California Virtual Campus

Never mind creating a password with at least eight characters, two of which are numbers, one of which is a capital letter, and one of which is a symbol like (*&^%$). The easiest way for a hacker to weasel into your account is likely the “Forgot your password?” link.

“Forgot your password?” features are older than the Internet, providing businesses and site owners a simple way to let a user reset a forgotten password, provided he can verify his credentials by asking a few personal questions that only the rightful user should know.

Read Yahoo News

A new survey of students found that about a quarter of them reported hunting for an illegal copy of a textbook from pirate Web sites.

The survey was small—only about 500 students from two colleges—but it is one of several indicators that downloading unauthorized textbooks is becoming commonplace at college campuses.

by Jeffrey R. Young

Read The Chronicle of Higher Education

Web security services firm ScanSafe reported that the total number of Web-based malware blocks has increased by 87 percent in July 2008 compared to the previous month. Specifically, the first two weeks in July have shown an extraordinarily high volume of malware blocks. ScanSafe sells online security services, which scan Web requests from its customers and blocks malicious content.

by Dian Schaffhauser

Read Campus Technology

Cell phones have long been anathema in the classroom, banned as a potential distraction, at best, and as a possible vehicle for cheating, at worst. But lately, educators have begun changing their tune on mobile phones. Abilene Christian University will hand out Apple’s iPhone 3G smartphone to two-thirds of this year’s entering class of 950 freshmen. Students will be expected to use the devices to brainstorm ideas and get virtual handouts and podcasts during class. Instructors will use them for such tasks as monitoring attendance.

by Olga Kharif

Read Business Week Online

Teaching and learning have always had a collaborative element, but wiki technology has in recent years made collaboration central to the method of many educators. Since they can be edited by anyone with access to them, education wikis are ever-changing and evolving documents that ideally represent the wisdom of the student crowd. Teachers are constantly finding new and creative ways to use wikis. One college new media class is writing its own textbook, for instance. Science classes are using wikis to develop research proposals.

by Vivian Wagner

Read Tech News World

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros. I visited the booths of several distros, Ubuntu, Suse, Red Hat and even BSD, grabbing disks along the way. The plan was to give each a test drive, then choose one based on my experience.

by Jason Z. Cohen

Read Tech News World

We will be doing three sessions of GRAPE Camp this fall. GRAPE stands for “Getting Reviewers Accustomed to the Process of Evaluation,” and is a three week training webinar (one hour each week) for people to become Peer Reviewers. Once an individual “graduates” from GRAPE Camp, he/she will be assigned to an Editorial […]

Two Pennsylvania teaching colleagues with an interest in music and technology are bringing remote experts into classrooms at almost no cost, using Skype’s free videoconferencing technology.

Joseph Pisano, a music professor and conductor at Grove City College, and Travis Weller, a composer, instrumental music instructor, and director of bands for grades 7-12 at Mercer Area Middle School and High School, are working together to explore the teaching potential in Skype, the well known Internet communication tool owned by eBay.

By Linda L. Briggs

Read Campus Technology

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — The tireless tongue already controls taste and speech, helps kiss and swallow and fights germs. Now scientists hope to add one more ability to the mouthy muscle, and turn it into a computer control pad.

Georgia Tech researchers believe a magnetic, tongue-powered system could transform a disabled person’s mouth into a virtual computer, teeth into a keyboard — and tongue into the key that manipulates it all.

by CNN

Read CNN News

The student textbook market will soon welcome another newcomer to the market in the form of a revamped Amazon Kindle, according to McAdams Wright Ragen analyst Tim Bueneman. If true, it will have to compete with a number of other digital textbook options, but has the potential to win students’ affections by changing the textbook market for the better.

by Jacqui Cheng

Read Ars Technica