Charles A. Wight, associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah, joined the Tech Therapists recently to talk about the growth in online education. At the University of Utah, online education was at a “hobby level” for the past 10 years. But this spring the proposals for online courses had tripled, and Mr. Wight suspects this is a trend for the future.

“Right now, we teach about 5 percent of our credit hours in fully online courses,” he says. “I think in the next few years that will triple to 15 percent, then it will level off.”

“We have to be pretty careful,” he says, “because the people who are doing this are the early adopters and people who are into technology anyway. … As this becomes more mainstream, we have...

A handful of universities are gearing up for a contest to reduce power use among computer users on campus, and there is still time to join the contest if you are interested in participating. The contest, called Power Down for the Planet, is sponsored by the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a nonprofit group devoted to reducing energy use in computing.

Pat Tiernan, executive director of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, says that information-technology devices consume up to 3 percent of the power generated in the United States. Personal computers make up some 40 percent of the total power draw from technology. There are a billion personal computers on the market today, and that number may grow to 2.5 billion within six years. “The need to focus on the problem now is immense,” Mr. Tiernan says.

These days, facilities staff members are constantly immersed in sustainability, what with their roles in planning campus construction, dealing with campus energy systems, and supervising odds and ends like campus waste — all of which are directly tied to sustainability priorities.

The average chief information officer is fairly removed from this world — and that’s perhaps why “green IT” is getting attention much later than more mainstream sustainability issues. Only recently have people really started paying closer attention to the power use and waste generated by campus computing.

One of the first steps in getting a green-IT movement going on campus is to get the facilities manager talking to the CIO, says Warren Arbogast in the latest episode of Tech Therapy. At...

Yesterday, we passed along an arresting story from The Sunday Times, which said that two Google searches and boiling one kettle of water both generated about the same amount of greenhouse gases.

In response to the story, Google deployed its public-relations machine almost faster than the search engine could yield results to the 13th most popular search of the day, “teacher slept with boy 300 times” (84,900 results in .53 seconds).

“As computers become a bigger part of more people’s lives, information technology consumes an increasing amount of energy, and Google takes this impact seriously,” said a statement on the official Google blog, posted the...

How many kettles of water have you boiled today?

That might seem like random question for the Wired Campus, but it certainly conjures a picture of the energy used to bring water up to a whistling, scalding 212 degrees.

Now consider this: Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University who researches the environmental impact of computing, says that two Google searches and bringing a kettle of water to boil generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide. About 200 million Google searches are performed every day. That’s a lot of tea.

The calculations were part of a story in The Sunday Times that looked at computing, energy consumption, and environmental impact. The story noted that Gartner had caluculated that the IT industry generated about as...

It was a very good year for Tech Therapy, The Chronicle’s technology podcast. Actually, to call it a technology podcast is a bit misleading. It’s often really a show about management and communication, efficiency and psychology.

That said, in 2009, Tech Therapy’s co-hosts, Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast, plan to take on an array of techie topics, like cloud computing and energy efficiency in technology. If there is something you want them to talk about, write in at techtherapy@chronicle.com.

But the most popular episodes of 2008 didn’t really have technology at their core. They were more about hiring, leading, scandal, and, of course, libraries. Thank goodness for librarians. Anything and everything The Chronicle publishes about them is tremendously popular.

So here...

This new building at Utica College houses a “sensitive compartmented information facility,” or SCIF. Just you try to hack in, pal. (Photo courtesy Utica College)

Utica, N.Y. — I am standing in a room that I will probably never stand in again, no matter how many times I visit Utica College in the future.

At first glance, it seems like nothing special. It’s a plain, white room — not much bigger than an average office meeting room — with a closet at one end and a round table with chairs in the center. That my Utica tour guides had to enter a code into a sophisticated lock on the door was my first sign that this place is special. The second sign might have been the big, circular lock, situated above the first. It...

One of the oft-cited, counterintuitive facts in computerland is that the video-game industry pulls in more money than Hollywood. Over the past several years, the two entertainment media have converged in many ways: Video games often include their own backstory, with cinema-like presentations in the game and trailer-like teases. Cinema, in turn, has its share of video-game crossover products.

So it would make sense that New York University, an institution known for training filmmakers and for its interactive-telecommunications program, would establish the NYU Game Center, devoted to the research and design of digital games.

The center, which was announced last week, will first gather together the disparate courses in game design and research that are already being taught at NYU, said...

The World Wide Web Consortium, an organization devoted to improving the interoperability of the Web, has released a new version of its Web-accessibility guidelines. The guidelines are meant to help Web designers build sites that can be read and understood by people with disabilities as diverse as blindness, hearing impairments, physical impairments, and even cognitive disabilities like short-term memory impairment or seizure disorders.

The new version of the guidelines was developed with broad input from the Web-development community, said Judy Brewer, director of the Web Accessibility Initiative for the consortium, which is known as W3C. The first version of the guidelines has been widely used around the world, but sometimes with modifications.

“There are a lot of local versions — sometimes...

The San Jose Mercury News ran a story this weekend about Hasan Elahi, an artist and assistant professor at San Jose State University who is “lifelogging” his whereabouts and activities to demonstrate that he is not involved in terrorism. The whole project came out of a life-changing event in 2002 — when, Mr. Elahi says, he was detained for nine hours at a U.S. airport and accused of stockpiling explosives during a trip to Africa.

“Elahi reasoned that if he was fated to live under a perpetual cloud of suspicion anyway, he would turn his Kafkaesque existence — every waking, quaking moment of it — into ‘surveillance art,’” writes Bruce Newman of The Mercury News. “If government agencies wanted to track his...