Students at universities in the United States have been pegged as good targets for online criminals, the security company RSA notes in a recent report.

The first month of 2010 marked a new record in the total number of monthly phishing attacks for RSA's Anti-Fraud Command Center, at 18,820, up from 8,497 in January 2009. The center now monitors more than 300 organizations in 140-plus countries. RSA, a division of the information firm EMC, says that it has noticed several attacks focused on servers at American universities so far this year, although no total is given, compared with a "minimal number" of total attacks in 2009.

"This sudden reversal may mark a new trend in phishing and online fraud—and a source for concern within the education...

Students in Emory University's bike-sharing program will soon be able to unlock the bikes they want to use by sending a text message. The university will replace its current system, which requires manually checking out a key, with the automatic one, developed by students at the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology.

Each bike in the new "viaCycle" fleet will be equipped with a GPS and locking system. When students or employees want to use a bike, they will send a text message with the bike's identification number to a server. The server will forward the request to the bike and unlock it automatically. After using the bike, the rider will use an attached cable to secure it anywhere and send another text message to lock it.

Five graduate students and one alumni of Georgia Tech's mechanical-engineering program won a $50,000 grant from the Ford Motor Company Fund to...

NEW YORK — The TEDxNYED Conference that took place here on Saturday was like the Lollapalooza festival for education technologists. Almost every speaker was a headliner in his or her own right.

The forum was a regional spin-off of the "billionaires-and-brains edutainment summit in California," as one participant, Dan Cohen, of George Mason University, described the mothership TED conferences and the hugely popular videos of their presentations. The theme Saturday was how new media and technology are shaping the future of education. And the speakers — including Lawrence Lessig, Michael Wesch, Henry Jenkins, Gina Bianchini, Jay Rosen, and David Wiley — each had 18 minutes to deliver what sometimes felt like a "greatest hits" snapshot of their ideas, with the chance for future online glory...

In an effort to better prepare its students for cyberwarfare, the United States Naval Academy presented a plan to expand its cybersecurity program on Monday, the Associated Press reported. According to the AP article, the Naval Academy recognizes that it falls behind the other two major military academies -- the United States Military Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy --in preparing its students to defend and attack computer systems.

The Naval Academy created a new Center for Cyber Security Studies in December 2009 and now offers cybersecurity internships with the National Security Agency and the National Defense University. The academy is testing two new courses in the computer-science department this semester: "Cryptology and Network Security" and...

Lots of colleges are designing smartphone applications that make life more convenient for students by shrinking what they can already get on desktop computers. North Carolina State University today announced a new library service that carries that trend a step further, sharing campus history by taking advantage of a smartphone's ability to sense your location.

The system, called WolfWalk, alerts pedestrians to information about nearby buildings and shows them hundreds of archival photos. One of the oldest is an 1890 shot that depicts the first freshman class, when the institution was called the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts.

“Particularly on college campuses,...

The February 18 fairness hearing on the revised settlement in the Google Books lawsuit has come and gone, and the world now waits for word from Denny Chin, the federal judge in charge of the case. It could be a long wait. At the Association of American Publishers meeting held in Washington this week, there was talk that we might not hear from the judge for a couple of months. (He could issue a ruling anytime, of course.)

One question on the minds of everyone following the settlement is : What happens after the judge rules? Jonathan Band, a specialist in technology law and policy, has created a nifty chart of possible paths the settlement might take, depending on what Judge Chin decides. Called "GBS...

Librarians spend an average 22 minutes a day reading print publications relating to their job and an average 10 minutes a day reading library-themed blogs, a survey has found.

Primary Research Group surveyed 555 full-time academic librarians in the United States and Canada for the report, released this week.

Librarians who were at least 60 years old spent the most time reading print publications, at 31 minutes a day. Academic librarians 30 or under spent the most time reading library-related blogs, at 19 minutes a day.

James Moses, the company's director of research, said it was interested in monitoring technology use because academic librarians' profession is so information-intensive. "They're sort of the canary in the coal mine for technology in broader society," he said.

The survey also...

Add this to the reasons you might not want to allow texting in your classroom:

Above the Law, a legal blog, reports that a Georgetown University law professor unwittingly caused a national media frenzy on Thursday when he used a Paper Chase-style pedagogical gambit.

According to Above the Law's report, Peter W. Tague began his criminal-law course Thursday morning by telling the class that the U.S. Supreme Court's chief justice, John G. Roberts, would soon announce his retirement for health reasons. At least one student in the class immediately began sending notes to the outside world.

Within 20 minutes, Radar Online, a gossip site that is a corporate...

A classics professor says students in his Latin classes are usually lousy translators of Horace and Ovid—mainly because they don't understand the cultural references in their poetry.

So now the professor, Roger Mr. Travis Jr., requires students to do weekly role-playing exercises online to put themselves in the shoes (or sandals) of the ancient Romans.

For Mr. Travis, an associate professor of classics and ancient Mediterranean studies at the University of Connecticut, the experiment is part of a broader exploration of using games in the classroom, which he describes on his blog, Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World.

He has tried using virtual worlds in the past, where students can build avatars for their characters and move in video-game-like realms. But this semester he's using Google Wave, and...

The University of California at Los Angeles has restored its streaming video service about two months after temporarily suspending the service amid complaints from an educational-media trade group.

The Association for Information and Media Equipment told UCLA in the fall that the university had violated copyright laws by letting instructors use the videos, some of which were full-length productions. UCLA decided that beginning this semester it would suspend the password-protected video-streaming service, available only to students in specific classes.

UCLA announced Wednesday that it will restart streaming of instructional content. The university hopes material will be back up by the spring...