For most college students, there's so much reading, and so little time.

California State University-Dominguez Hills is trying to make students' lives easier by turning some of that reading into listening. About a year ago, a library administrator was tinkering with text-enlarging software, which makes it easier for visually impaired students to read. She found that the software could also turn text into sound, and thought it would make sense to make the program available to all students.

Seventeen computers at labs across thecampus are now set up so that students can scan and convert their reading materials into MP3 files, which they can then download onto cellphones or other mobile devices.

The speed of the scanning itself depends on the quality of the scanner, but the software, called Kurzweil 3000, converts the scanned text into sound at a rate of three...

For more than two years, the University of Texas system figured its students and faculty members could handle having multiple usernames and passwords. Not anymore.

After initially refusing in 2007, the Texas system has agreed to join a growing number of institutions in the InCommon Federation. InCommon is an organization that makes services like JSTOR, a digital archive of scholarly journals, and Turnitin, a plagerism-detection program, all easily accessible with one username and password per user. InCommon also determines which people get access to which services. As a Chronicle article in 2007 put it, the service is like a bouncer that lets people in if they have the right wristband. InCommon also allows for participating institutions with a...

Barnes & Noble says its Nook e-book device, to be released by the end of the month, was not built with college students in mind.

"Nook is not designed to be a textbook reader," said Jade Roth, the company's vice president of books. "Nook is really designed to be an e-reader for pleasure, for relaxation on the go -- not really for the educational space."

Amazon said the same thing about its first-generation Kindle, but a few months ago it unveiled a larger model that it says works well for e-textbooks. Amazon is running pilot projects at seven universities this semester to see how students and professors respond to the devices.

For now Barnes & Noble has no plans for similar classroom tests. It will, however, sell Nooks in 17 of the 624 college bookstores that the company operates, as an experiment to see how well they sell there, said Ms. Roth.

Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale. And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same scenario has played out many times before.

The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.

For the first time, however, those who find unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site is called RC2C...

More than 1,700 private e-mail messages were illegally nabbed from a university-based climate-science lab by computer hackers, with the apparent goal of discrediting the authors' research on global warming just days before a major climate summit begins.

The incident is an unusual one. Though data breaches happen almost every week in higher education, most involve Social Security numbers or other university records, and the biggest concern is usually identity theft. In this case, personal e-mail messages of scientists were illegally obtained from a university server, and bloggers have been using quotes from the messages to argue that the scientists exaggerated their data on global warming.

In a statement issued Monday, officials from the University of East Anglia, in England, confirmed that the messages were stolen from a server in its Climate Research Unit. The...

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 Web-science program when other fields already cover the topic? "Most computers science isn't about the Web, and most information science isn't about the Web," said James Hendler, a computer-science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who is a leader of the new effort. He named climate science as another new research area that has emerged in recent years by pulling people from different...

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 also reached an agreement with Google, which will serve as a third-party distributor, meaning users of the search tool will be able to find the dissertations. Administrators hope the move will save the university money and give students' work a greater audience.

"We have way north of 35,000 bound dissertations on our shelves," Stanford's university librarian, Michael Keller, told the...

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 President Obama’s address during the memorial service for those killed at Fort Hood, in Texas. I gave them about 10 minutes and then asked them to read aloud what they’d written. I figured we’d brush up against the limits of blogging, with its inherent pressure to process and post as quickly as possible. Even though I have a thoughtful bunch of students, I didn’t...

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 technology blog, says the company—which is still less than a year old—could surpass Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the largest research-paper database, by April 2010. Mendeley says it is doubling in size every 10 weeks.

Mendeley is more than just a dumping ground for...

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 Twitter.

Meanwhile, several readers pointed out yet another tweckling episode, which was not included in the article. This one involved Danah Boyd of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. More on that