The $10 laptop computer that India announced last week turns out to be something less than a computer and its cost is at least double the initial estimate, The Times of India reports.

The ministry that announced the invention last week had called it a low-power laptop computer and said the devices would be available in India within six months at a cost of just $10 apiece. The machines were to be part of an initiative to increase the number of students pursuing a higher education. But the prototype unveiled today, called “Sakshat,” turned out to be a computing device with a hard disk for storing e-books, e-journals, and other educational materials, the newspaper said.

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Can open-source and commercial software peacefully coexist at the same college? Two officials from Virginia Tech University seem to think so. During a session at the Educause conference in Dallas on Wednesday, Jeshua Pacifici, assistant director for the university’s Graduate Education Development Institute, and Kim Gausepohl, a learning systems manager, talked about how they had brought in Sakai, an open-source course-management software, after the campus had been using Blackboard software almost exclusively.

Mr. Pacifici said that when Virginia Tech began having trouble with recent versions of Blackboard, technology officials bemoaned that they did not have access to the commercial software’s computer code to fix the problems. Bringing in open source, however, made them nervous. For one thing, the buck would stop with them. If something went wrong, he said,...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory is reinventing itself to focus more on projects with practical applications, according The Boston Globe.

In changes led by a new director, Frank Moss, who took over in February, the high-tech center has been shifting its focus from multimedia and technology convergence to concerns like aging and health care. Mr. Moss told the newspaper that he wants to intensify the lab’s concentration on technologies that deal with the problems of society’s “disadvantaged, disabled, and disenfranchised,” such as $100 laptop computers, digitally controlled prosthetic limbs, and robotic elder care. And, in addition to seeking corporate sponsors, he has opened talks with philanthropic groups,...

Computers may have defeated the world’s best chess masters, but they aren’t ready to take on human poker players, says Jonathan Schaeffer, of the University of Alberta. That’s because computer scientists have not yet figured out how to write programs that can make informed decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information, he told the Canadian Press News Service.

Mr. Schaeffer, who is chairman of the university’s computer-science department and holder of a Canada research chair in artificial intelligence, was part of the team that designed Hyperborean, a computer that took top prizes a tournament for poker-playing programs, held last month by the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (

Clickers, the handheld devices similar to remote controls that are showing up in college classrooms across the country, have been embraced by some professors as a way of getting students more involved in class discussions. But some students are not convinced that the educational value outweighs the cost. At the University of Connecticut, where the devices cost about $20, a clicker required for one course may not work in another. And sometimes a clicker is bundled with textbooks, meaning students cannot purchase the device or the books independently. Administrators are looking for solutions to those problems. Professors who have adopted their use also have...

With cellphone technologies constantly changing -- and last year's must-have feature rapidly waning in coolness factor -- it's no wonder that college students change their handsets every 18 months, according to market-research estimates. But what becomes of the old phone? Tossing it in the trash is not an environmentally friendly option. Cellphone components and batteries contain lead, arsenic, and other toxins that can leach from landfills, contaminating groundwater. The University of Colorado at Boulder and a local company, the Wireless Alliance, are giving students a better option.  The partnership is placing recycling kiosks on the campus to collect discarded phones, which will be sold to the Wireless Alliance and repurposed, reused, or recycled.  Money raised through the program will go to community-development projects.