The University of Texas system has purchased land in the online world Second Life, betting the investment will improve teaching and research at all of its institutions.

The university system, made up of nine universities and six health centers, doesn’t have concrete plans for how each school will use Second Life. It hopes that administrators, faculty members, researchers, and students will take advantage of the virtual real estate over the academic year.

In Second Life, people create avatars that interact with one another. The avatars, which look like three-dimensional figures, can make friends, pursue hobbies, conduct business, and even practice religion.

The university and Linden Lab, which operates Second Life, say that the University of Texas is the first statewide educational system to make a concerted leap into the virtual world. Hundreds of universities use Second Life to some...

In Canada, one religious studies professor wants more followers.
   
Followers on Twitter, that is. Hoping to get students engaged in his introductory course on Islam, Christianity and Judaism, Steven Engler, a professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, will test students on news stories posted to the class’s Twitter account. He’s also setting up a discussion group on Tweetworks, a program that complements Twitter.

Students won’t be graded on their participation in online discussions, Mr. Engler said, but three midterms will each include a question that asks students to contextualize one of the news stories posted on Twitter. The response will count for 20 percent of the midterm grade.

Class starts on Monday, September 14, but Mr. Engler has been tweeting away since August. On Sept. 6, he reported: “NEWS: Holy city twist: Arabs moving into Jewish areas.” and linked to an Associated...

The operators of the .edu domain are planning to enhance security for .edu Web sites, in a move experts say is long overdue.

Once the new system is in place, work that is expected to be completed by March of next year, it should be harder for a third party with bad intentions to take control of .edu sites protected by the security system. Called Domain Name System Security Extensions, it uses a digital signature to verify that the site being visited is in fact the site it purports to be. People browsing Web sites will be less likely to be redirected to malicious sites posing as legitimate ones.

Web sites ending in .edu will be able to opt into the security system. A spokesman for Educause, a nonprofit group that operates the .edu domain in a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce, said he expects colleges and universities will quickly take advantage of it.

Virgil...

A new iPhone application created by a Harvard University professor and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student is designed to gather information from its users about infectious-disease outbreaks.

The tool was developed as part of the Health Map.org project, which collects and displays information about infectious diseases on an interactive map on its home page. Information on the map is automatically drawn from online sources of infectious-disease data, and is updated each hour.

The new application, called Outbreaks Near Me, flips that process around: Users are asked to submit information about infections themselves. Though currently only available to iPhone users, similar applications for other smart phones are in the works, said Craig Freifeld, the MIT graduate student working on the project. Over the weekend, about 600 reports were submitted, and the...

Robbed of his iPhone last week, a student at Carnegie Mellon University used a tracking program on the phone to help police officers find and arrest the robbers outside a fast-food restaurant.

Early Saturday morning, Can Duruk, a senior, was walking home when two men stopped him and asked for his wallet, according to a press release from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. One of the men showed Duruk what looked like a handgun and demanded his PIN number, while the other took Duruk’s wallet and iPhone out of his pockets.

After calling the police, Mr. Duruk used the program MobileMe to track the movements of the robbers, according to The Tartan, Carnegie Mellon’s student newspaper. MobileMe has a feature called Find My iPhone. Users can log onto a Web site to access a map, which can be updated at the push of a button, that shows the approximate location of the phone. As they headed toward an ...

Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University, may have lost his historic court case with the Recording Industry Association of America this summer, but he has become a cult hero on several pirate Web sites. And now the RIAA charges that Mr. Tennenbaum is encouraging illegal music downloading by egging on his fans via Twitter.

In July, a federal jury ordered Mr. Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 to record labels for downloading and distributing 30 songs by several artists, including Nirvana, Eminem, and the Beastie Boys. Now, it says Mr. Tenenbaum is encouraging others to illegally download music as well. On Tuesday, it filed for injunctive relief in a federal court in Massachusetts.

In August, a person upset about the court’s decision posted the list of the songs named in the case on The Pirate Bay, a Swedish file-sharing Web site, encouraging others to download them in protest. A...

Google has donated cellphones to 11 colleges and universities for use in introductory computer-science courses this fall, hoping that students will build some interesting applications for the company's cellphone software.

Each college has received 20 HTC phones loaded with Google’s Android operating system, which the company says allows students with no programming experience to create applications for sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The colleges getting the phones are Ball State University, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mills College, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Michigan, the University of San Francisco, and Wellesley College.

The program between Google and the colleges kicks off as cellphone companies prepare to release...