An article in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education covers the digital divide and its effects on tribal colleges.

While mainstream colleges pour millions into technology, “tribal colleges are finding myriad hurdles — financial, technological, geographical and cultural — in their quests to become technologically relevant and thus appealing to increasingly tech-smart, if not savvy, students,” reports Reginald Stuart.

The article offers a picture of how some tribal colleges continue to struggle with providing access to computers and the Internet. Sometimes the problem is made more difficult by the architecture of the colleges — a college in Kansas, for example, was built with sturdy, cheap cinderblock that inhibits wireless signals. More often, the challenge is simply economic: Some tribal colleges are...

What is it with the way that real-time measurement affects our personal choices — particularly with regard to environmental issues? Students who have energy-usage monitors in their residence halls, for example, end up expending less energy than their counterparts without such visual aids. (A particularly colorful monitor featured a drowning polar bear.)

Now researchers at the University of Washington have come up with another monitor that they hope will play a part in saving the planet. It’s a monitor for cellphones, and it can determine whether its user is walking or running, or riding in a car, train, or bus. The program uses cellphone-tower signals to tell if the phone’...

The Times Record News reports that a software glitch led Midwestern State University to give out too much money to students during course registration. The university is asking for its money back.

To make things worse, the students most affected by the glitch were “three-peats,” or students who were taking a course again because they had already failed it twice. (Ah, just when you thought things were going your way. …) The paper reports that glitch affected 183 students at about $300 apiece. The students were refunded money from a credit balance they had after they paid their fees, but the charge for repeating a course a third time wasn’t included. Some students were able to register for courses at $50 a credit instead of $150.

The university says that it will let the students pay...

With the latest episode of Tech Therapy, Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast had to revisit the topic of sex, secrets, and technology because so many controversies and scandals had occurred since the episode about privacy, “The Trouble With Online Sex,” ran months ago.

There was the Sarah Palin e-mail break-in, allegedly perpetrated by a college student. There was the porn scandal at New Mexico State University. There were the gay porn pictures featuring Nebraska wrestlers. There was a community-college president, a...

The phone book is a big hunk of tree. But in an age when you can look up many names and most businesses on Google and other Web sites, does it get used?

That is the question, on a micro level, that administrators at Murray State University are grappling with, according to The Murray State News. The campus phone book is 100 pages, and the university prints 4,500 a year.

“That is a lot of paper,” Linda Miller, the university’s chief information officer, told the News. “The contract of renewing the phonebooks is up, and we are deciding whether to renew the contract or cancel the paperback versions all together.”

The university has found that while residential students do not use the phone books, student workers do. —Scott ...

The turnout and results of the election indicate that a great number of people are probably happily anticipating an Obama presidency. But some industries are wringing their hands over the policies and regulations that might come out of the new White House.

Right there in the hot seat with Big Coal and Wall Street financial firms: the telecommunications industry. According to a recent story from Bloomberg, Obama has plans for them.

“AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. will probably face new Internet rules backed by Google Inc. under Barack Obama’s administration, and find it more difficult to persuade the government to approve acquisitions,” Bloomberg reports.

“The Democratic president-elect’s top technology priorities include ‘network neutrality’ policies that would bar Internet-service providers from accepting ...

The latest issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record includes an article about green-IT efforts at colleges, corporations, and civic institutions. The short article is a survey of some of the major things that are going on in green IT, including the increasing use of “dumb terminals” or “thin clients” to cut power use, a reduction in the numbers of servers that need to be cooled, and the use of videoconferencing to cut down on travel.

The article relates a story about how the College of Southern Nevada cut its data footprint in half and saved thousands by consolidating servers.

Green IT seems to be catching fire out there among techies, but...

The University of California at San Diego and the University of British Columbia are starting to work together on “green cyberinfrastructure” — computing techniques that will improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The two institutions have signed a memorandum of understanding that says they will work together on green-IT issues.

Doug Ramsey, communications director for the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or CALIT2, says the universities are also hammering out an agreement on how to share money to support green-IT research.

Green IT is becoming a hot topic, and San Diego has shown some leadership on the issue with the opening of a new supercomputer center that is designed to save energy. Research in...

Wondering what you might see when Educause kicks off tomorrow in Orlando? Wondering what the higher-ed technology organization is planning to do in the future?

As usual, the answers to life’s questions can be found in Tech Therapy. Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast talk with Diana Oblinger, the president and chief executive officer of Educause, about where the organization is going under her leadership, what issues it will address, and what people will see at this week’s conference.

Ms. Oblinger addresses some of the biggest challenges and issues that technologists face these days (cloud computing, outsourcing services, green computing) and the issues that Educause plans to tackle. Hear more below.

Simson Garfinkel takes a look at authority and sourcing in Wikipedia world with an article in the latest edition of Technology Review. He focuses on Wikipedia’s requirement to cite published sources in adding information to Wikipedia articles. Yes, with a mob-written encyclopedia, a requirement for citing published, vetted sources makes sense, he writes.

“But there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people’s written words: Many publications don’t do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right,” Mr. Garfinkel writes. “For instance, Dun and Bradstreet gets the information for its small-business information reports in part by asking those very same small businesses to fill out questionnaires about...