Las Vegas -- "Getting technology tools into the hands of every student and family should be standard practice. It isn't now," said the U.S. under secretary of education, Martha J. Kanter, addressing a mix of technologists and educators at the HigherEd Tech Summit here, part of the giant salute to gadgetry known as the Consumer Electronics Show. Nor are best practices for professors to use technology to improve learning standard, Ms. Kanter said: "We are losing ground. We have a lot of work to do to make faculty comfortable with technology and ways to use it."

But the under secretary was less specific about how the Obama Administration was going to help this happen. Ms. Kanter, who pushed technology programs...

Las Vegas--Martha J. Kanter, under secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, thinks the agency is understaffed. At the HigherEd Tech Summit here, part of the vast Consumer Electronics Show, she gave a keynote address, noting her department, with "only 5,000 people," is one of the smaller government agencies and thus needs help from outside partners to bring technology to bear on higher education.

One potential partner immediately stepped forward. From the side of the room, Richard Dreyfuss—yes, the actor from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and also head of the Dreyfuss Initiative, a nonprofit group that advocates for K-12 civics classes—suggested that her department put out a call for experts in technology and education to come to...

While Congress is still weighing legislation that could put $500-million into the development of open, online courses, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has stepped up to the plate. The charity is giving $12.9-million to advance technology at community colleges, improving virtual learning environments for both students and teachers.

The major goal is to bolster the academic success of students who arrive at community colleges lacking study skills, and who are under a lot of pressure to balance studying with demands of family and work. Ideally, new technologies will be intergrated into teaching and course-delivery systems, rather than added as as afterthought.

Here's who got what:

A consortium, Global Skills for College Completion, got $3.6-million to create ways to teach...

Leslie Whitaker, a guest blogger for Wired Campus, is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Previously she worked as a reporter for Time magazine.

My first experience with blogging’s potential as a teaching tool occurred last week. I am teaching a class on blogs to English majors this semester, and I asked them to blog immediately after watching a live broadcast of President Obama’s address during the memorial service for those killed at Fort Hood, in Texas. I gave them about 10 minutes and then asked them to read aloud what they’d written. I figured we’d brush up against the limits of blogging, with its inherent pressure to process and post as quickly as possible. Even though I have a thoughtful bunch of students, I didn’t...

Carl Hartung was surprised by the cellphone reception in East Africa this summer. "We were working in villages miles from electricity or running water, but we still had cell coverage," wrote Mr. Hartung, a graduate student at the University of Washington, in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

That was good, because Mr. Hartung was in rural Kenya using cellphones to help test and counsel people about HIV. He and other university researchers have developed an application based on Google's open-source mobile operating system, Android, that turns phones into vital data-recording devices: They record locations in seconds using GPS, take video and audio of patients, let counselors and patients fill out questionnaires, scan bar codes that serve as patient identifiers, and then send all these data to a confidential medical-records center in seconds.

Other devices have...

Denver — The face of evil, projected 20 feet tall on a screen behind Lawrence Lessig, belonged to Britney Spears.

The face of good belonged to composer John Philip Sousa.

Mr. Lessig, the Harvard Law School professor, was giving a keynote address at Educause 2009. He argued that intellectual property in education had been taken over by an exclusive-rights model represented by Ms. Spears, the pop diva. That model has pushed out another one based on community collaboration—represented by the composer of "Stars and Stripes Forever," who longed for music created by neighborhood singalongs.

The "ecology of education and science," Mr. Lessig said, is inherently collaborative, and it is being strangled by copyright-law principles based on exclusivity.

It is time to fight back, he told his audience, adding: "You geeks have to become...

Denver-- "This is another sign of the culture war between faculty and IT," said a vice president for technology and administration at a medium-sized state university. The official, musing after a session on budget crises here at the Educause 2009 technology meeting, said professors fought hard to keep "low performing" programs in the curriculum, while his university just got the news they would have to lay off 50 or 60 people by Christmas. By low performance, he meant programs that had low enrollment or produced relatively few graduates.

"They say, 'Isn't music, or philosphy, important to the university, and to life?'" he said, arguing that decisions about cuts should be made on the basis of what is central to his university's mission and that faculty want to keep all programs going while, across the country, nearly half of IT departments responding to the newest...

Denver -- Continuing education continues to evolve, and e-learning platforms presented here at the Educause conference are vying for attention from universities with promises of enhanced engagement of "lifelong learners" and alumni.

Building on Drupal, the open-source content-management system, a company called GoingOn built a platform for a University of Pennsylvania psychology course in the institution's continuing-education program. The psychology department had graduates who had become psychologists who wanted to learn more to improve their professional practice, as well as learners who wanted to improve their lives. Nearly a thousand student took the course, called "Foundations of Positive Psychology." The interface allowed students to form their own "affinity groups" based on topics of particular interest. And the entire...

What did civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy have to do with the Apollo moon missions? Find out next week, when the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds its first virtual conference for educators. The date is November 10, and the time is from 11 AM to 5 PM Eastern time.

There are six sessions with Smithsonian curators, designed to help instructors use materials about the space program in lessons. One, for instance, will focus on the cultural impact of Apollo imagery. (A version of a photo of astronauts saluting the American flag was used as an MTV logo for many years, for instance.) The politics and history of the program will be discussed in another session, which you will have to view in order to learn about the civil rights connection.

Open access is in the air. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a national laboratory managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, just announced that all of its scientists have to place their published journal articles in OpenSky, a new digital repository that will be open to anyone who wants to read those articles.

Well, not completely open. "The repository will be free and available to the public, but access to the works it contains will depend upon the policies of their publishers," the laboratory and its managing corporation said in a written statement.

What that really means, says Mary Marlino, director of the center's library, is that the repository will be open, but some articles will be closed. "We will honor publishers' embargoes," she says. Major journal publishers -- in...