The T-shirts and tote bag that Julia R. Vallera created as part of her course work at Parsons the New School for Design hold an open secret.

What appears to be merely a cool design is actually a diary entry, locked within a special barcode that can be read by a cellphone.

The code presents “my private thoughts and writing, kind of exposed in a really public way, but contradictorily, being still private because its encoded,” Ms. Vallera said in an interview.

Ms. Vallera, a part-time master’s-degree student and course instructor, created the T-shirts while enrolled in “Me and My Mobile.” Students walk into the course with a mobile phone, but they leave it with what the instructor, Paul Notzold, calls “the Swiss Army knife...

Students of all ages in China will soon be able to use Nokia cellphones to tap into English lessons, test-prep training, and other courses from New Oriental Education & Technology Group, a leading Chinese educational company, the companies announced this week. "The idea of mobile learning is that it will allow students of all ages to access course materials through a mobile phone, maximizing time by providing learning on the go," said Michael Yu, New Oriental's chief executive.

Would-be mobile learners can buy one of the newer Nokia models with educational programs already installed, and they can also download courses from Mobiledu and New Oriental's online-learning site, Koolearn.com. The project is not the first time...

School administrators typically worry that their students will bring distracting iPods and laptops to school, but one Arkansas school district has welcomed them. Some of the students spend as many as three hours each day commuting from rural Grapevine to school in Sheridan, south of Little Rock. Now they can use that time to learn science and math thanks to a bus with a wireless Internet connection and Billy G. Hudson, a biochemist at Vanderbilt University and a Grapevine native, who conceived the project.

“I just had the concept of one-room schoolhouses in my head, and then I rode the bus and I saw kindergarten through 12 on a bus with nothing to do, and the bus driver had absolute control on their lives for an hour and a half each way,” Mr. Hudson said in an interview. “I thought, well, this is a schoolhouse.”

Vanderbilt donated 15...

The first episode of a documentary Web series, Hometown Baghdad, opens on the University of Baghdad campus. Adel, a student in the college of engineering, takes the viewer on a two-minute tour of the macabre: a missile attack, students maimed or murdered, a dean assassinated.

The ongoing series follows the lives of students at the university as they struggle to study for their degrees and debate whether to leave the country. “I think it’s dangerous to go to school and college over here,” Adel says. “There are some groups that are targeting professors and doctors and even students.”

The subjects and crew risk their lives to film these documentaries—each less than three minutes long—because they want to “show the world what life is like when your hometown is a...

Family and friends of Paul Shuman-Moore, a student at Grinnell College who went missing in September, posted a video on YouTube last week as part of their continuing search for him.

The six-minute video features footage of Mr. Shuman-Moore playing trombone with his high-school band, Caw! Caw!, during a concert in the men’s room of Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago. It includes heartfelt appeals from his band mates.

“Some people think that he committed suicide, but we believe that he’s still alive, and he’s living another sort of life somewhere,” one of his bandmates says on the video.

Mr. Shuman-Moore was last seen at about 1:30 a.m. on September 25, 2006, and his roommate discovered a note from him...

An announcement Sunday posted on Rate Your Students that Chronicle reporter Rachel Zino would expose the popular blog’s creator and moderator as Martin Bell, a classics professor at Arkansas Northeastern College, and force him to take down the site provoked a roar of outrage from fans.

“I can’t believe the Chronicle would do this to you,” one fan wrote. “It makes me so angry I could spit.” Many readers begged Rate Your Students not to shut down. The blog provides a forum for students and faculty members to “work out the tricky dynamics of the modern classroom.”

Rate Your Students’ moderators (three in all and all still anonymous) received more than 700 upset e-mail messages before apologizing to readers for the unexpectedly successful

Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University will collaborate through a new computer-science research center, the company and university jointly announced Monday during the Symposium on Computational Thinking on Carnegie Mellon's Pittsburgh campus.

The Microsoft Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking will support computer scientists' efforts to solve "real world" problems in areas such as privacy, e-commerce, and embedded medical devices. The center will also develop and make available courses and lesson plans for students in kindergarten through graduate school. Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon researchers will meet at the center for annual "mindswaps" to encourage further collaboration. The research center is the eighth that Microsoft has created worldwide.--Sierra Millman

Study Shows iPods Help Doctors Hear the Beat

Physicians who listen at least 400 times to common heart murmurs via their iPods or other MP3 devices are much more likely to identify the murmurs in patients, according to a study presented Sunday at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting.

The study’s lead investigator, Dr. Michael Barrett, last year demonstrated the benefit of repeat listening with medical students at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital. The university now offers a four-year curriculum on the topic and posts heart lessons online to teach students how to differentiate between a normal heartbeat and a murmur.

Dr. Barrett stops short of suggesting that physicians...

IBM and Academe Seek to Improve Technology Access

The computer behemoth IBM is working with several universities to collect and store materials that will help developers make software more accessible to aging and disabled users, IBM announced today.

A majority of faculty members responding to a recent survey do not teach technology accessibility in the classroom, according to IBM. The company wants to reach student developers early and make sure they have the necessary skills and resources as they begin their careers.

Professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, California State University at Long Beach, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the University of Toronto are among those already contributing to the repository, known as