Forget tour guides. A new iPhone application may be able to replicate the quintessential college tour, minus the huge crowds and backward walking.

The application, created by a Yale University student and two high-school students, provides information on about 100 different locations on the campuses of four universities -- Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If approved by Apple, the four tours will be available for $10. The students hope to add tours of other colleges and universities as well.

People with iPhones can get information on campus landmarks if they hold their devices in front of them as they walk. Using the iPhone's tracking of GPS coordinates, the program can figure out the user's location. Using a compass, it can determine what buildings the person is facing, and then match that information with 100 key locations on campus. If the...

Abilene Christian University says handing out iPhones to its entire first-year class in 2008 has improved interaction between students and faculty members. That students use the devices so much for academic purposes, the university says, proves that the move was not just a way to get the Texas institution noticed—though it certainly doesn't mind grabbing headlines.

In a report as shiny and user-friendly as the iPhone itself, the university provides page after page of evidence that it says demonstrates that the iPhone program works. First-year students, all 957 of them, received either an iPhone or an iPod Touch last year, as did about 1,000 members of this year's incoming class. Students in last year's class reported using the devices for academic purposes nearly once a day. Student approval of the project stayed fairly steady over the course of the year.

"If this didn't have a whole...

Researchers at the University of Utah have created new iPhone applications that help people study anatomy and medicine.

One of the applications, called AnatomyLab, allows students to view a body in different stages of dissection. Researchers dissected a cadaver and photographed it at 40 different stages of the process.

“It’s aimed at students who want to learn anatomy,” Mark Nielsen, a biology professor, said in a statement. “There’s no substitute for real dissection, but a lot of students in the undergraduate world don’t have access to cadavers in anatomy lab. So we tried to provide them with a realistic lab setting on their phone.”

Another application lets users look at three-dimensional images of medical scans, and a third in development would let people analyze large image files on their iPhones.

PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free lectures online. 

Their site, called Forum Network, says it makes thousands of lectures available, including the Harvard professor Michael Sandel's take on calculating happiness in a lecture called "How to Measure Pleasure," and a discussion by a Northeastern University professor, Nicholas Daniloff, about the difficulties of reporting in Russia in a lecture called "Of Spies and Spokesmen: The Challenge of Journalism in Russia."

The Web site also includes material featuring political figures and business executives. The offerings from PBS and NPR add to video and audio already available on sites such as YouTube EDU and from individual universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University.

YouTube EDU, the Web site for video channels from universities, has recently added content from institutions in Europe and Israel.

Forty-five colleges and universities from those areas, including the University of Cambridge and distance-learning institutions like the Open University of Catalonia, now have channels on the site.

About 200 American and Canadian institutions also have YouTube EDU channels, where viewers can watch professors' lectures, famous people speaking on campuses, and even half-time antics at major college-football games. The site was launched in March.

On its blog, YouTube also announced a language menu that allows viewers to receive content only in their language of choice.

An administrator at Amherst College has put together a list of numbers that demonstrates how the role of technology is changing at Amherst, and perhaps at other colleges. Peter Schilling, director of information technology, models his list after the index in Harper's magazine, which comments on politics and culture.

Mr. Schilling has published the index for the second year in a row. Some of his findings from this year:

Between the 2005 fiscal year and the 2009 fiscal year, the decrease in the total number of outgoing phone calls placed by college employees: 117,823 calls, or 25 percent.

In the same period, the decrease in the total number of incoming calls: less than 2 percent.

Percentage change in employee calls to the IT help desk in the last five years: 60 percent increase.

Subscribers to the Amherst College YouTube channel: 86 (September 2009).

And from last year:

Number of...

A beauty school in Illinois is suing a student for his "defamatory" comments on a Facebook site that encouraged students to vent about their instructors.

The Salon Professional Academy of Elgin, Ill., says Nicholas Blacconiere created a site called Tspa RobinHood that looked similar to TSPA Elgin's Facebook page because it used the academy's logo. The suit, filed in July, also says that he posted libelous comments about school officials on the site.

Print-outs of the Facebook page included in the suit show several posts by "Tspa RobinHood." The site says it gives "the students a voice, because what happens when we need to be heard? Nobody gives a s___." It encourages students to send messages to the site, which it says will then be posted anonymously.

The site uses an obscenity to say that a dean at the school, Aaron Aven, has sex with "teenage girls" and implies that he is HIV...

Making free e-textbooks available to students does not affect sales of the print books, a new report from a publicly funded group in Britain suggests.

But the managing director of a major publishing company is challenging those findings, saying sales of print materials were not as high as expected during the period when e-books were available for free.

A draft of the report was presented at a seminar in London this week. From November 2007 to December 2008, students at 127 British universities were able to access 36 e-books at no charge. According to the report, sales for the titles fell by 18.7 percent from 2006 to 2007, before the study began. From 2007 to 2008, after the study began, sales for the same titles fell 13.7 percent.

The study was conducted by JISC Collections, a service that negotiates with publishers and owners of digital content for British higher-education...

Students at several colleges were able to read each other’s e-mail messages because of a software bug in Google Apps, though the company says the problem has been corrected.

Google officials acknowledged that the mixup affected a handful of students at a handful of colleges, though they sought to downplay the incidents and provided few details. The colleges were transferring students’ accounts from their current servers to Gmail, a process that is spread out over several days. A glitch in that process made e-mail messages available to the wrong users in some cases.

One of the colleges, Brown University, said that 22 students were affected as it was transferring about 200 accounts from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail last Friday. After figuring out that the problem was not internal, Brown officials say they contacted Google on Saturday. On Monday, the company temporarily disabled the...

Move aside, Cosmo.

Three students at Harvard University have created an online magazine, Her Campus, for female college students, hoping to fill what they see as a gap in the crowded world of women's magazines.

Its content, written by college students, covers topics like style, love and health. A column written by two students at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, promises to help readers decode cryptic texts sent by men. Another article offers readers tips on dealing with being "sexiled" from their shared dorm rooms.

“There really isn’t any media that targets college women directly,” said Stephanie Kaplan, co-founder and a Harvard senior, adding that magazines college students usually read, such as Seventeen or Glamour, don’t address life on campus.

About 20 students contribute to the site, and two companies currently advertise on it.

The founders, who met while working at an ...