Wired Campus now runs a Twitter feed with links to its latest stories, along with news about technology in higher education from other publications. The Wired Campus Twitter feed is updated regularly throughout the week by the Chronicle's technology staff. Readers can submit ideas for stories by tweeting them and including the tag @wiredcampus or by sending a direct message on Twitter.

Physics students at North Carolina State University can get their introductory-level textbooks for free thanks to a new program by the college.

Each year about 1,300 students at North Carolina State take Physics 211 and Physics 212. Beginning this semester, the university's libraries and physics department have offered the courses' textbook online for free. Students can also print pages of the text or buy a printed copy at the university's bookstore for about $45.

Michael A. Paesler, head of the physics department at North Carolina State, said his department wanted to find a cost-effective way for students to get course material and felt an online option might work well. The department hopes to offer more material online, including an optics text written by Mr. Paesler to be used for a course next semester.

"This is just the way students nowadays communicate and apply learning," Mr....

University of Georgia police officers have arrested an employee accused of trying to solicit money from a student who, the employee said, illegally downloaded music. The employee purportedly solicited money in exchange for not turning the student in to university authorities.

Dorin Lucian Dehelean, a security analyst for the university's Enterprise Information Technology Services, was responsible for identifying students and faculty and staff members who illegally downloaded copyrighted material on the institution's computer network.

Eric Dellinger, administrative lieutenant for the University of Georgia Police Department, said Mr. Dehelean called the student on January 25, said he knew she had downloaded music on the network, and offered his silence in exchange for money. The police, citing the fact that the investigation is still under way, decline to say how much money Mr. Dehelean ...

Stephen Kinsey wanted to find a more personal way to connect inventors at his university to businesses that might be interested in their creations.

So he let researchers do the talking, explaining their work in videos on a YouTube channel created at the University of Maryland at Baltimore last month.

Mr. Kinsey, technology-licensing officer for the university's department of commercial ventures and intellectual property, said the short videos aren't intended as a hard sell. Rather, they're an opportunity to let researchers shine in a way they might not in written descriptions of their work.

"Their passion for the technology comes through," he said. "A lot of times they're giving you a little more than you're going to get in a very specific technical description."

Mr. Kinsey said several universities have contacted him because they are interested in developing similar YouTube channels...

A large library reference publisher has acquired one of the world's biggest online libraries of copyright-cleared books, and hopes to add to both collections.

Gale, a division of Cengage Learning, announced that it had acquired Questia Media last week, with undisclosed financial terms. Questia, a subscription-based online information service, lets users access more than 75,000 books and millions of journal, magazine and newspaper articles; Questia Classroom is a course-management system tied to that online material.

John Barnes, Gale's executive vice president of strategic marketing and business development, said Questia subscribers will still be able to use all of the service's regular features. He also said the merger will expand an existing agreement to give each service some of the other's useful materials, such as e-books or journal articles.

Judith Axler Turner, editor of The...

The University of California at Los Angeles has stopped posting copyrighted videos on course Web sites after complaints from an educational-media trade group, leaving other colleges worried about repercussions.

The Association for Information and Media Equipment contacted the university in the fall, alleging that it had violated copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, which were accessible only to students then enrolled in specific courses. The university temporarily stopped using online videos beginning this semester and is negotiating with the trade group.

Current copyright laws allow "fair use" exceptions for teaching and research, and one specific exception in copyright law lets instructors use legally made audiovisual material in face-to-face teaching activities. The university argues that posting the material to password-protected sites falls under these exceptions ...

Washington and Lee University dancers Anna Rogers (kneeling), Stephanie Brown (standing, left), Jennifer Ritter (standing, center) and Hannah Kate Mitchell pose with Wii remotes, which they used to transfer their motions into sounds during several performances. Kevin Remington/Washington and Lee University

Performance halls usually frown on patrons whipping out their phones to check Twitter in the middle of an event.

But at a dance concert at Washington and Lee University, using Twitter isn't just allowed; it's encouraged.

During a set of performances at the university at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday, the W&L Repertory Dance Company will have a student running a live Twitter feed with context and commentary for dance pieces. One performance will also feature dancers using Wii remote controllers to create the music accompanying the piece. William H. Meadows, a...

A leading publisher in health-science textbooks is the latest to add interactive tools to online books and one of the first to offer e-textbooks without an expiration date.

Elsevier introduced the Pageburst service this week, with interactive features such as social networking, integrated multimedia, and incorporated grade-book tools. Daniel Behan, the company's product director for e-books, said health-science students were a good market for interactive, permanent e-textbooks because they often need to reference multiple texts throughout their education.

Flipping through pages of material every time they need information is too time-consuming for students, Mr. Behan said.

"Obviously we aren't going to fundamentally change student behavior," he said, "Students today aren't going to act the way that students did 15 or 20 years ago, where they were willing to sit down and read."...

California researchers have developed a system they believe could stop the most common kind of spam from reaching people's in boxes.

Most spam e-mail messages are transmitted using a few infected computers that use a template-based system. The new system works by analyzing the small changes in messages that spammers make to slip past spam filters, according to the team from the University of California at San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif.

Researchers looked at 1,000 e-mail messages generated by a software bot and reverse-engineering the template. Knowing that template, researchers could block spam with total accuracy without letting legitimate messages get caught in the filter.

Christian Kreibich, a research scientist from the International Computer Science Institute, said any sort of software using the system will probably not appear in...

A nonprofit corporation created to find new uses of information technology in education debuted on Monday.

Congress authorized the creation of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies in 2008. The New York Times reports that the center could be giving out grants by fall.

The center received $500,000 in funds from the Department of Education--far less than the $50-million that advocates requested when Congress authorized the center in 2008. The center also plans to solicit private funds.

Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of NBC News and PBS, and Newton N. Minow, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recommended a multibillion-dollar trust that would function as a "venture capital fund" to do research on learning technology in 2001, according to the Times.

The center was included in the reauthorization of the Higher...