A new court ruling may challenge the ability to make anonymous comments online.

Last week, in a case involving a former police officer from the University of California at Davis and a blog called the Vanguard of Davis, a Sacramento judge ruled that anonymity on the Internet is not absolute, The Sacramento Bee reports.

Calvin Chang, the former police officer, filed a lawsuit against the university claiming that anonymous comments on the blog were a breach of a settlement he had reached with the university to end an earlier lawsuit.

After David Greenwald, who runs the blog, reported on the first lawsuit, commenters posted material that Mr. Chang believed might have come from university insiders trying to discredit him.

In an effort to learn the identity of the commenters, Mr. Chang sought to subpoena Google, the former host site of the blog. But Mr. Greenwald filed a motion to quash...

Students at far-flung campuses can now participate simultaneously during lectures with the push of a button.

The University of British Columbia recently completed a trial of a new satellite polling system by i>clicker, which sells student-response systems. The new system allowed students on three campuses, all part of the university's Distributed Undergraduate Medical Program, to respond to questions in a simulcast lecture . I>clicker hopes to make the product widely available by January 2010.

Clickers allow teachers to electronically “poll the audience” (as in TV game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). They first appeared in classrooms about five years ago as a means to increases student participation in large lecture courses. The company claims that this is the first time that such devices have been used to bridge multiple locations.

Kathy Gaul, an associate professor in the...

In an effort to support alternatives to traditional scholarly publishing, five major research universities announced their joint commitment to open-access journals on Monday.

The institutions—Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley—signed a compact agreeing to the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals.

While conventional journals require institutions to pay subscription fees to access articles, open-access publications make their material free to the public, thus aiding libraries forced to cut back during difficult financial times, officials at the universities believe.

John M. Saylor, associate university librarian for scholarly resources and special collections at Cornell, says it is a much healthier research...

Winners of a student video contest used everything from ninjas, to bandits, to techno music to teach others about computer safety.

The contest, which concluded this week, was put on by several education and computer security groups: the Higher Education Information Security Council, the National Cyber Security Alliance, CyberWATCH, and the ResarchChannel (a nonprofit founded by research and academic institutions to share their work with the public). Their goal is to raise awareness and increase computer security in colleges and universities across the country. Ten winners, whose work educational institutions have the right to distribute as public service announcements, were announced as part of National Cyber Security Awareness Month.

The Gold Winner of the Training Video category, called “Cyber Security Awareness” and made by Nathan Krochmal of Grand Valley State University, used the ...

Google is touting its growing influence in the area of college e-mail systems. To celebrate the start of a new academic year, the company unveiled a Web site that makes it clear just how widespread its presence is in higher education.

The site features a map that looks like a big game of Risk in which Google owns all the pieces. It shows the 145 colleges that have signed up to have Google Apps Education Edition as their official campus e-mail service.

The Official Google Blog announced the site in honor of the now five million students who have "gone Google" and agreed to use the platform. According to the blog, the number of students who have registered for the service has risen by 400 percent since last year.

As for Google's major competition, Microsoft's Live@edu, a spokeswoman for that company would not specify how many college accounts it has.

With a new $10.1-million grant from the National Science Foundation, Indiana University at Bloomington plans to build an experimental network to link supercomputers at campuses across the country to help scientists tackle large-scale reseach problems.

The project aims to create a distributed supercomputer by linking some 1,400 processors at five universities. The new network will be called FutureGrid.

Bradley Wheeler, the university's vice president for information technology, says that the goal of the project is to figure out the best way to do such networking of high-end computers. The ability to create faster machines by linking several supercomputers online could help projects such as modeling climate systems or comparing DNA segments.

"This whole project hinges on the question, What’s next?" Mr. Wheeler said. "We are creating an experiment factory to discover the best...

A new video game created by Colorado State University’s Bighorn Leadership Development Program teaches users about the challenges of balancing the state budget, a process so arduous that it may even cultivate a little empathy for the governor.

The game is a bit dry -- more like an introductory civics class than Grand Theft Auto. But it allows users to monkey around with the budget to try to solve an estimated deficit of about $800-million. With all information made public, the governor's office says it will look at desires of its constituents.

Worried about the fact that most Coloradans are uninsured? Increase health-care spending by $1.23-billion and cover them. Want to fully fund community colleges? Add another $100-million to the higher-education pie wedge.

But users beware, each maneuver comes with various caveats. Because of numerous spending limits and constitutional amendments...