With several men in ties staring at laptops and talking over one another into headsets around a table laden with Ethernet cables on Wednesday, the cramped room looked like a call center. In fact, it was a conference room in the U.S. Capitol building, and the men on the headsets were members of Congress.

They were at the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions, a nationwide event involving more than 750 colleges and schools. Twelve representatives and one senator cycled through Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s fourth-floor suite to participate in live Web conferences with colleges and high-school students from their home districts. The subject of the day was climate change.

“The idea that basically four people in Portland can organize something that involves 750 schools … and create video dialogues with the Capitol and Congress,” said Eban S. Goodstein, an economics...

In order to be free, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed, humans must sometimes surrender a measure of freedom.

Fred Stutzman, a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, may not have had Rousseau in mind when he created the “Freedom” application. But he does believe that to escape the siren song of social media, scholars might need to freely impose restrictions on themselves. “When there’s wireless everywhere,” he told The Chronicle, “how do we really escape the Internet?”

Mr. Stutzman’s answer is to relinquish one’s right to surf the Web to the supervision of a sort of robotic schoolmarm. Freedom is a shareware application that users instruct to disable their computers’ network adapters for a fixed period of time, leaving them unable to browse the Internet for up to eight hours.

Mr....

Though some business schools charge for the “case studies” they develop as teaching aids, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today that it is making a set of teaching materials available free online.

MIT’s Sloan School of Management has unveiled a set of case studies, videos, interactive teaching tools, and teacher’s notes on a new Web site called MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources.

The announcement comes eight years after MIT created its OpenCourseWare project, which makes instructional materials for courses available online for free.

What distinguishes the new site, according to JoAnne Yates, deputy dean for programs, is that whereas OpenCourseWare allows visitors to browse a linear series of resources and notes for a specific course, the management-school’s site allows them to search for specific “teaching artifacts”—e.g., case studies or simulation...

A new effort to increase several overseas universities’ access to cloud computing, or using Web-based resources to execute computationally intense tasks, could allow researchers there to use more sophisticated tools for field study.

IBM announced today that it had selected three universities in Qatar — Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, and Qatar University — as collaborators for its cloud-computing software. In a news release, IBM said it hoped the technology would aid in the universities’ advanced research into the region’s oil and gas exploration and production. Other uses of the technology may include the development of Arabic-language search engines.

The company also said it would be working with the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, and the Health Alliance, a consortium of seven universities in East Africa, to use cloud computing to...

Hewlett-Packard’s Innovations in Education Grants program announced today that it will give $240,000 in equipment, professional development, and cash to the 10 colleges or universities that submit the best proposals for applying technology to teaching.

The company will evaluate each proposal based on four criteria: training leaders to implement innovative approaches, creating a digital learning environment that increases academic success, involving engineering undergraduate students in research challenges, and reaching out to secondary school teachers and students.

A few years ago, the company’s Worldwide Higher Education Philanthropy gave out similar grants to institutions such as Diablo Valley College, in California, for redesigning calculus courses to take advantage of tablet PC’s and boost retention rates and grades. The current grant program is open to any two- or four-year...

Last week, a “phishing” scam struck Twitter, a micro-blogging service. It was a new problem for the latest species of social-networking site. And like most new problems involving such services, it challenged college administrators to determine how to address an issue that might affect students and professors.

As social networking has proliferated, especially at colleges, so have social-networking scams. Last month, it was a team of interlopers squatting in “Class of 2013” groups on Facebook for marketing purposes. This time, it was an Internet con artist baiting Twitter users into handing over their private log-in information.

West Virginia University’s Office of Information Technology was one college that cautioned its users about the Twitter scam, posting a brief warning on its own Twitter feed. Sarah Barnes, a Web developer for the university who posted the warning, said the...

Educause, the higher-education technology group, has released its list of top teaching and learning challenges of 2009.

The top five challenges were selected by a combination of focus groups, surveys of interested professionals, face-to-face brainstorming, and a final vote. The challenges are:

1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation. 2. Developing 21st-century literacies — information, digital, and visual — among students and faculty members. 3. Reaching and engaging today’s learners. 4. Encouraging faculty members to adopt, and innovate with, new technology for teaching and learning. 5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era of budget cuts.

Educause officials say they will now begin soliciting a volunteers to collaborate on solutions for each challenge...

The Online Education Database, or OEDb, released its third annual ranking of online educational institutions this week, prompting announcements and press releases from many of those that appeared near the top of the list.

The Houston-based OEDb, a subsidiary of DomainDev, is a for-profit company that makes money by referring visitors to the many online colleges and universities that advertise with it—which is to say that a more accurate title for the company might be the Online Education Database of Our Advertisers.

But the annual rankings are a completely separate service, OEDb founder Andy Hagans told The Chronicle this afternoon. Hagans conceived of the idea when he noticed that there were no mainstream rankings for online schools. Any perceived conflict of interest, he said, should be dispelled by the site’s thoroughly transparent methodology.

OEDb ranks the colleges...