Students can combine their passion for music and video games with a composition course at Berklee College of Music, part of a push by colleges to cater to a booming video-game market.

The Boston Globe reports that the college is one of several teaching students to prepare video games' musical scores, an option that has emerged in the last decade. Berklee now offers several courses in video-game scoring, and a summer program in music for video games.

Berklee first offered a course exclusively on game audio about four years ago. Michael Sweet, an associate professor who teaches video-game composition, lists one of his goals on his faculty profile as building "the John Williams for video games in the next generations."

Mr. Sweet, a 1990 Berklee graduate, told the Globe that video games were popular when he was a student but not considered a career possibility. "Now, it's a juggernaut,"...

The nation's leading e-textbook seller reported a 400 percent increase in sales for 2009 from the year before, the company's executive vice president said Tuesday.

CourseSmart does not disclose exact values, but Frank Lyman said students who have used the company's e-textbooks number in the hundreds of thousands.

"It has enormous value to students not to lug a printed textbook around," Mr. Lyman said. "They can log in anywhere and access their textbooks, and for a lot of students, that's a better solution."

About 42 percent of students have either purchased or at least seen an e-textbook, according to "OnCampus Research Student Watch 2010," a 16,000-student survey released by the National Association of College Stores in fall of 2009. That's an increase of 24 percentage points from 2007.

Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the association, said an increase could come as e-textbook...

A new distance-learning program says it is the first accredited, degree-granting, online college open only to union members.

The new program, called the College for Working Families, is a joint venture between the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the National Labor College, and the Penn Foster Education Group (now owned by the Princeton Review).

The National Labor College already offers in-person training and some online classes as the only accredited higher-education institution specifically for unions. The new online program would combine the college's on-the-ground resources with online tools to offer programs in subjects including health care and business administration.

Leaders of the effort are surveying union members on what courses they would find useful, and some classes should begin in the fall, said William Scheuerman, president of the National Labor College.

The online college would charge...

Barnes & Noble's college-bookstore division has entered the growing field of textbook rental for college students, the bookseller announced Monday. After testing the waters with a pilot program, the service has expanded. It will allow students to rent textbooks through campus-bookstore Web sites at 25 college campuses or through the Barnes & Noble stores on those campuses. Students can pay for the service in several different ways, including financial aid and campus debit cards. The rental service will compete with other lenders such as Chegg and CourseSmart.

Universities are increasingly trying to reach students with iPhone applications for campus information such as bus schedules and course catalogs.

But what about students whose phones aren't so high-tech?

Jeff Brown and Ron Vetter of University of North Carolina at Wilmington have collaborated with a team of students to create applications accessible from any phone using simple text messages. Mr. Vetter is a professor of computer science and Mr. Brown is a professor of mathematics.

Some of the free features for students include grade retrieval, text responses to financial-aid questions, movie listings, shuttle-bus locations, and menu information from a local cafe.

"Students are telling us what applications they want," said Mr. Vetter. "They're helping us develop what information they want, and we're adding them."

Mr. Vetter said his team became interested in developing an application...

Facebook is friending college researchers -- and helping pay for their education -- in the hope that academics will help the company improve its popular social network.

The company on Friday announced a new fellowship program to support five doctoral students, who will be asked to work with Facebook developers to solve current challenges in Internet technology and social media.

Recipients will receive tuition and fees for the 2010-11 academic year, along with money for travel, a $30,000 stipend, and other benefits.

"We believe that the academic community plays a central role in addressing many of our most challenging research questions, and we created this fellowship to extend our involvement and collaboration with the academic world," said Greg Badros, Facebook's director of engineering, in a statement.

Applicants must be full-time doctoral students enrolled in American universities...

Some librarians in Ohio are worried about the future of one of the nation's top state resource-sharing networks.

The librarians say that over the past two months they have noticed unusual outages in services run by the Ohio Library and Information Network, or OhioLINK. The group is a consortium of 88 Ohio college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio. OhioLINK is used both as a way to share university materials online and to negotiate prices for outside resources.

Databases run by OhioLINK have occasionally been temporarily unavailable, frustrating scholars and students doing research.

Victoria Montavon, dean of the University of Cincinnati Libraries, said the problems were worrisome because grant-supported projects run by her library rely on OhioLINK to function, and that outages effectively block users from key archives.

"This is a centerpiece in providing resource...

Students at a technology-training company operating in 14 states are scrambling for refunds after receiving an abrupt notice that classes would be discontinued.

The company, ComputerTraining.edu, shut down its 22 campuses on Christmas Eve, after the financier BB&T announced plans to freeze the company's line of credit and bank accounts, as well as seize its assets, according to a statement on the training company's Web site. Students received the news in an e-mail message on New Year's Eve from ComputerTraining.edu, which bills itself as "Microsoft's Largest IT Academy."

"Students have lost their education, employees have lost their jobs, and shareholders have been bankrupted," the company's statement said.

A BB&T spokeswoman, Cynthia Williams, said that the bank has been in talks with ComputerTraining.edu since the summer and is disappointed an agreement could not be reached....

A simple mistake by a new employee at the Johns Hopkins University's history department led to the disclosure of e-mail addresses for 106 job applicants, causing awkward moments for those whose employers did not know they were hunting.

The employee sent an e-mail message to all applicants for two faculty positions in early modern European history early last month, and accidentally put their addresses in the "copy" field rather than the "blind copy" field, said David Bell, dean of faculty in the university's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. That meant everyone who got the message saw the addresses of the other recipients.

The department sent an e-mail message to the same group several days later apologizing for the gaffe, Mr. Bell said.

Mr. Bell found out about the error after looking at the Web site Academic Jobs Wiki at Wikia, where outraged posters wrote comments such as: "Don't...