According to Gloucestershire College, in England, Facebook and other social-networking Web sites can do more than provide a platform for vacation photos, favorite quotes, and status updates; they can help reduce dropout rates, the BBC reports.

The media-curriculum manager at the college, Perry Perrott, says that with the advent of social media, students have been better at keeping in touch with faculty members, which has lead to a “significant improvement in retention.”

After seeing how popular social-networking sites were with students, Mr. Perry says the college decided to embrace the technology as a cost-free way to further engage the campus.

The BBC also points out that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says sites like Facebook have a “positive effect on motivation.”

Research Bits is an occasional roundup of technology research. This week's topics deal with digital ants, seeing the world from an animal's point of view, and collages of the future.

Ants: an Inspiration

Ants. We’ve watched them march around their eponymous farms, we’ve seen them finish our picnic leftovers, and we’ve had them crawl up our pant legs. Now they are being used by researchers at Wake Forest University as inspiration for a new tool that fights computer worms and viruses, The Daily Telegraph reports.

After watching the actual insects fight off interlopers using “swarming intelligence,” a team of software-security developers at the university created their own “digital ants” (not to be confused with computer-animated film Antz).

In this program, a digital ant that detects a software bug will alert his compatriots for reinforcement, just like when the real critters find a...

Professors are past the days when most resisted technology. Now the question for many professors is how to make the most of the latest tools.

Two tech-happy English professors have started a group blog called ProfHacker, which provides tips for making the most of Internet tools for teaching and research. With 10 regular contributors, the blog—the brainchild of Jason B. Jones, a professor at Central Connecticut State University, and George H. Williams, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate—is getting 10,000 page views a week. The Chronicle spoke with Mr. Jones about the new site.

Q. With so many technology blogs out there already, why did you feel the need to create another?
A. We don’t think of ProfHacker as just a tech blog. It’s a site that wants to look at the intersection of productivity, technology, and pedagogy in higher education. There are blogs that...

In an effort to engage former students with events on campus, Colgate University is using Webcast technology to allow even the most remote alumni to watch and participate when prominent writers visit the school.

The program -- called Living Writers -- is hosted by the streaming Internet television platform Livestream.

So far there have been two lectures, one by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz and another by the husband and wife writers John and Carrie Brown. Tim Mansfield, the director of alumni affairs, said 75 people watched the entire lecture virtually.

While anyone can watch the broadcast, and even pose questions for the authors in a chat room, Mr. Mansfield says the real goal is to connect with former students.

“There’s a real appetite for intellectual engagement among our alumni,” he says. “They miss the classroom and the Colgate liberal-arts experience, and now we have...

In an effort to bring down the cost of learning materials, a new project will allow Florida college students to get digital versions of some of their textbooks free of charge, the St. Petersburg Times reported on Thursday.

The undertaking, called Orange Grove Texts Plus, is being spearheaded by the University Press of Florida with support from the state’s digital library database.

The project houses 124 books that students can either read free online, or -- if they prefer ink and paper -- have printed and bound at a much cheaper price than the original, the Times says.

The article says the average yearly cost of textbooks for Florida students exceeds $1,200 dollars.

While the project aims to decrease this burden for students, Meredith Babb, director of the press, told the Times that she expected some objections from professors who can earn large amounts of money publishing nationally...

Henry Farrell thinks academic conferences go on too long.

Mr. Farrell, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, uses a blog post for The Monkey Cage to call for a system that would keep presentations at the American Political Science Association moving along—and that would cut them off after five minutes, or perhaps 10 as a compromise.

Mr. Farrell takes the idea from Ignite, a Seattle company whose software keeps slide shows inexorably plugging forward at 15 seconds per page for a total of five minutes. Mr. Farrell says this approach has become popular at technology forums, and could easily be adopted in academic settings.

“I don’t think I have ever seen a conference presentation at APSA that couldn’t have been improved by being cut down to five minutes with inexorable advance,” he writes. “Indeed, I don’t think I have ever given a presentation that could...

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a computer program that they say can deduce whether or not someone is gay by doing an analysis of his Facebook profile, The Boston Globe reports.

According to The Globe, two students in a course on Internet ethics and law designed a program that looked at the profile information—including gender and sexuality—of a person’s Facebook friends and analyzed the information to predict the person’s sexuality. The students called the program “Gaydar.”

The students taught their computer program to make predictions by looking at profile information from profiles of 1,544 men who identified themselves as straight, 21 who said they were bisexual, and 33 who said they were gay. Then the students did the same analysis for 947 men who did not report their sexuality. The MIT students had no means of confirming their software’s conclusions...

College researchers work on some out-there technology projects. They may not lead to everday products, but they can help us rethink mundane facts of life. Here are three recent projects that caught our eye, in what is the first of an occasional series:

Eye of the Beholder

If you are jealous of the way the Arnold Schwarzenegger robotic character could see information about the world around him superimposed over whatever he was looking at in The Terminator, you might want to pay attention to the work of Babak A. Parviz at the University of Washington.

Mr. Parviz and his team of students have developed a contact lens with a built-in computer display, and it's powered by wireless radio waves. For now, this prototype cannot do anything nearly as complicated as displaying a man’s leather-jacket size as he plays pool in a smoky bar, but Mr. Parviz is trying to prove that some such...

An 18-year-old student at St. John’s University, in New York, has been arrested after allegedly posting messages on Facebook in which he threatened to kill people on the campus with a “Virginia Tech attack,” referring to the 2007 campus shootings that killed 32 people, law-enforcement officials said today.

Radames Santiago is being charged with making a terroristic threat, and if convicted he could face up to seven years in prison, according to a written statement by Richard A. Brown, the district attorney in Queens. The messages were posted on Monday and Tuesday.

Officials say Mr. Santiago posted messages on Facebook saying he was going “crazy” and wanted people to “watch CNN or something every day after” he went on his killing spree.

Mr. Santiago told detectives he was drunk and depressed "about everything” when he posted the Facebook messages, the statement said.

Dominic Scianna,...

Search giant Google Inc. announced today that it has purchased reCaptcha, a company that began as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. ReCaptcha develops online word puzzles to serve both as Web-site security and to help digitize printed text, and Google says it will use it in projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers began their reCaptcha project in 2007 in the hope of killing two birds with one stone. The method takes the distorted word puzzles aimed at keeping hackers and spambots from logging into Web pages, and turns them into micro-archiving machines.

The project works with the understanding that one thing humans can still do better than computers is recognize text. Luis von Ahn, the computer scientist who created the technique along with his colleagues, realized this when he first invented the original Captcha...