Yesterday I listed a few flip-flops by leading thinkers chronicled in a new anthology, What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (Harper Perennial). Whether universities were really that great was one of them. But there are more.

One of the major things that bright minds have rethought is that the Internet will be a boon to humanity. Here is why:

It does not fight authority. Nicholas Carr, who wrote the recent best seller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, used to believe the Internet would shift the bulk of power to the little people, away from big companies and governments. But “its technical and commercial working actually promote the centralization of power and control,” he says. Although the overall number of Web sites has increased from 2002 through 2006, the concentration of traffic at the 10 most popular sites has grown from 31 percent to 40...

Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you get things right the first time. That’s the premise behind What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (Harper Perennial), a new anthology. In it, 150 “big thinkers” describe what they now think they were wrong about earlier in their lives. Much of this has to do with technology and education. Among the highlights:

Ray Kurzweil no longer thinks that intelligent aliens exist. The oft-cited futurist and inventor, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and in making reading machines for the blind, says that conventional thinking holds there should be billions of such civilizations and a number of them should be ahead of us, “capable of vast, galaxy-wide technologies. So how can it be that we haven’t noticed” all of the signals they should be creating? “My own conclusion is that they don’t exist.”

Roger C. Schank used to say “we would have...

Let’s see: President-elect Barack Obama needs to find money to fix a spiraling recession, bail out the auto industry, revamp health care, fight and possibly end two wars, create jobs, develop new energy sources, and combat terrorism—and now two higher-education organizations want him to focus on improving broadband access across the country.

Today Educause, the education-technology consortium, and higher-education network provider Internet2 announced that they have joined the U.S. Broadband Coalition. The coalition consists of high-tech companies, labor unions, state and local governments, consumer advocates, and many others who want bigger Internet pipes laid across the country, and their basic argument is that better access will be an engine for economic growth.

In a statement, Educause president Diana G. Oblinger said that America’s colleges have prospered because of the benefits...

A federal judge has ruled against a former student who sued Millersville University of Pennsylvania for denying her a degree in education in connection with an online photo of her drinking, The Washington Post reported.

The former student, Stacy Snyder, sued Millersville in 2007. A year before, the nearby high school where Ms. Snyder was student-teaching had barred her from its campus days before the end of her semester-long assignment. Prior evaluations had criticized her competence and professionalism in the classroom, the legal decision says, but the school’s discovery of a photograph of Ms. Snyder on MySpace — with the caption “drunken pirate” and a note alluding to her strained relationship with her supervising teacher — precipitated the decision to end her assignment.

That prevented Millersville from awarding Ms. Snyder a bachelor’s degree in education. Instead, the university...

Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast discuss the future of library buildings on the latest edition of Tech Therapy. The Athenaeum, the new library at Goucher College that will feature not only books but treadmills, is the initial focus of the discussion. Libraries are increasingly all things to all people, and planning needs to reflect on that. “As you are planning library spaces, you need to find ways to bring nuance and agility into the conversation about what the library will become,” Scott says. “You need to stay away from saying the library will be all one thing or the other, or we’re going all electronic or going all paper, or whatever.”

Stir-crazy doctoral students who want diversions from their dissertations have a new option: “Dance Your Ph.D.”

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is sponsoring the project, a contest inspired by a wildly successful one last year at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, in Vienna.

“The human body is an excellent medium for communicating science — perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting,” says the contest’s Web site. This year’s “Dance Your Ph.D.” is open to anyone with or in pursuit of a Ph.D. in science or related fields, according to the AAAS.

All contestants must upload to YouTube a video of a dance performance depicting their research. So far, there’s some stellar lindy hop and elegant ballet. In one video, a woman in fringed bell-bottoms hula-hoops with fire to Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round.” It’s a fresh...

When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced this week that it would ramp up its grant-making to increase college graduation rates, community-college officials applauded the news. An infusion of new money? Hallelujah.

Campus-technology experts may have even more reason to get excited. That’s because innovative uses of technology will be one of the focuses of the grant-making, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The foundation says it will look for new technology products that produce large improvements in learning and completion rates. It is also seeking to finance “student-centric” learning platforms.

The foundation’s goal is to double the number of low-income people earning post-secondary degrees. Community colleges are a target of its efforts, part of a larger plan to spend $3-billion on education over the next five years.

Rio Salado College, in Arizona, was...

Have you ever wished for a personal reference librarian, an information guru to point you to the most reliable sites whenever you search the Web? A new search-engine project aims to simulate something like that. The trick? Weighting search results so that librarians’ picks rise to the top.

Called Reference Extract, the project is being developed by the Online Computer Library Center and the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington. OCLC is an international cooperative that shares resources among more than 69,000 libraries in 112 countries and territories. A $100,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is covering planning costs.

According to the project proposal, the search engine “will be built for maximum credibility by relying on the expertise and credibility judgments of librarians from around the globe.”

One of the...

Orlando, Fla. — Cloud computing is very much in the air here at the Educause educational-technology meeting. Everyone is talking about the benefits of using software kept someplace on the Web, rather than on your desktop.

Everyone, that is, but Anthony Salcito, Microsoft’s general manager for U.S. public-sector education. “We want people to have the best of both worlds,” he said over lunch here. “Flexibility is key. We want scientists to be able to start a Word document in a shared workspace with colleagues in a cloud, and then get on an airplane, where they don’t have access to the Web, and finish it on a laptop.”

So Microsoft is offering extensions of its Office suite to do just that. The company has also created a cloud-based program called Live Mesh. With the free service, people can synchronize files on a Web site with those on their PCs’ desktops, their Macs, their iPhone...

The top tech-smart community colleges have been named by the Center for Digital Education and the American Association of Community Colleges. The center conducted a survey to highlight colleges that provide a high level of information-technology service to students and faculty. The survey examined colleges’ offerings in such areas as online admissions, student access to transcripts and grades, information security, campus-security alerts, and online-library capabilities.

Institutions were placed in three categories, based on the number of students enrolled in 2007. The top three winners in each category were: 7,500 or more students: Montgomery County Community College, Blue Bell, Pa. Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale, Va. Florida Community College, Jacksonville, Fla.

3,000 to 7,500 students: Laramie County Community College, Cheyenne, Wyo. Darton College, Albany, Ga...