UWIRE, a popular college-media aggregator that shut down abruptly last year, plans to resume publishing. So reports the blog College Media Matters, which claims that the resurrected UWIRE could go live as early as this week.

UWIRE compiled material from student newspapers around the country, and student newspapers in turn relied on the service as a source of national content that they could republish locally. The Web site used to be owned by CBS, but it was sold to Palestra.net, another college-news-network service, last March.

Palestra's Tom Orr hopes to re-establish UWIRE as "the main pipeline for college media's conversation with themselves and the world," reports College Media Matters. Mr. Orr sympathized with student journalists who felt "burned" by the site's demise, which he attributed to financial problems.

But the revived UWIRE now faces a new problem: competition.

Since it ...

A notorious Facebook blunder has become a boon for online-privacy advocates.

To settle a lawsuit alleging privacy violations, the social-networking giant is pledging to invest $6-million to start a grant-making foundation focused on promoting online privacy, according to a settlement made public this week. Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology's information-privacy programs, will be one of the new foundation's three board members.

Mr. Hoofnagle wouldn't get specific about the foundation's plans, because the board hasn't met yet. But he expressed excitment about the windfall to support "pro-consumer privacy work."

"I'm particularly interested in supporting groups with a strong record on consumer-privacy issues, and those who need resources to create usable privacy-enhancing technologies," he said in an e-mail message to Wired Campus.

The lawsuit stemmed...

The Federal Communications Commission will release the country's first national broadband plan Tuesday—a landmark blueprint for universal high-speed Internet access that will be eagerly pored over in some parts of academe.

"If we’re right, the FCC report will call for a new role of leadership for higher education in this whole area of broadband," said Gary Bachula, vice president for external relations at Internet2, the high-speed networking consortium for colleges and universities.

In a news release previewing the 360-page document, the FCC said on Monday that one of its goals was affordable access to ultra-high-speed broadband at "anchor institutions" like schools and hospitals. Mr. Bachula, who has joined other higher-education networking leaders in trying to shape the plan, expects that the full FCC document will declare that "there is evidence that the commercial marketplace has...

NEW YORK — The TEDxNYED Conference that took place here on Saturday was like the Lollapalooza festival for education technologists. Almost every speaker was a headliner in his or her own right.

The forum was a regional spin-off of the "billionaires-and-brains edutainment summit in California," as one participant, Dan Cohen, of George Mason University, described the mothership TED conferences and the hugely popular videos of their presentations. The theme Saturday was how new media and technology are shaping the future of education. And the speakers — including Lawrence Lessig, Michael Wesch, Henry Jenkins, Gina Bianchini, Jay Rosen, and David Wiley — each had 18 minutes to deliver what sometimes felt like a "greatest hits" snapshot of their ideas, with the chance for future online glory if the videotaped talks go viral.

In the blogging frenzy that followed the blockbuster conference,...

Lots of colleges are designing smartphone applications that make life more convenient for students by shrinking what they can already get on desktop computers. North Carolina State University today announced a new library service that carries that trend a step further, sharing campus history by taking advantage of a smartphone's ability to sense your location.

The system, called WolfWalk, alerts pedestrians to information about nearby buildings and shows them hundreds of archival photos. One of the oldest is an 1890 shot that depicts the first freshman class, when the institution was called the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts.

“Particularly on college campuses, there’s a lot of history about what happened in certain places in certain times in the past and how the campus has changed over time,” says Tito Sierra, associate head for digital library development....

It's been a good month for people who worry about the sustainability of open-education projects.

First, a Brigham Young University study found that offering free online access to distance-education course materials doesn't hurt paid enrollment, giving a boost to those who think the best business model for publishing free content is one that dangles it as bait to draw in students for paid courses.

Now many leaders in the world of open education -- a movement whose original projects were largely financed by foundation grants -- are ponying up their own cash to keep free courses thriving.

On Monday more than a dozen universities and groups pledged a total of $350,000 over five years to support the OpenCourseWare Consortium, an association that promotes the publication of free content like lecture videos, assignments, and syllabi.

The donors, listed here, include the Johns Hopkins...

A major university-led effort to produce freely available open-source student-administration software suffered a financial setback Friday, when Florida State University announced that it will pull out of the project because of budget cuts.

Florida State had signed on in 2007 as a founding member of the venture, one of several higher-education software collaborations that fall under the umbrella of the nonprofit Kuali Foundation. It joined seven other institutions—including the University of California at Berkeley, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Maryland at College Park—committed to investing at least $1-million a year to develop software for managing student admission, registration and other tasks.

In an announcement Friday, Florida State said that "massive funding cuts" had forced the university to "focus our scarce resources on sustaining the operational...

Fort Worth -- Many of Todd McCann's students suffer from a chronic disease.

Call it CRS: Can't Remember Squat.

Now they have no excuse.

Mr. McCann, an English instructor at Bay College, in Michigan, is deploying students' own favorite technology to burn away the memory fog. He blasts his classes text-message reminders using Broadtexter, a free software program used by bands to create mobile fan clubs. Rather than texting tour dates, he keeps the phones in students' pockets buzzing with regular reminders like "Paper 4 is due tomorrow."

The instructor offered the optional service in three classroom-based courses last year, embedded as a widget in the course-management system. Out of about 66 students, 45 signed up, Mr. McCann said during a talk on free tech tools at an e-learning conference that wrapped up here Tuesday. An added bonus: They don't see his phone number, and he doesn't...

Fort Worth — Individual community colleges can’t match the marketing budgets of for-profit institutions that plaster their regions with advertisements. So they’re exploring ways to fight back by going national, pooling their efforts to promote online programs in a new marketing collaboration that was announced Sunday at a distance-education conference here.

The discussions, led by the American Association of Community Colleges, represent a fresh spin on an older strength-in-numbers distance-learning vision called the International Community College, which failed to get off the ground after four years of planning.

The distance-education landscape has changed drastically since that telecourse project. Both for-profits and an increasingly aggressive group of traditional four-year colleges now often recruit by purchasing “leads” on potential students that are parcelled out by online portals –...

Careful how you use the word "Texas."

The University of Texas is objecting to a new iPhone application called iTexas, developed for the university's undergrads by an Austin start-up called Mutual Mobile. Its beef: the name.

The university has filed a complaint asking Apple to require the developer to rename the free program, saying the title is "confusingly similar" to its own, according to The Austin Chronicle. The program could get booted from Apple's store at any time. "It's a ticking clock," Tarun Nimmagadda, a co-founder of Mutual Mobile, told the newspaper.

It's not the first time Mutual Mobile employees — most of them University of Texas alumni — have clashed with their alma mater. The Austin Chronicle reports that the company's previous "UT Directory" app was pulled after the university complained about the program, which made staff and student directories easily searchable....