Arlington, Va. — At what point does the volume of historical scholarship get in the way of our ability to make sense of history?

At The Chronicle Technology Forum on Monday, Andrew J. Torget, director of the digital scholarship lab at the University of Richmond, argued that we have already exceeded that point. He said that if a person were to read one book a day for the rest of his life, he would not even begin to approach the number of books that Google has already scanned into its database from college libraries. There is just too much information out there.

The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around the country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online....

Ohio University has settled a lawsuit with two former information-technology administrators, paying them a total of $90,000 because the university improperly failed to disclose some records related to an investigation of a data breach three years ago. Thus concludes a saga fraught with litigation, finger-pointing, and the perils of technology.

The university discovered in spring 2006 that holes in its network security system had left hundreds of thousands of files—including medical records and Social Security numbers for students dating back decades—exposed for more than a year. It fired the plaintiffs, Todd Acheson and Thomas Reid, after an audit from an independent company placed the blame on their shoulders.

However, a university Administrative Senate panel concluded after an investigation that the university had unfairly scapegoated the two administrators, and that William F....

Harvard University plans to stop printing its course catalogs, faculty and student handbooks, and the Q Guide—which publishes the results of each year’s course evaluations—after this semester, The Harvard Crimson reports. Starting in the fall, these guides will be published exclusively on the Web.

The move will save “tens of thousands of dollars,” according to The Crimson. Officials say it is also a practical decision that the university had been considering for several years before the recession prompted general belt-tightening. The course catalog, after all, “is significantly out-of-date before the first copy rolls off the presses,” according to Barry Kane, registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The online system will be much more dynamic, said Jay M. Harris, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, in a statement. The university has several new tools in the works,...

Separate surveys conducted recently on two college campuses returned mixed signals on the sorts of capabilities students desire from their mobile devices.

One survey, conducted by Michael Hanley, an assistant professor of journalism at Ball State University, found that 27 percent of respondents on his campus reported owning a smartphone—a mobile device with advanced capabilities, like an iPhone or BlackBerry—as opposed to what nationwide surveys have determined to be the national rate for working adults (19 percent). That study used a voluntary-response sample of 314 Ball State students.

Another survey, orchestrated by Chuck Martin of the University of New Hampshire’s school of business and economics, polled 707 students across the university’s six colleges about how they use their mobile devices and what new features they think would prove most useful.

The results were startling...

Students nonplussed by the absence of certain friends from their Facebook news feeds in the last month may have the church calendar to blame. During the season of Lent—a 40-day Christian holiday during which celebrants traditionally abstain from selected indulgences as a gesture of piety—some students at Texas Tech and elsewhere have reportedly sworn off social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The Lenten season began in late February and ends on Easter, which is April 12. The pope has lauded such Web sites in the past for helping to strengthen friendship and understanding, but many students acknowledge that they offer hazardously convenient ways to waste time. –Steve Kolowich

A plan to connect public schools, universities, and business in Idaho with a high-speed broadband network may be delayed after the State Legislature cut the project’s seed money out of its annual budget, the Associated Press is reporting.

The Department of Administration had requested $3-million from the state for the 2010 fiscal year—a sum it hoped to more than triple with federal matching funds and private foundation money—to increase broadband access across the state. This would involve building an “Idaho Education Network”—similar to one in neighboring Utah—that would allow learning institutions to swap interactive videos, among other things.

Although Mike Gwartney, the department’s director, had requested a 69-percent increase from this year’s allocation, the bean counters stymied him, trimming the agency’s take by 1.7 percent instead. –Steve Kolowich

The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of shutting down all of its public computer labs as part of an effort to cut costs.

In an explanation published on the university’s Web site, information-technology officials say that students’ changing habits have rendered the public labs obsolete. A survey conducted last fall revealed that 99 percent of new students brought their own laptops to the campus. And while the labs are still heavily used (students spent 651,900 hours in the labs last year), internal data indicated that 95 percent of the time those students used the lab computers to surf the Web and read and compose text documents—tasks that officials say they could easily do on their own computers.

“In these budget times, we have to distinguish between providing essential services and providing ones that are merely convenient,” said James L. Hilton, vice president ...

Technology is changing the way students learn. Is it changing the way colleges teach?

Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre.

While colleges and universities have been “fairly aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few decades is altering our pedagogy.”

To help get colleges thinking about how they might adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, called the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.

Taking their own advice, they have outfitted the handbook with a wiki function that will allow readers to contribute their own additions.

I...

Some academics may deride video games as mindless escapism, but Mary Flanagan and her collaborators are trying to push the medium into service as a tool to educate gamers on pressing social issues.

Ms. Flanagan—who is a digital humanities professor at Dartmouth College—and her colleagues with the Values at Play research project design video games that seek to engage players with the real world, rather than distract them from it. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation and Microsoft, the project aspires to “harness the power of video games in the service of humanistic principles, or human values, knowing that their work can have a tremendous and wide-ranging impact on our world,” according to its Web site.

Ms. Flanagan’s latest creation, called Layoff, is a puzzle-style game (similar to Solitaire or MineSweeper) aimed at exposing the outrages of the financial crisis and...

The number of students enrolled in computer-science programs rose for the first time in six years, says a new report.

Data from the Taulbee Survey, an annual poll by the Computing Research Association, reveals that enrollment jumped 6.2 percent this year among students majoring or intending to major in computer science in the United States and Canada. The data include candidates for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.

Top programs, like the ones at the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University, have been reporting increases in enrollments in recent years, but this report makes it official: The computer science major is back.

“It definitely appears that U.S. computer-science departments are replenishing the freshman and sophomore ranks with larger groups than they are graduating as seniors,” researchers wrote in the report.

While the enrollment bump is an...