A poll released today by the Associated Press and mtvU gives insight on the stress that social networks and text messaging can cause college students.

The two media organizations teamed up to conduct a "technology and mental health poll" of 2,207 undergraduates at 40 colleges, and found a group with many Facebook friends but few they feel comfortable reaching out to in a crisis. For instance, 40 percent say they have at least 500 friends on Facebook but hardly interact with most of them.

About 90 percent of students surveyed said they used Facebook and sent text messages to friends in the previous week. However, not everyone was excited about these modes of communication. About a quarter of them said they would be relieved if they shut off their cellphones and computers, while 57 percent said a social-media blackout would make them more stressed.

And many students said they felt the...

Universities that grant doctoral degrees often have significantly faster Internet connections than other colleges and universities, and the bandwidth gap is expanding, according to a recent National Science Foundation survey.

The survey found that in 2008, the most recent year that data is available, nearly half of doctorate-granting institutions in the United States had bandwidth speeds of 1 gigabit per second or faster, compared with 25 percent of nondoctorate-granting institutions. A year earlier, 39 percent of doctoral institutions offered at least a 1 gigabit-per-second connection, compared with 20 percent of other universities.

That did not surprise Greg Jackson, vice president for policy and analysis at Educause, a higher-education technology group, who was not concerned about the gap. He said institutions with intense research demands are more inclined to invest in advanced...

Colleges will soon have to pay full price when setting up virtual campuses in Second Life. Yesterday Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, announced that they will end their generous educational discount as of January 1, 2011.

Linden Lab officials did not return calls from The Chronicle for further information.

Aaron Walsh, director for the Immersive Education Initiative, which provides more than 3,000 educators with open access to virtual worlds, says the announcement is consistent with other recent changes by the company. Though Mr. Walsh says there are other virtual world technologies that institutions of learning can utilize, some colleges have made heavy investments in Second Life and may have difficulties switching services. He says he is consulting with members of the initiative to move virtual campuses elsewhere.

Sharon Stoerger, an instructional-design consultant at the...

Twitter is getting more popular with professors. But they're largely using it for a purpose outside the classroom—sharing information with peers, according to a recent report about Twitter in higher education published by Faculty Focus.

Of the 1,372 people surveyed this year—the majority of them professors, but also some administrators and other college employees—35.2 percent were using Twitter. That's a nearly 5 percent increase from 2009. The survey found that Twitter was most popular as a way for people to share information with colleagues and get news in real time. Less popular were teaching uses like communicating with students and using Twitter as a learning tool in the classroom.

The report comes as other researchers are discovering that Twitter can have classroom benefits. Reynol Junco, who studies social media as an associate professor of academic development and counseling at...

Just when you thought college gossip sites like JuicyCampus had disappeared, more college students are posting salacious, unsubstantiated gossip about their peers on a similar Web site called CollegeACB. (The initials stand for Anonymous Confession Board.) Colleges are again pondering two questions: whether they should ban the site, and whether doing so is a freedom-of-speech violation.

Peter Frank, CollegeACB’s creator and a Wesleyan University student, told The Chronicle in an e-mail that the site got more than 10 million page views from 250,000 unique users so far in September. Viewership has shot up fivefold since JuicyCampus shut down 19 months ago, according to figures Mr. Frank gave to the Wesleyan student newspaper.

That kind of heavy student use was too much for Millsaps College.

Millsaps blocked access to the site a month ago after student leaders suggested a review of the...

The former information-technology director at Valley Forge Christian College in Pennsylvania was sentenced to two years probation in federal court Wednesday after defrauding the college. He got the institution to purchase computer equipment at artificially high prices and in return received kickbacks from the equipment vendor.

The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader reported that Craig Stirling had conspired with officials of Intellacom Inc. for two and a half years. Mr. Stirling convinced the college to buy Intellacom equipment at an inflated price. The company would then pay the IT chief a portion of the inflated price, according to The Hazleton Standard-Speaker. Mr. Stirling pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud in May.

U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo ordered Mr. Stirling to pay back the college $27,202 to cover the uneccesary costs and serve the first six months of his sentence on ...

Everybody agrees that communication outlets like Facebook, instant messaging, and texting are creating new rules for dating. But people can't seem to reach a consensus on exactly what the new rules are, says Ilana Gershon, an assistant professor of communication and culture at Indiana University at Bloomington who studied student dating for her new book, "The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media."

For example, should the dumper or the dumpee be the first to break the news on Facebook that it’s over? One of Ms. Gershon’s students insisted the latter, and that’s what all her sorority sisters thought, too. But the "dumpee first" rule clearly isn't universal: Another student discovered her boyfriend had not only broken up with her but was in a new relationship—all through her Facebook news feed.

"I was interested in seeing how people used technology designed for connection" in...

The University of Kentucky is hopping on the geotagging bandwagon, with a new Facebook Places initiative that the institution hopes will start a campus discussion about online privacy.

Facebook Places is a feature that allows registered users to reveal their real-life location by smartphone or laptop, which then appears in their status to all their “friends.” The concept doesn’t stray far from predecessors Gowalla and Foursquare, well, besides Facebook's 500-million-plus users worldwide.

Kelley Bozeman, Kentucky's director of marketing, said the social network’s wide appeal is what prompted her to launch a campaign just days after the popular site announced the feature—at the same time the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California released a statement criticizing it for overlooking potential privacy problems.

Now, six wooden pointers resembling the Places logo are...

Lots of colleges are experimenting with e-book readers. St. John’s College is fighting them.

At a recent meeting, the faculty of the liberal-arts college's Annapolis campus voted "to discourage students from loading up Homer or Aristotle on their Kindles or iPads and bringing them to seminar," said Rosemary Harty, the college's communications director.

The faculty stopped short of banning the devices, Ms. Harty said in an e-mail to The Chronicle. But professors made sure the college now has a policy that says that faculty members are "concerned that electronic reading devices also may present a distraction," and students can be asked to keep them out of the classroom.

Professors worry e-readers will draw students' attention away from classroom discussions at the college, known for a Great Books curriculum that requires students to read more than 100 texts before graduation. The...

Professors have experimented with assigning technology fasts for their students—by discouraging gadget use for five days, for example, or rewarding extra credit for a semester without Facebook. 

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is going one step further with a “social-media blackout.” Starting Monday, the Pennsylvania institution will block Facebook, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, and MySpace on the campus network for a week. Faculty and staff members will be affected as well as students.

“Telling students to imagine a time before Facebook is like telling them to imagine living in a world with dinosaurs,” said Eric D. Darr, Harrisburg’s executive vice president and provost. “It’s not real. What we’re doing is trying to make it real.”

By blocking Web sites—instead of just discouraging use—the university will give its entire community a shared experience, Mr. Darr said. ...