Daniel R. Glickman, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has spent much of the fall touring colleges across the country to preach the antipiracy gospel. But it seems his message isn’t exactly resonating.

During a recent speech at the University of California at Los Angeles, Mr. Glickman regaled about 60 students with tales about "the power of movies to change people’s lives" and warnings about the evils of theft. But when Mr. Glickman left the stage, and a screening of March of the Penguins started, a group of students voiced their opinions on the presentation—by sardonically making pirate noises. (Los Angeles Times)

Library and civil-liberties groups expressed disappointment on Thursday with a tentative Congressional agreement to renew two controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which they say erode Americans’ rights. Some lawmakers also criticized the pact and threatened to stall its passage. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Webloggers who harbor serious literary aspirations might be a relatively rare breed, but they’re about to get their own annual award: The Blooker Prize celebrates bloggers who turn their work into fiction, nonfiction, or graphic novels. The competition—sponsored by Lulu, a company that produces print-on-demand books—will net three lucky winners at least $1,000 (and perhaps some short-term notoriety).

A study by the Sloan Consortium found that a growing number of colleges are putting online more of the courses that they offer in a face-to-face setting. The consortium, an organization that promotes standards for online learning, found that more than three out of five institutions offering face-to-face undergraduate or graduate courses offer them at the same level online. The survey also revealed that more college officials see distance learning as crucial to their long-term strategies. The survey can be found at the Sloan Consortium Web site.

"I would be interested to know how the majority of institutions in higher ed deal with faculty permissions on their desktops and laptops," writes Melissa J. Miszkiewicz, director of academic computing and technical services at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. "Our school is somewhat rigid in that we only allow faculty to install software in certain circumstances. However, in other institutions that I’ve worked, the policy is far more free, and faculty are masters of their own desktop. The concern here is security – so another question is, How do institutions that allow freedom to faculty deal with security? Is it merely philosophical, or is it a difference in administrative policy structure?"

What is the situation on your campus? Share your thoughts.

Students and administrators at the University of Colorado at Boulder are reviving a debate on campus race relations after a student-government official received a threatening e-mail message. Mebraht Gebre-Michael says the message—which police have traced to a public computer on the campus—used a number of racial slurs and told her she’d be harmed if she ran for student government again.

The last two years have not been encouraging for minority students at Colorado: Last spring a number of visitors to Boulder said they were harassed during a conference for black student-government officials, and in the summer a student suffered a broken jaw after being attacked by a man who was screaming racial epithets at him. (The Denver Post)

Library representatives, law professors, consumer advocates, and representatives from the electronics, software, and publishing industries sat before a Congressional subcommittee yesterday to testify about the fair-use doctrine of copyright law. The hearing concerned a bill called the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act (HR 1201), which would allow consumers to circumvent copy-protection software for otherwise-legal uses.

Prudence Adler, of the Association of Research Libraries, said that fair use was vital to libraries’ role in preserving and disseminating materials, but that licensing controls were starting to limit librarians’ ability to fulfill that role. Jonathan Band, a lawyer speaking on behalf of companies like Google and Yahoo, said that search engines relied on fair use to provide information to the public in the form of short excerpts of text or thumbnail images. Peter A. ...

In its first major foray into academic supercomputing, the Microsoft Corporation announced on Tuesday that it would pay for new Institutes for High-Performance Computing at 10 universities around the world. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

A new Web portal promises to provide free open courseware to the public from an international group of institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a nonprofit group known as China Open Resources for Education. The portal was announced Wednesday at the World Summit on the Information Society, and was sponsored by Development Gateway Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This, along with a $900,000 grant offered by Hewlett to African teachers, is meant to provide university-quality course materials online to educators and students who might not normally have access to such courseware.

There may come a time when video-playing iPods are used to distribute all kinds of worthy educational content—including lecture vodcasts, high-tech slide shows, and the like. But for the time being, the devices are more likely to let students watch music videos, episodes of Lost, and, of course, porn.

Pornography that can fit on an iPod screen might not sound very alluring (or practical), but several adult-entertainment enterprises have already begun to release material for the devices. People who don’t want to get caught with salacious stuff on their hard drives might be willing to stash it on their MP3 players instead, industry executives reason. (The Washington Post)