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The admissions folks at my public university report that they regularly see prospective student email addresses like beerbashbabe@___ . And the parents know — in some cases it’s Mom or Dad who writes the email address on the form at the open house. --drj50

Dear Students With Unprofessional E-Mail Handles: Your Professors Notice

Recent Posts

Educause Releases Report on IT Trends | Comment

Could Google Have the Solution to All Those Inappropriate Student E-Mails? | Comment [3]

Settlement Near in Google Book Search Lawsuit? | Comment

Apple's iPhone Takes Lead in Reader Race | Comment [6]

Iowa State U. Will Make Students Pay to Set Up Land Lines | Comment [12]

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October 10, 2008

Could Google Have the Solution to All Those Inappropriate Student E-Mails?

Whether they’re making grammatical errors, using suggestive handles, or just writing in an inappropriately casual tone, many students don’t know how to e-mail their professors properly. Or at least that’s the sentiment expressed by the 300-plus posts to a Chronicle forum on the topic.

Common sense — or maybe a spell checker — might seem to be the best remedy for most inappropriate e-mail messages. But another solution may lie in a new Google e-mail application called “Mail Goggles.” The tool is named after “beer goggles,” the slang term college students use to describe how inebriation can make a potential mate seem inexplicably attractive.

Mail Goggles asks users when they might be most likely to send regrettable messages (the default setting is from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights). It then forces users to solve a few simple math problems before letting them send any messages during those dangerous hours.

Although there’s no proof that alcohol is driving students to send questionable e-mail messages to their professors, Mail Goggles might have blocked one note that ended up gracing the Chronicle forum: A student e-mailed a professor to say he or she had been drinking wine at a Seder dinner and might not make it to class in the morning. — Caitlin Moran

October 9, 2008

Apple's iPhone Takes Lead in Reader Race

According to Forbes, Apple’s iPhone is now a more popular e-book reader than Amazon.com’s Kindle. And the iPhone may just be getting warmed up.

A free application called Stanza — designed by a company called Lexcycle and made available through Apple’s iPhone App Store — has been downloaded 395,000 times since it was released in July. That’s already enough to outpace the 380,000 Kindles that are expected to sell this year, according to Forbes. But the rate of Stanza downloads is steadily increasing, so the iPhone e-readers could be far more common than Kindle users by the end of 2008.

Next up for Lexcycle is a plan to expand the iPhone library, which as of now only contains books in the public domain. The Kindle, by contrast, offers more than 180,000 titles, including new releases. —David DeBolt

Iowa State U. Will Make Students Pay to Set Up Land Lines

The Gazette, a newspaper serving the area around Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, recently ran a story about a new policy at Iowa State University: The institution will make students pay to have land-line telephones hooked up in their rooms. Given the triumph of cellphones, we would have thought that this was old news. Certainly, colleges used to bring in some money by providing students with telephone service, but that source of revenue dried up years ago. In fact, it costs money just to hook up the phone.

“Beginning next year, ISU will turn off phone service in dorm rooms and students who want it will have to pay to hook it up,” The Gazette reports. “ISU’s Department of Residence will put the $700,000 in annual savings toward installing wireless in all rooms, at a cost of $6 million to $9 million. Students support the move, officials said. A survey last year revealed 62 percent of ISU students never use a land line phone in their room, and 96 percent had cellphones.”

The article notes that some colleges, like Luther College and Grinnell College, still provide land lines for emergencies. But a Chronicle story found that land lines were ineffective for delivering emergency information.

We’d be interested in hearing whether your institution is cutting off land lines. —Scott Carlson

Keeping Friends and Acquaintances Informed, or at Sea, in a Swarm

Sure, programs like Twitter are a boon for campus communities and for social circles of all kinds. They permit students and professors — the tech-savvy ones, at least — to keep their friends and associates apprised of what they’re up to, where to find them, what they’re thinking. But what if you want different groups of acquaintances to know different things about how you’re spending the day? What if you don’t want certain people – your boss, for example – to know what you’re really doing?

Then you need Swarm, says its inventor, Christine Satchell, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne. While completing her doctoral dissertation at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology — it was titled “A Young Nomad’s Guide to New Digital Terrains” — she came up with the idea of cell-phone software that lets users choose what to report to which of their associates.

By flicking through and clicking on a few of Swarm’s screens, menus, and icons, a user can signal different things to different people in a phone’s address book. Loaded into just about any of the newfangled 3G phones, Swarm’s icons indicate that a user is — or claims to be — on vacation, driving, or working; it can also signal that the user is socializing, and where to join in, or that the user is sleeping, so that friends don’t interrupt a nap.

But users can also choose to tell some contacts that they’re at a certain pub having a beer — the icon is a cocktail glass — and at the same time assure the boss that they’re running an important errand. Users can add icons that signal their mood, or add music, photographs, or videos to their shout-outs.

Ms. Satchell admits that her system’s capabilities have earned it the name “the liephone,” but she says she prefers to see it as giving users control over their own identity — or identities.

A segment about Swarm that appeared this month on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s weekly television program, The New Inventors. —Peter Monaghan

September 19, 2008

Researchers Hope 'Smart Desks' Will Improve Classroom Interaction

Move over, smart classrooms. Researchers at Durham University in England are working on your offspring — an interactive desk they hope will move education away from its “teacher-centric environment,” the university announced Wednesday.

The new desk’s screen will function somewhat like a whiteboard: An instructor can assign small sections of the desk to different students, and he or she can then send a specific task to each piece of the screen.

After studying the collaboration between teachers and students, the Technology Enhanced Learning Research Group was awarded roughly $2.1-million to develop software aimed at providing more interaction between them. The software will be tested on students from primary and secondary schools and universities over the next four years.

Some readers may recall the DigiDesk — a similar effort, presented by Microsoft at a 2007 conference, that is still in the works. —David DeBolt

September 11, 2008

Salisbury U. Hopes to Entice Students to Use Digital Media Regularly

This week Salisbury University unveiled its Center for Integrated Media — a project, six years in the making, that aims to give students from every department on campus an opportunity to mesh audio and video with their daily homework assignments.

Located within the 165,000 square-foot Teacher Education and Technology Center, the facility boasts a 3,000 square-foot, high-definition video-recording studio, 15 video-editing suites, five audio-editing suites, and digital camcorders available for rent at no cost. For 16 hours a day, the facility is open to all students and faculty — mediocre garage bands included, as Jerome Waldron, chief information officer for University Technology Services, points out.

“What we’ve done in a nutshell is create a real high end media center with the idea that nobody owns it and it is really designed for the creation of digital media,” Mr. Waldron said.

Mr. Waldron said the university is now trying to figure how exactly the $5.3-million worth of goods will be maintained. “It’s going to be pretty hefty come three, four, five years from now when we have to replace this equipment,” Mr. Waldron said. —David DeBolt

September 5, 2008

U. of Maryland Gives iPods and iPhones to Scholarship Students

The University of Maryland at College Park is giving iPods and iPhones to students to find out if the devices can have any educational use.

The iPod Touches and iPhones will go to 133 freshmen who received one of two scholarships—the Maryland Incentive Awards Program, which goes to students who go to college despite difficult challenges (mainly African-Americans), and the Banneker-Key scholarship, the university’s most prestigious merit award.

Haven’t we been down this road before—at, say, Duke University? Or how about Abilene Christian University? How many studies do universities have to do to determine whether there is educational value to the latest cool tech toy?—Scott Carlson

September 3, 2008

Network Administrators Keep a Wary Eye on Increasing Demand for WiFi

How robust is your institution’s wireless network? Students, faculty members, and others now expect to be able to connect their laptops to the Internet anywhere, to say nothing of their iPods and other devices. And they’re not just checking e-mail, either—they want to listen to music, keep up with YouTube videos, and maybe even watch television online. But that kind of heavy demand, especially in areas that attract lots of simultaneous users, is a challenge for those who oversee campus networks, according to an article in PC World.

Carnegie Mellon University, for instance, is upgrading wireless networks in its residence halls to use the latest 802.11n technology, as well as connection points that each packs up to 16 WiFi radios, with antennae divided by sector to reduce interference. Other institutions are dealing with overloads on the servers that assign Internet addresses as machines connect to campus networks. Still others face developments like the Slingbox, a device that lets students stream cable-television programs over the campus network from their dorm rooms to their laptops—so they can watch TV wherever they happen to be.

John Turner, director of network and systems at Brandeis University, says that as recently as three years ago the university had comparative few wireless users. “Now everyone has a laptop,” he says. “These scaling issues are becoming more and more apparent where lots of folks show up and you need to make things happen.” —Lawrence Biemiller

August 29, 2008

For Many Students, the Simplest Cell Phones Suffice

There is something to be said for simplicity in an ever-more-wired age. But it’s typically the old folks you hear saying something like: “I just want a cell phone that makes calls. I don’t need one that plays music, sends e-mail, takes pictures, surfs the Web, contains a map of Tokyo, unlocks car doors, plays a crafty game of poker, works like a credit card, and combs my hair.” (Somewhere in this wide world, technicians are no doubt working on the mobile beautician.)

Youngsters have been branded as gizmophiles, attached to their phones and their many uses. But a new survey from the University of New Hampshire suggests that students use their phones in limited ways — mainly for talking, texting, keeping track of time, and a handful of other basic functions.

Students in a market-research class taught by Chuck Martin, an adjunct professor in the university’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics, asked 707 students from the college of engineering (the geeks, that is) which functions they use on their cell phones. Talking, texting, and the alarm clock were used by 80 to 90 percent of those who responded. The calculator, camera, and “backlight as flashlight” were used by around 50 percent. Far less important were the Internet browser, the music player, the e-mail reader, and GPS, at around 3 percent.

When asked what features they wanted in a cell phone, students ranked long battery life and water resistance at the top, then GPS features right after that. Maybe it’s just cool to have a cell phone that can do GPS, even though you never use it.

When asked what might prevent a student from buying a phone with an array of cool features, most students cited price, then durability and the quality of the service provider. So practical, these students. —Scott Carlson

August 18, 2008

Flying Saucers and Mini-Tanks Highlight Spy Robot Competition

Eleven teams, including universities, defense contractors and small companies, are competing in the British Ministry of Defense’s Grand Challenge with autonomous information-gathering vehicles that include flying saucers, a mini tank, several mini-helicopters and darts, among other machines.

The winner of the competition, which launched Friday, will get a trophy and a potential contract with the Ministry of Defense. The multi-day challenge, the British response to the U.S. DARPA Grand Challenge, is taking place in a facsimile of a deserted German village built during the Cold War. The village serves as a training center for British troops, The Guardian reported.

During the competition, the robots have to identify threats such as potential snipers and enemy vehicles and other threats, with minimal human guidance. The machines then have to report the information back to troops preparing for an assault. The judges will reward accuracy and autonomy.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the student robotics group at the University of Maryland won an international underwater robotic competition earlier in August, and is preparing for another contest, this time for land robots, the university reported in a press release.—Maria José Viñas

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