Denver-- "This is another sign of the culture war between faculty and IT," said a vice president for technology and administration at a medium-sized state university. The official, musing after a session on budget crises here at the Educause 2009 technology meeting, said professors fought hard to keep "low performing" programs in the curriculum, while his university just got the news they would have to lay off 50 or 60 people by Christmas. By low performance, he meant programs that had low enrollment or produced relatively few graduates.

"They say, 'Isn't music, or philosphy, important to the university, and to life?'" he said, arguing that decisions about cuts should be made on the basis of what is central to his university's mission and that faculty want to keep all programs going while, across the country, nearly half of IT departments responding to the newest Campus Computing...

Denver -- Continuing education continues to evolve, and e-learning platforms presented here at the Educause conference are vying for attention from universities with promises of enhanced engagement of "lifelong learners" and alumni.

Building on Drupal, the open-source content-management system, a company called GoingOn built a platform for a University of Pennsylvania psychology course in the institution's continuing-education program. The psychology department had graduates who had become psychologists who wanted to learn more to improve their professional practice, as well as learners who wanted to improve their lives. Nearly a thousand student took the course, called "Foundations of Positive Psychology." The interface allowed students to form their own "affinity groups" based on topics of particular interest. And the entire platform was able to draw student information from...

What did civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy have to do with the Apollo moon missions? Find out next week, when the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds its first virtual conference for educators. The date is November 10, and the time is from 11 AM to 5 PM Eastern time.

There are six sessions with Smithsonian curators, designed to help instructors use materials about the space program in lessons. One, for instance, will focus on the cultural impact of Apollo imagery. (A version of a photo of astronauts saluting the American flag was used as an MTV logo for many years, for instance.) The politics and history of the program will be discussed in another session, which you will have to view in order to learn about the civil rights connection.

Open access is in the air. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a national laboratory managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, just announced that all of its scientists have to place their published journal articles in OpenSky, a new digital repository that will be open to anyone who wants to read those articles.

Well, not completely open. "The repository will be free and available to the public, but access to the works it contains will depend upon the policies of their publishers," the laboratory and its managing corporation said in a written statement.

What that really means, says Mary Marlino, director of the center's library, is that the repository will be open, but some articles will be closed. "We will honor publishers' embargoes," she says. Major journal publishers -- in this field, they are the American Geophysical Union and the American...

By linking some 1,400 processors at five universities, Indiana University intends to create a virtual supercomputer in the form of a network called FutureGrid. The project just garnered $10.1-million dollars in grant support from the National Science Foundation. But just why do universities need a new network when current ones, like TeraGrid, are still running? Geoffrey C. Fox, a professor of informatics at Indiana and director of FutureGrid, says in an interview on the blog Next Big Future that TeraGrid is a current workhorse, providing computing for current projects. But FutureGrid is supposed to develop new ways of doing things with more advanced technology, something that an active network with daily responsibilities to projects and users cannot do. FutureGrid will create software to facilitate cloud computing, so individual institutions will not have to build their own networks and ...

The National Endowment for the Humanities is going semi-transparent with its grants. Its new Web site allows people to search for recipeints of NEH money by name, by field of inquiry, by date of award, or by institution. Do you want to know who is getting $30,000 to work on a cultural history of Russian food? It is Darra J. Goldstein of Williams College.

Utah Valley State College got $123,456 for a project on "Fostering Coherence in the Humanities through History of Civilization Study."

The site, called the Funded Projects Query Form, is still a little opaque, however, because it does not provide quick links to the grant recipents and their proposals. Darra J. Goldstein, for instance, requires an Internet search to reveal that she is a professor of Russian at Williams as well as the editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture.And searching the NEH Web site for details on...

National American University is no longer worried about Naughty American University. The former, which operates 16 campuses in the United States and offers online courses, has dropped a lawsuit against the latter, which was operated by a pornography company, according to the Associated Press. The university had charged that the naughty site was "nearly identical" in appearance and impression to its own Web site and infringed on its trademark. The news organization reports that an attorney for the university said the naughty site's owners agreed to cease and desist.

Now the only confusion will be between National American University, at www.national.edu, and Northern Arizona University, at www.nau.edu.

A number of academics believe that writing on the Internet, in all its varied forms, can improve student prose. Mark Bauerlein is not one of them. The professor of English at Emory University noted in his Brainstorm blog post on Saturday that "we don't see any gains in reading comprehension for 17-year-olds on NAEP exams, the SAT, or the ACT," referring to the battery of standardized tests taken by teenagers. If Twittering, texting, and the like really improved writing, Mr. Bauerlein argues, surely the tests would show some evidence.

He has made this point before, in a June 11, 2009, Chronicle article by Josh Keller about studies of writing on the Internet. He called claims of Internet-derived writing prowess "either grandiose or flatulent."

That same article, however, described the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year study of nearly 14,000 pieces of student writing, done for class...

Information-technology managers at colleges need to cut their purchasing budgets to save money -- at the same time they need to purchase energy-efficient equipment, also to save money. According to a survey by CDW-G, a large company that buys technology for government and higher-education institutions, some are managing to do both.

It's not a random sample, or a large one, but it does provide one view of the college IT world.

The survey included 152 IT managers in higher education with purchasing power. Of those people, 54 percent said they had reduced technology-related energy costs in 2009, compared with 38 percent in 2008.

The managers identified three major sources for the cost savings. The first is buying liquid-crystal-display monitors. No. 2 is getting employees to shut down equipment when not in use. And the third is purchasing devices with the federal government's Energy Star...

It may not be great as a phone--don't scream, Apple fans, but the iPhone has taken some knocks on call quality and battery life, though the latest version has improved--but the iPhone is getting more and more fans as a college-textbook reader.

CourseSmart, an e-textbook supplier, has come out with a reader app that draws on a library of 7,000 college texts from a dozen publishers, including McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Pearson, and Elsevier. The app is free, and the e-books seem to be cheaper than hardcovers. The idea of looking at a diagram of a molecule on a small screen might be off-putting, but the app does have a decent zoom and scroll feature that makes such things easier. You still can't make notes in the margins, though.

For algebra students who need extra help, Pearson Higher Education has rolled out its AlgebraPrep app, with tutorials and mini-tests you can take at the student...