Wired Campus

New Group Encourages Colleges to Start Programs in 'Web Science'

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:20:11 -0500

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, announced a new nonprofit group last week to promote the study of "Web science," arguing that his creation deserves its own specific research focus.

The group, Web Science Trust, has set up a Wiki where universities offering Web-science programs can list their offerings and links to their course syllabi.

Why set up a separate

Stanford Doctoral Students Can Now Submit Dissertations Online

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500

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

Teaching Tool: Blogging a Mass Killing

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:00:00 -0500

Leslie Whitaker, a guest blogger for Wired Campus, is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Previously she worked as a reporter for Time magazine.

My first experience with blogging’s potential as a teaching tool occurred last week. I am teaching a class on blogs to English majors this semester, and I asked them to blog immediately after watching a live broadcast of

'The Last.fm for Research Papers' Tops 100,000 Users

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:48:00 -0500

Mendeley, a Web service that lets users organize and share research papers, recently announced that it has surpassed 100,000 users, and that its database now includes some 8 million works. The announcement has generated a lot of hype for the fledgling company.

TechCrunch, a popular

Tweckling Twitterfolk: Chronicle Readers React to the New World of Twitter Conference Humiliation

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0500

A new low for academic life?

A powerful tool to improve conferences?

A shameful act of journalism?

A Chronicle story today about the abuse of Twitter at conferences is touching off an online debate among readers. Dozens of them are arguing about a new trend in academic life: how audience members now “tweckle” speakers by heckling them on the micro-blogging service

Universities Add Their Own Search of Google Books

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Colleges working with Google on the company's effort to scan millions of library books today unveiled their own search tool to comb the full text of some 500,000 volumes.

The tool has a few features that Google lacks, said John P. Wilkin, an associate university librarian for the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is leading the group formed by the colleges, which is called HathiTrust Digital Library. The killer app: HathiTrust's

New Web Site Makes Internet Time Traveling Easier

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:27:24 -0500

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

'USA Today' Pushes Digital Editions on College Campuses

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0500

For years major newspapers have given away free copies on several college campuses to try to get students hooked on their print products. Now USA Today has added a digital edition to its free offerings at three campuses, hoping to test how students use its new premium electronic version.

Anyone using a computer on the three campuses can now get free online access to the newspaper's e-Edition, for

U. of North Texas Catalogs the Photos of the JFK Investigation You Haven't Seen

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:17:00 -0500

Ever wanted to see a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald's copy of the book 1984? Probably not (it looks remarkably like any other copy of the book), but if you ever do, the University of North Texas has made it easy with its new digital catalog of photos from the Dallas Police Department's investigation of the John F. Kennedy

Course Requirement: Friend Your Professor on Facebook

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:49:08 -0500

Some professors don’t let students see their Facebook pages. Some accept students’ invitations but don’t initiate them.

Peter Juvinall insists students friend him.

The Illinois State University instructor decided the best way to connect with a bunch of freshman business students in a short 8 a.m. class was to conduct much of the course where they are anyway—on

Android Cellphones Dial Up African Health in University Project

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:56:00 -0500

Carl Hartung was surprised by the cellphone reception in East Africa this summer. "We were working in villages miles from electricity or running water, but we still had cell coverage," wrote Mr. Hartung, a graduate student at the University of Washington, in an e-mail to The Chronicle.

That was good, because Mr. Hartung was in rural Kenya using cellphones to help test and counsel people about HIV. He and other university researchers have developed an application based on

Finding the Kindle a Poor Device for the Blind, 2 Universities Say They Won't Buy More

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:00:00 -0500

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

Archive Watch: Armistice Day Edition

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0500

November 11 is Armistice Day, which marks the cessation of Great War hostilities in 1918. (Here in the United States, of course, this is now Veterans Day.) In honor of the day and the dead, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, housed at the University of Oxford, chose today to unveil its Siegfried Sassoon Collection.

Although it

Working on the Chain Gang

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:56:00 -0500

Meet the latest acronym in the world of digital humanities: Chain, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks. Born at a meeting at King's College, London, in late October, Chain brings together eight digital-technology undertakings, several based in Europe (e.g., Dariah, or Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and

Improving Mobile-Device Security

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:07:00 -0500

As mobile phones begin functioning more like minicomputers, they also take on more security risks.

That's why the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work toward developing safer mobile devices and telecommunication networks that serve such devices. The project's researchers hope to protect mobile devices from viruses and malware that can steal personal