For most college students, there's so much reading, and so little time.

California State University-Dominguez Hills is trying to make students' lives easier by turning some of that reading into listening. About a year ago, a library administrator was tinkering with text-enlarging software, which makes it easier for visually impaired students to read. She found that the software could also turn text into sound, and thought it would make sense to make the program available to all students.

Seventeen computers at labs across thecampus are now set up so that students can scan and convert their reading materials into MP3 files, which they can then download onto cellphones or other mobile devices.

The speed of the scanning itself depends on the quality of the scanner, but the software, called Kurzweil 3000, converts the scanned text into sound at a rate of three...

Doctoral students spend years on their dissertations. Too bad the results of their hard work often end up in a cardboard box in a dark corner of a library.

Now Stanford University doctoral students will be able to store their dissertations in a digital repository instead of submitting several bound paper copies to the university, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The university has also reached an agreement with Google, which will serve as a third-party distributor, meaning users of the search tool will be able to find the dissertations. Administrators hope the move will save the university money and give students' work a greater audience.

"We have way north of 35,000 bound dissertations on our shelves," Stanford's university librarian, Michael Keller, told the...

Time traveling is coming to an Internet browser near you.

A new Web site called Memento Web will allow anyone curious about what the Internet used to look like to plug in a date and then browse the World Wide Web as it was on that day.

The site is already live with limited use. Users can enter a URL and the date on which they wish to see a version of the page the URL once called up.

That doesn't mean they'll get exactly what they were looking for. For example, a search for nytimes.com on November 17, 2006, returned a Web page dated December 8, 2007. Some searches don't work at all.

People behind the site, financed by a grant from the Library of Congress, said that they were still working on it and that they hoped to get more money to develop it further.

Michael Nelson, an associate...

Two universities say they won't order large numbers of Amazon Kindles until the company releases devices that are easier for blind students to use.

The University of Wisconsin at Madison and Syracuse University, which have both made Kindles available to their students in pilot programs recently, say they won't buy more devices until they're improved. Though most Kindles read text aloud, it's impossible for a blind person to navigate their basic menus because they aren't "voiced."

When Syracuse employees first heard that Kindles would have a read-aloud feature, "We thought, yay, this is going to be great" for disabled readers, said Eve Hill, senior vice president at the university's Burton Blatt Institute, which advocates for people with disabilities. But staffers soon realized the device's menu options were not spoken aloud. "If you're blind, you won't be able to...

This fall, a strange silence has fallen over a Web site that long amplified the voices of hundreds of student newspapers.

UWIRE, a popular service that aggregated articles from student newspapers across the country, promoting student journalism both within higher education and to the outside world, has disappeared. Visits to the Web site in October returned a "problem loading page" message. Student newspapers that relied on the service to republish articles from other newspapers haven't heard a word. Student editors who were paid to scour campus papers to find content for the site received an abrupt e-mail message on October 4 telling them the site was being "temporarily suspended" but offering no explanation as to why. They still haven't received payment for their work in September, some said.

Those who operate UWIRE, which was founded in 1994 and facilitated...

A long-running newsletter that covers higher-education technology will no longer be published because its author, an employee at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been laid off.

Carolyn Kotlas, who has written the monthly TL Infobits newsletter since 1993, will publish the last issue in November. About 27 positions in her department have been eliminated in the past year, said her direct supervisor, Charles Green, the assistant vice chancellor for the teaching and learning division at Information Technology Services at the university. Budget pressures have forced the division to focus on "mission critical" services, Mr. Green said.

Ms. Kotlas, an academic-outreach consultant in the division, has helped teach faculty how best to use technology, among other duties.

"It's a shame that support for faculty has suffered," Mr. Green said....

On Friday, Carnegie Mellon University will dedicate a pedestrian bridge in honor of Randy Pausch, a computer-science professor whose lecture about achieving childhood dreams, given while he was terminally ill, inspired millions after it was posted on YouTube. Mr. Pausch succumbed to pancreatic cancer in July 2008.

The bridge connects a building that houses the university's School of Drama with a new building for the School of Computer Science. University officials said the bridge mirrored Mr. Pausch's support of collaboration between scientists and artists. He started a popular course at Carnegie Mellon called "Building Virtual Worlds," in which students from several disciplines work together on virtual projects.

"What Randy did to connect computer...

For five hours last Friday, Tyler Penrod watched his fellow students at Purdue University take sledgehammers to computers.

Mr. Penrod, a senior at Purdue and president of a computer-animation club at the university, organized the event with other club leaders to raise travel funds for students to attend a national computer-animation conference. A local computer store donated old computers.

At Purdue, where many students take computer-related courses, "everyone has frustrations at a computer at one point or another," Mr. Penrod said. "So it's always a popular event."

Students paid $1 for the privilege of destroying a machine. Organizers of the event, in its third year, follow safety guidelines used for car-smashing events, which are hosted by fraternities on the campus.

The anticomputer hoopla took place on a main quad, attracting attention from...

A $12.2-million federal stimulus grant from the National Institutes of Health will finance a network some are calling a Facebook for scientists.

Several universities, including Cornell University and the University of Florida, will develop the network over the next two years in the hopes of helping scientists find other academics to work with.

If a researcher is looking for someone else in a very specialized field, he or she would usually think of all the people he has met or simply scan recent scientific journals for names, said Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics at the College of Medicine at the University of Florida and the principal investigator on the grant. Mr. Conlon calls those methods "haphazard."

People using the network will be able to enter targeted inquiries into a search box. The results will show scholars in very...

A project based at Carnegie Mellon University will study how effective games on cellphones are at teaching English to students in rural India.

Led by a professor at Carnegie Mellon, professors, graduate students and undergraduates have been working on developing games over the last six years. Now, because of financial support from Nokia, the professors will be able to lend 450 cellphones to children in villages in Andhra Pradesh, a region in the south of India. The children with games on the cellphones will be compared with children who will not play the games and will learn English in a traditional classroom setting.

"If it's very difficult for so-called poor children to go to school regularly. You could take mobile devices and make it possible to access learning anytime, anywhere," said Matthew Kam, assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute...