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Chronicle article about a new guide by the university's Center for Social Media offers free legal advice to clarify such issues-and its authors say that the "fair use" provisions of copyright law are more permissive than many professors may think.

Argues that money should not be shifted from less popular languages to more popular

"The Georgia Institute of Technology has stripped, at least for now, more than 10 years of class work from its collaborative-learning Web sites, known as Swikis. Following a student's complaint to the university that his name was listed on the Web site of a public course, Georgia Tech officials decided on Monday to remove all Swikis other than ones from the current semester, said Mark Guzdial, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing, who is a co-creator of the Swikis."

Describes using the "pecha kucha" format for presentations and benefits to learning.

"Welcome to the ItalNet publication of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) textual database. The production database contains 1849 vernacular texts (21.2 million words, 479,000 unique forms) the majority of which are dated prior to 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death. The beta-test installation of the database under PhiloLogic3 contains 1960 documents (see below). The verse and prose works include early masters of Italian literature like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as lesser-known and obscure texts by poets, merchants, and medieval chroniclers. The OVI database was created to aid in the compilation of an historical dictionary of the Italian language, the Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini, (portions of which are now available online). The fully-searchable ItalNet implementation of the OVI database presented here has been produced in order to enable scholars around the world to benefit from this rich textual resource. "

In the next five years, Web-based computing will likely bring important changes in how students study, how scholars do research, and how college information-technology departments operate.

Describes map-based project aggregating election data.

New MIT Center Will Explore New Forms of Storytelling (Including Holographic Ones). The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced yesterday that it had signed a contract with a budding film-and-television studio to create the Center for Future Storytelling.

"Online education is booming, but not at elite universities-at least not when it comes to courses for credit. Leaders at the University of California want to break that mold. This fall they hope to put $5-million to $6-million into a pilot project that could clear the way for the system to offer online undergraduate degrees and push distance learning further into the mainstream. The vision is UC's most ambitious-and controversial-effort to reshape itself after cuts in public financial support have left the esteemed system in crisis."

Every couple of years, a hot new electronic device comes along that promises to transform education, if not life in general, and a few colleges give one to every new student. In the 90s, it was laptops. Three years ago, Duke University tried an iPod giveaway. And last month, Abilene Christian University announced that it would give every new student an iPhone (or an iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet via a campus or other wireless network).