The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog

A federal judge has ruled against a former student who sued Millersville University of Pennsylvania for denying her a degree in education in connection with an online photo of her drinking, The Washington Post reported.

The former student, Stacy Snyder, sued Millersville in 2007. A year before, the nearby high school where Ms. Snyder was student-teaching had barred her from its campus days before the end of her semester-long assignment. Prior evaluations had criticized her competence and professionalism in the classroom, the legal decision says, but the school’s discovery of a photograph of Ms. Snyder on MySpace — with the caption “drunken pirate” and a note alluding to her strained relationship with her supervising teacher — precipitated the decision to end her assignment.

That prevented Millersville from awarding Ms. Snyder a bachelor’s degree in education. Instead, the university reclassified some academic credits and gave her a degree in English, a decision she appealed and lost. When she sued, alleging violations of her free-speech and due-process rights, she sought the degree in education.

The judge, Paul S. Diamond of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, had already thrown out Ms. Snyder’s due-process claims, and his decision on Wednesday dismissed her free-speech claims as well.

“She was more a teacher than a student,” the decision says. Employees’ speech is constitutionally protected if it relates to matters of public concern, which Ms. Snyder’s MySpace post about her supervising teacher did not, it says. The judge also chronicled her negative performance evaluations.

Legally, students can say more, Ms. Snyder’s lawyer, Mark Voigt, told the Post. “Because she was some sort of de facto employee,” he said, “she got fewer rights than would be afforded the average student.”

Millersville maintained that free speech was not the issue. “This was not about First Amendment rights, it was about performance, and she clearly did not do what was necessary in order to earn a degree in education,” the university’s president, Francine McNairy, told the Post.

The classification of Ms. Snyder as an employee of the high school rather than as a student at Millersville limits the case’s implications for other colleges and universities, but the opinion also refers to a recent decision against Temple University that had unsettled some higher-education lawyers. In that case, DeJohn v. Temple, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the strong free-speech rights of students. —Sara Lipka

At the Ohio State University Medical Center, the iPod Touch is literally what the doctor ordered.

The university announced this week that all students in the College of Medicine would receive the devices, which the university plans to equip with medical software.

Justin Harper, a third-year medical student credited with the idea of distributing the wifi-enabled audio-and-video players, says the iPod Touch will allow him to listen to lectures during his commute to school and will put current medical information at his fingertips. He will be able to pull up graphics, watch videos of medical procedures, and search medical reference books. Perhaps more importantly, he says, he will be able to answer patients’ questions more quickly and without leaving their sides.

“It just makes [everything] faster,” he said. “We can have it there when we need it.”

Other medical schools have also incorporated iPods or other portable media players in their training. At Temple University, students use iPods to listen to recordings of heart murmurs. At the University of Michigan, students use “Dr. iPod,” a program that lets them review lectures and patient presentations on their iPods. Ohio State University, however, appears to be the first to give the devices away.

But judging from past giveaways, the concept is unlikely to spread to other medical schools. A news analysis in The Chronicle in March questioned the success of giveaway programs. —David DeBolt

Richard L. Gilbert, a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, is about to begin a series of surveys of participants in Second Life, the virtual world where people interact as cartoonlike characters in a 3-D animated landscape. Usually the researcher would pay test subjects a small fee for their time, but for this study he’ll be paying participants in Linden dollars, the virtual currency used in Second Life.

He had no idea what the appropriate amount would be, so Mr. Gilbert walked around popular areas of Second Life asking strangers how much he would have to pay them to sit down for an hour and take a survey. “The average of all the responses that I got was $1,000,” he says. That’s 1,000 Linden dollars, worth about $4 in actual U.S. currency. “It’s much cheaper” than what he would have paid subjects in a traditional experiment, he says.

Mr. Gilbert says that two of the surveys — one about addiction to online worlds and another about sexuality in Second Life — just won approval from the university’s institutional review board, which must sign off on research involving human subjects. The project was a harder sell than usual, he says, because the board had not dealt with virtual worlds before. “I had to meet with them and sort of explain what we’re doing,” he says.

When the experiments begin in January, participants will have to visit the university’s new “island” in Second Life to take the surveys. Mr. Gilbert gave me a tour of the university’s island this afternoon, showing off the bank of virtual computers where participants will take the survey. When users click on the computers, they will be taken to a Web site with the survey questions.

Mr. Gilbert (whose virtual character is shown above, in black) says he wants subjects to come to Second Life to take the survey to demonstrate that they are experienced users of virtual worlds. —Jeffrey R. Young

The U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., has established a video oral-history project that will collect the stories of soldiers of all ages and make them available online for students, historians, journalists, and the public. The project, created by the academy’s history department, already has a preview site with a video explaining its goals, but the site’s formal unveiling won’t come until sometime in 2009.

“Soldiers’ personal stories are a largely untapped mine of military insight and historical testimony,” said Todd Brewster, a former journalist who is director of the project. In addition to recording battlefield stories of soldiers — including those now deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as those who served in conflicts as far back as World War II — project leaders hope to interview senior policy makers, among them former secretaries of defense and state. Besides video, the project will collect audio recordings and textual materials.

The academy said the project would be “a work in perpetual progress, continuously updated as history unfolds.” The project’s first undertakings include interviews with members of the academy’s Class of 1967 who were sent to Vietnam soon after graduating. —Lawrence Biemiller

Paul Debevec, a research associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, has helped develop a holographic videoconferencing system just like the fictional one depicted in recent Star Wars films. He demonstrated the science-fiction inspired system — which uses off-the-shelf video projectors and a fast-spinning mirror to create the illusion of a 3-D image — at the Army Science Conference this week.

In Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, Yoda virtually attends Jedi council meetings by beaming a holographic image of himself to the meeting room. Everyone in the council chamber can see, in real time, when the Jedi master is displeased as he speaks. Similarly, Mr. Debevec says that professors who are traveling for work will now be able to hold meetings with graduate students back on their campus via hologram.

Other than looking extremely cool, what’s the point? Mr. Debevec argues that the holographic system is better than a phone call or a traditional videoconference because users are able to make eye contact, and viewers can tell which way the holographic caller is looking. “It helps people know whose turn it is to speak and helps people know who’s paying attention,” he said. “Video chats are gaining in popularity, but you don’t usually get accurate eye contact.”

During the conference, Mr. Debevec (below) talked with a holographic image of a colleague who was broadcasting from across a convention hall as part of his demonstration. Video of the system is available on the university’s Web site.

This is not the first time Mr. Debevec’s work has intersected with science fiction. He previously developed an innovative camera technique that was used in The Matrix and other Hollywood blockbusters. —Jeffrey R. Young

Just when you thought the patent fight over course-management software couldn’t get any more confusing, Blackboard Inc. went to federal court to sue the United States Patent and Trademark Office, seeking to overturn a recent decision concerning Blackboard’s controversial patent on course-management software.

The issue at stake is who decides whether or not Blackboard’s patent is valid. Right now the patent is being challenged on two fronts:

• Front one is the courts. Blackboard sued its biggest competitor, Desire2Learn, arguing that the Canada-based company violated Blackboard’s patent with its course-management software. On that front Blackboard is winning. In march a federal jury in Texas awarded Blackboard $3.1-million, finding that Desire2Learn did infringe the company’s patent. Desire2Learn has appealed the decision, and it modified its software in response to the court decision.

• Front two is the patent office’s own review process. Desire2Learn has challenged the validity of Blackboard’s patent, and the office is working through a formal reexamination of it. On this front Desire2Learn is winning big. In an initial ruling issued this year, the patent office struck down all 44 claims in the Blackboard patent.
  

Blackboard clearly wants the final decision to rest with the courts, where it has received the most favorable verdicts. Its new lawsuit, filed late last month against the patent office and Jon W. Dudas, the office’s director, seeks to overturn the patent office’s recent decision to continue its review of the patent’s validity while the court challenge goes on. Blackboard argues that once a court ruling about a patent is issued, the patent office should end any reexamination of that patent. The patent office has ruled that its reexamination will only end once a final verdict in court is issued, meaning only after all possible appeals are pursued.

Michael Feldstein, a blogger who has been tracking the Blackboard patent battle, argues that Blackboard’s latest action muddies the company’s efforts to display a greater willingness to make its software work with that of competitors. For instance, Blackboard has announced that future releases of its course-management software will allow colleges to synchronize with Sakai and with Moodle, two open-source alternatives.

“Regardless of the legal merits, the fact that Blackboard continues to assert the patent heavily undermines their new marketing message of openness,” wrote Mr. Feldstein. “I don’t understand why they still think this strategy is a winner.”

But Bruce Wieder, a partner with the Washington law firm Dow Lohnes who is watching the case, said that Blackboard’s latest move was not that unusual. “It’s not typical, but it’s not outrageous,” he said.

Blackboard issued a statement today saying that its latest action is “not an effort to stop the overall re-examination,” and that the company “remains confident in the re-examination process.” Company officials could not be reached for further comment.

Diane M. Lank, Desire2Learn’s in-house lawyer, said in an interview Tuesday that “it is rather clear that Blackboard doesn’t like the patent office since the reexamination started.” —Jeffrey R. Young

If you have been following Internet policy debates over the past several years, you have probably run across the writings of Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Kevin Werbach, an assistant professor of legal studies at the University of Pennyslvania’s Wharton School of Business. Now these two names are in the news again — they’re advising President-elect Barack Obama as he considers whom to install at the Federal Communications Commission.

Both have been strong advocates for net neutrality, the premise that all data flowing over the Internet should be treated equally by service providers. (Paul Cesarini’s recent essay in The Chronicle Review provides a fuller definition.) They are active participants on CircleID, a news and opinion site about Internet infrastructure.

A Wired blog item called Ms. Crawford and Mr. Werbach “highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy.” But according to an article yesterday in Congress Daily, some people doubt that the two will have the last word on who should chair the commission. —Lisa Guernsey

Some people raise money for every mile they run in a long-distance race. Now two brothers, Michael and Matthew Kopko, have developed a Web site called GradeFund that applies this “marathon model” to helping students raise money for college.

The site enables students to create online profiles and invite family and friends to register as “sponsors” — people who make pledges of financial assistance to individual students based on the grades they earn at the end of each term. Corporate sponsors may also donate money to students who are interested in a subject that is related to their organization.

Launched about two weeks ago, GradeFund is managed by a team of seven people and already has about 900 users, according to Michael Kopko. He says between 15 percent and 25 percent of users are registered as sponsors; the rest are students. The creators of GradeFund also plan to launch a transcript-based job board in January that will enable employers to search for applicants based on their grades in a specific subject area.

The Kopko brothers came up with the idea for GradeFund when they learned that the girlfriend of a high-school buddy — who is now GradeFund’s chief financial officer — was going to graduate with about $120,000 in student-loan debt. Michael and Matthew, who recently earned degrees in economics at Harvard and Princeton Universities, respectively, saw an opportunity for students to profit from long hours spent staked out in the campus library.

“We’re going to help kids down the path of turning their grades into useful things,” Michael Kopko said in an interview with The Chronicle. So far, he said, the highest amount raised per A is $400. —Caitlin Moran

It could be a scene out of “Revenge of the Nerds: The Next Next Generation.”

Computer geeks at universities around the country compete to sabotage a Victoria’s Secret contest that is being promoted—on some of the campuses—by sorority members via Facebook.

At Drexel University and a handful of other colleges, students created computer scripts to sway the contest—an online vote to nominate a university to receive its own clothing line—in their campuses’ favor.

Tim Plunkett, a junior at Drexel, created a script that could cast 1,500 votes per second, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania’s independent student newspaper. Mr. Plunkett wrote the script in about three minutes and ran it on 30 different computers over 12 hours. The voting bot lifted the private university, with an undergraduate enrollment of more than 13,000 students, into first place with 5.2 million votes.

Thirty-one universities have their own PINK Collegiate Collection clothing lines, which hit stores in July and feature college logos on Victoria’s Secret T-shirts, sweatshirts, and underwear.

“We thought it was amusing to see the reaction of the people in the group [on Facebook], which were primarily sorority girls,” Mr. Plunkett told The Triangle, the student newspaper at Drexel.

Students at the contest’s other top four colleges—Texas Tech University (second), George Mason University (third), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (fourth)—all created similar scripts.

Officials from Victoria’s Secret could not be reached on Monday but the company’s Web site offers this warning:

“Tech schools, we’re watching your votes. And we’re on to you. Don’t be surprised if PINK shows up at your school.” —David DeBolt

The San Jose Mercury News ran a story this weekend about Hasan Elahi, an artist and assistant professor at San Jose State University who is “lifelogging” his whereabouts and activities to demonstrate that he is not involved in terrorism. The whole project came out of a life-changing event in 2002 — when, Mr. Elahi says, he was detained for nine hours at a U.S. airport and accused of stockpiling explosives during a trip to Africa.

“Elahi reasoned that if he was fated to live under a perpetual cloud of suspicion anyway, he would turn his Kafkaesque existence — every waking, quaking moment of it — into ‘surveillance art,’” writes Bruce Newman of The Mercury News. “If government agencies wanted to track his movements, Elahi would do it for them, letting his life play out in surreal time for the whole world to see on the Internet. If Big Brother was watching, Elahi would bore him to death.”

So everyday life becomes performance art. In fact, Mr. Newman raises the question of whether the whole exercise — including the story about being detained in the airport — is performance: “The FBI will neither confirm nor deny Elahi’s claim that he was detained because there is no official record that it ever happened. A field agent in the bureau’s San Francisco office responded to a description of Elahi’s story as ‘not likely,’ but no one at the FBI with direct knowledge of the case returned calls.”

Putting one’s life on display is probably the kind of thing that artists can get into, but I wouldn’t recommend the activity for the average person. Having dabbled a bit in lifelogging myself, I can say that recording one’s life can be stressful: You never know who could watch or listen to those lifelogs at any point down the road, so you suffer from a kind of self-censorship whenever the recorder (or “memex”) is running. It’s also a tricky legal landscape — you have to figure out whether recording other people is legal in your state.

There is also the whole question of whether the material you gather can be used against you in court. Leana Golubchik, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, has wondered whether authorities can subpoena details about people’s private lives from their lifelogging archives.

This doesn’t seem to be something Mr. Elahi is worried about — or, if he is worried, the concern is nothing compared to the ordeal of being accused of something he didn’t do. —Scott Carlson