, LSU Health Sciences Center at New Orleans, Louisiana Tech University, Southern University at Baton Rouge, Tulane University, Tulane University’s Health Sciences Center, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the University of New Orleans, and Xavier University of Louisiana.

Edward Seidel, ...

Eduventures, the higher-education consulting firm, is selling a division focused on business research to a market-research company.

Outsell, a company that includes publishers and other information providers among its clients, reports that it will acquire Eduventures’s business-research-and-analysis branch. The education firm appears to want to concentrate more closely on the higher-education market. —Josh Fischman