Texts for visually impaired college students are hard to come by. But a new agreement between Cambridge University Press and Bookshare, a nonprofit organization that converts books and journals into formats that blind people can read, may enlarge this library.

And in the U.S., it won't cost students a cent.

Bookshare, which already has digital-copy sharing agreements with 11 colleges and universities, as well as with the open-access textbook publisher Flatworld Knowledge, gets digital files from the publishers and converts them to files that can be read using text-to-speech software or Braille embossers.

The group operates under an exemption to U.S. copyright law known as the Chafee Amendment. "That allows any U.S. student with a disability that affects their ability to read standard print to join Bookshare and get a free copy of a book," says Valerie Chernek, a spokeswoman for...

"We've heard," says Google's official blog today, that "college students, in particular, really appreciate getting their voice mail sent to their e-mail, sending free text messages, and reading voice-mail transcriptions, rather than listening to messages (especially handy while in class)."

And not-so-coincidentally, Google has a service that does just that. Google Voice for Students gives a person all this for nothing—as long as that person has an e-mail address that ends in ".edu." The rest of us, well, just have to know someone well-connected to get an invite.

Actually, it's a nice service. You get a new phone number, and can forward all your other phones to that, and get all your mail in one place. And once you stop being amused by the way the transcription feature sometimes turns your friends' words into things they didn't really say, you will find it to be useful. Maybe on your...

Even as a lawsuit over Google's book-digitization project remains up in the air, the search giant has quietly started reaching out to universities in search of humanities scholars who are ready to roll up their sleeves and hit the virtual stacks.

The company is creating a "collaborative research program to explore the digital humanities using the Google Books corpus," according to a call for proposals obtained by The Chronicle. Some of Google's academic partners say the grant program marks the company's first formal foray into supporting humanities text-mining research.

The call went out to a select group of scholars, offering up to $50,000 for one year. Google says it may choose to renew the grants for a second year. It is not clear whether anybody can apply for the money, or just the group that got the solicitation.

The effort seems largely focused on building tools to comb and...

San Diego--"We may already be in the red in terms of our ability to store information," said Christopher L. Greer last week to an interested, and vaguely intimidated, audience of scientists and other academics. Gene sequences, distant pulsar signals, YouTube videos, e-mail -- it's all too much to keep track of.

Or perhaps not. Mr. Greer, who works on networking policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was addressing a session called "Managing the Exaflood" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was actually an optimistic gathering, where researchers presented ideas for getting a handle on all this data -- an exabyte is one billion billion bytes -- and using it productively.

Larry Smarr, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, demonstrated a method of coupling genetic sequences from ocean bacteria...

Las Vegas -- "Getting technology tools into the hands of every student and family should be standard practice. It isn't now," said the U.S. under secretary of education, Martha J. Kanter, addressing a mix of technologists and educators at the HigherEd Tech Summit here, part of the giant salute to gadgetry known as the Consumer Electronics Show. Nor are best practices for professors to use technology to improve learning standard, Ms. Kanter said: "We are losing ground. We have a lot of work to do to make faculty comfortable with technology and ways to use it."

But the under secretary was less specific about how the Obama Administration was going to help this happen. Ms. Kanter, who pushed technology programs when she held leadership positions at California community colleges, did mention the Education Department had $350-million for a grants program in best-practices innovation, but did ...

Las Vegas--Martha J. Kanter, under secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, thinks the agency is understaffed. At the HigherEd Tech Summit here, part of the vast Consumer Electronics Show, she gave a keynote address, noting her department, with "only 5,000 people," is one of the smaller government agencies and thus needs help from outside partners to bring technology to bear on higher education.

One potential partner immediately stepped forward. From the side of the room, Richard Dreyfuss—yes, the actor from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and also head of the Dreyfuss Initiative, a nonprofit group that advocates for K-12 civics classes—suggested that her department put out a call for experts in technology and education to come to Washington "and work as $1-a-year men," he said, referring to the business leaders who worked for the Wilson Administration during World War I and...

While Congress is still weighing legislation that could put $500-million into the development of open, online courses, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has stepped up to the plate. The charity is giving $12.9-million to advance technology at community colleges, improving virtual learning environments for both students and teachers.

The major goal is to bolster the academic success of students who arrive at community colleges lacking study skills, and who are under a lot of pressure to balance studying with demands of family and work. Ideally, new technologies will be intergrated into teaching and course-delivery systems, rather than added as as afterthought.

Here's who got what:

A consortium, Global Skills for College Completion, got $3.6-million to create ways to teach math and writing skills using social media and interactive technology. The consortium is a collaboration between ...

Leslie Whitaker, a guest blogger for Wired Campus, is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Previously she worked as a reporter for Time magazine.

My first experience with blogging’s potential as a teaching tool occurred last week. I am teaching a class on blogs to English majors this semester, and I asked them to blog immediately after watching a live broadcast of President Obama’s address during the memorial service for those killed at Fort Hood, in Texas. I gave them about 10 minutes and then asked them to read aloud what they’d written. I figured we’d brush up against the limits of blogging, with its inherent pressure to process and post as quickly as possible. Even though I have a thoughtful bunch of students, I didn’t expect to hear much worth saving.

I was wrong.

The first several students reacted to the murders on an emotional level....

Carl Hartung was surprised by the cellphone reception in East Africa this summer. "We were working in villages miles from electricity or running water, but we still had cell coverage," wrote Mr. Hartung, a graduate student at the University of Washington, in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

That was good, because Mr. Hartung was in rural Kenya using cellphones to help test and counsel people about HIV. He and other university researchers have developed an application based on Google's open-source mobile operating system, Android, that turns phones into vital data-recording devices: They record locations in seconds using GPS, take video and audio of patients, let counselors and patients fill out questionnaires, scan bar codes that serve as patient identifiers, and then send all these data to a confidential medical-records center in seconds.

Other devices have been tried for these tasks in...

Denver — The face of evil, projected 20 feet tall on a screen behind Lawrence Lessig, belonged to Britney Spears.

The face of good belonged to composer John Philip Sousa.

Mr. Lessig, the Harvard Law School professor, was giving a keynote address at Educause 2009. He argued that intellectual property in education had been taken over by an exclusive-rights model represented by Ms. Spears, the pop diva. That model has pushed out another one based on community collaboration—represented by the composer of "Stars and Stripes Forever," who longed for music created by neighborhood singalongs.

The "ecology of education and science," Mr. Lessig said, is inherently collaborative, and it is being strangled by copyright-law principles based on exclusivity.

It is time to fight back, he told his audience, adding: "You geeks have to become radical militant activists." Scientists and educators are...