The Chronicle’s 2008 Technology Forum is still several months away, but the time to register is now: Sign up by the end of the day, and you’ll save $200 on registration.

The conference — which will be held February 24-26 at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay in Tampa, Fla. — will bring together the most influential leaders in American higher education for two days of conversations about how technology is affecting every aspect of colleges and universities. Speakers and panelists will include Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant and host of The Chronicle’s Tech Therapy podcast.

Libraries are facing a series of immense challenges: the explosion of information, a rapidly changing technological environment, shrinking budgets, pitched battles over copyright, a new world of information literacy, and continuing deficiencies in old-fashioned literacy.

On top of it all, academic libraries face a crisis of graying leadership. Young librarians, hip or not, will eventually be the people dealing with these issues.

This month The Chronicle contacted eight librarians under 40 and asked them a series of questions about the future of their profession, including: What will happen to the book? How will battles over copyright play out? What do you love and hate about librarianship? Read the librarians’ responses, and listen to their comments.

The Internet has proved its value as a self-publishing tool, but has it actually been good for writing — or for writers? 10 Zen Monkeys posed that question to 10 authors and scholars, and their responses are often quite revealing.

“The short answer is yes,” says Mark Amerika, an associate professor of art at the University of Colorado at Boulder, before issuing a caveat: “We probably need to expand the concept of writing to take into account new forms of online communication as well as emerging styles of digital rhetoric.”

But Mark Dery, a professor of media criticism and literary journalism at New York University, warns against “this ghastly notion,” propagated by some bloggers and Web 2.0 enthusiasts, “that every piece of writing is a ‘conversation.’”

“It’s a no-brainer that writing is a communicative act, and always has been,” says Mr. Dery. But the professor ...

Planning on building a campus in Second Life for your university? Make sure your calendar’s open. Building an island for the University of New Orleans took “more time than I ever expected,” said Merrill L. Johnson, associate dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts, in a Chronicle chat this afternoon.

“I have a funding proposal out that will allow us to use commercial builders for the final build,” said Mr. Johnson. “Our main building is in fact a mansion that I bought at [a Second Life] store for 25 real dollars. It has been configured to hold classes, offices, display areas, etc.”

In addition to that functional space, New Orleans’s foothold in Second Life also includes a digital sandbox where professors can play. “This opportunity is important in acclimating faculty and staff” to the virtual world, Mr. Johnson said.

For more advice on Second Life, read the complete transcript of ...

Plenty of American colleges now tell freshmen they must bring laptops to campus, but a growing number of Chinese institutions are doing just the opposite: They’re prohibiting first-year students from having computers of their own.

Nanjing, Zhejiang, and Shanghai Jiaotong Universities have all recently enacted computer bans aimed at preventing freshmen from becoming addicted to Web surfing or computer-game playing, according to the Beijing News. The idea, apparently, is that first-year students don’t have much self-control: Once they become sophomores, they’re allowed to buy machines.

It’s worth noting that some of the institutions actually boast impressive technology programs. A team of students from Shanghai Jiaotong, for example, took first prize in the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2005 International Collegiate...

Jayant Agarwalla, a 21-year-old Indian college senior, and his brother, 26-year-old Rajat, didn’t realize how popular the free online version of Scrabble they developed would become when they created it in 2005. Now that their game Scrabulous has more than 950,000 registered users, and over 340,000 active users everyday, will the Agarwallas put it behind a pay wall? No way, they say, because they love the game too much.

“Keeping it free was the primary reason we developed this game,” says Jayant Agarwalla, who had just enrolled at St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata when he and his brother developed Scrabulous. The brothers used to play Scrabble on another site until it started charging users in 2004. “So when we developed our version we thought it is such a beautiful game and why should we charge to play it?” he says.

The Agarwallas put Scrabulous on their own site in 2006, but their version ...

How desperately do many African colleges need improved Internet access? At many institutions, the current connections are so spotty that campus presidents trek to Internet cafes just to conduct business.

If top administrators don’t have reliable Web access, it’s a safe bet that faculty and students aren’t getting that access either, says Calestous Juma, director of the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “The result,” Mr. Juma writes in Business Daily Africa, “is a digitally isolated Africa that cannot effectively educate its students and conduct quality research.”

The near-extortionate cost of bandwidth in Africa has proved to be a major impediment to progress, and African governments haven’t stepped in to help: Most national leaders “have abdicated their role in providing digital infrastructure to universities,” Mr....

Even after they fended off a Senate proposal that would have forced some colleges to buy antipiracy tools, many campus officials were in no mood to celebrate: It was only a matter of time, they said, before the House of Representatives brought up a similar measure.

They were right. Late last week, two Republican representatives — Rep. Ric Keller, of Florida, and Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, of California — introduced their own proposal intended to combat music and movie piracy on campus computer networks. The measure is very similar to the Senate proposal, made in July by Sen. Harry M. Reid, a Nevada Democrat and Senate majority leader, as an amendment to the renewal of the Higher Education Act.

Like Mr. Reid’s amendment, the House proposal calls on the U.S. secretary of education to identify the 25 institutions that received the most notices identifying cases of copyright infringement of...

This week The Badger Herald, the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s student newspaper, profiles “Elizabeth,” one of the growing number of college students who have received pre-litigation notices from the Recording Industry Association of America. The piece is well worth reading: It sheds a lot of light on how the notices, which encourage students to settle file-sharing claims out of court, are putting colleges in sticky situations.

In Elizabeth’s case, the university seemed to be doing everything right. In March, Wisconsin received 16 of the pre-litigation notices, each intended for a different student. Instead of just forwarding the letters to the students, campus officials convened a small meeting during which they encouraged the students to seek legal counsel (made available free through an affiliate of the university’s law school) instead of settling quickly out of court.

According ...

The Recording Industry Association of America has scored a big win in its first ever civil trial against a peer-to-peer piracy suspect.

A Minnesota jury ruled yesterday that Jammie Thomas, from Brainerd, Minn., owes Capitol Records $220,000 for sharing 24 songs on KaZaA, the once-popular file-swapping network. Ms. Thomas has denied the piracy charges, but the jury rejected her argument that someone else could have posted the files using her own KaZaA screen name and Internet-protocol number.

At CNET News, Declan McCullagh points out that Ms. Thomas may have been stung by a few facts specific to her case. For one thing, her KaZaA screen name — “tereastarr” — happened to be a name she used elsewhere online, so jurors may have had no doubt that the RIAA had found the right person.

Even if the verdict against Ms. Thomas doesn’t have much value in predicting future trial results, it has plenty...