Last year College Sports Television, CBS Sportsline, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association reached a deal that let anyone watch Division I men’s basketball tournament over the Web—as long as they were willing to pay a $19.95 subscription fee. But next March, Web users will be able to watch games online for free: CBS representatives say they expect to make money by charging online advertisers, not customers. (The Journal News)

In the public eye, what does a meth addict look like? What is the face of Halloween? SwarmSketch.com—a Web site that resembles a Wiki for amateur artists—intends to find out.

The site, which was created about three months ago by Peter Edmunds, a student at the University of Canberra, bills itself as a "collective sketching of the collective consciousness." Every week it randomly chooses a popular search term—"Xbox 360," for example, or "Daylight Saving Time"—and asks visitors to sketch that phrase. The results can be elucidating, and surprisingly artistic: "I have no idea how 1,200 people agreed that the face should be looking into the distance at three-quarter perspective," says Mr. Edmunds of the site’s "Faces of Meth" sketch. (The New York Times)

2005 has seen more than its share of breathless reports about classroom "clickers"—devices that let a professor pose questions and have students’ answers appear immediately, and anonymously, on the instructor’s computer screen. But there have been few serious studies about which academic goals those tools are best suited to achieve. A team of professors at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, hopes to fill that gap: The researchers are using clickers in large classes and working on a report about the devices’ advantages and drawbacks. (The Ring)

To help its cash-strapped technology office pay for $200,000 worth of wireless-networking hardware, Orange County Community College is running a raffle rather more ambitious than most academic fund raisers. For $5 apiece, entrants can buy chances to win a pricey custom-built motorcycle that the university bought from Orange County Choppers, a local company that has earned national renown for its starring role in the reality-television show American Chopper. Motorcycles outfitted by the company typically run upwards of $50,000. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Most schoolchildren consider the Internet an invaluable research tool. But their parents don’t think Google, Wikipedia, and the like are doing much to help their kids’ grades, according to a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future.

The report, "Surveying the Digital Future," is the fifth in an annual series of studies published by the center. This year’s survey finds an unprecedented number of computer users switching from telephone modems to broadband connections and turning to the Web for political information. And while more than four in five students consider the Internet "very important" or "extremely important" to their school research, according to the report, three out of four parents say the Internet has had no effect on their children’s grades.

With a special election on a $250-million higher-education bond fast approaching, college officials in Arkansas are pointing to the promise of the National LambdaRail, a high-speed research network,  in an effort to secure votes. The bond would provide money  to connect all of Arkansas’ public institutions to the network, which is being laid across the country—and which could have a transformative effect on the state’s economy, officials argue. (Arkansas News Bureau)

The brouhaha over Sony’s controversial CD copy-protection software includes some interesting substories—like the role that college researchers played in exposing the company’s clumsy attempt to fix its mess. After Sony came under fire for selling discs that surreptitiously installed insecure software on users’ hard drives, the company offered CD buyers a program that promised to remove the offending software. But John Alex Halderman, a 24-year-old graduate student at Princeton University, discovered that the new program opened up an even bigger security hole that the one it was intended to patch.

Mr. Halderman is no stranger to dubious digital-rights technology: In 2003 he was nearly sued by SunComm Technologies Inc., a maker of CD-encryption software, for writing in an academic paper that the company’s antipiracy technology was easily breached. Mr. Halderman is, according to Wired...

A technology company that makes software that records presentations made by professors and others today unveiled an online directory of lectures made with its product. The software, called Mediasite, allows users to watch a video recording of a lecture while viewing the slides that were shown during the original live presentation. Some 7,000 presentations are listed on the site.

A year ago, few people had ever heard of a "podcast." Now the term’s ubiquity has won it "Word of the Year" honors from the New Oxford American Dictionary. The audio files are used for "everything from NASCAR coverage to NPR’s All Things Considered," says the Oxford University Press. "Podcast," defined as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player," will be added to the dictionary in its next online update, in early 2006.

Duke University has discovered that iPods are a hit in class. A year after the university gave all freshman students the little white music players, the number of students using iPods for class work has quadrupled, and the number of courses incorporating iPods has doubled, the university announced.

This year Duke gave a free iPod to any undergraduate student who enrolled in a course requiring one. For spring 2006, the university expects 1,200 students to use the iPods in class, up from 280 last year, and 42 courses will incorporate the technology, up from 19 last year. More types of courses are using iPods as well, the university says. Beyond foreign languages and computer science, medical physics, mathematics, and dance courses are using  the devices.