After decades of relegating grad-school dissertations to dusty shelves on the top floors of libraries, Stanford’s believed to be the first school in the nation to put dissertations in a digital repository, the Chron is reporting.

As a hopefully-future grad student, this is fabulous news. Dissertations are the culmination of years of work and typically only publish a few copies that collect dust in libraries for the rest of eternity. It’s kind of disheartening to view it that way. They’re great resources for others doing highly specialized research as well, so they’ll hopefully see more use online as well.  Plus, there’s the whole saving lots-of-paper thing. We really, really like that, too.

Second Life still freaks me out a little. I won’t say never, but it’s pretty safe to say you will not see an avatar mini-me any time soon. I’m pretty tech savvy, and spend more hours on the Internet than I will ever admit, but I’m only now beginning to comprehend and accept the huge appeal of Second Life, the online user-created world that has immense real-world ramifications.

I’ve long been wary of its claims to connect researchers and educators — phone, e-mail, and GoogleDocs all do the same, minus the avatars — and have always been incredulous at established organizations presence in the virtual world. Reuters, at one point, had a bureau in Second Life. The University of Texas system paid a lot of real money to buy land for researchers in Second Life. Researchers, such as sociologists and anthropologists, see it as a safe, virtual laboratory for studying behavior when real-world conditions might be considered risky (ex: sending undergrads to conduct research on prostitution). Professors and librarians are leading classes in Second Life. All are cases of following where there is interest, but it always seemed slightly suspect to me. The lurking, murky dangers outweighed the benefits. 

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Although most people would probably hashtag Twitter as #thingsthataredistractinginclass, one professor is arguing that the microblogging service can be better incorporated as a learning tool.

At InsideHigherEd, W. Gardner Campbell says that more professors can use the tool as a source of real-time feedback from students. He debated Bruce Maas, CIO of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, at the Educause conference earlier this week.

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First off, hello midterms and prospecti and research papers! Thank you for reminding me that I’m also a student, not solely a higher-ed junkie, blogger, and DP editor. Sorry for the trickle of posts lately, guys; it’s been one of Those Weeks for about two weeks now.

But, moving past the “my life is hard” stuff and onto the real, more interesting news: A recent study that I found on the Chron indicates that those nifty .edu email addresses may well be on their way out, as 25 percent of doctoral institutions and 10 percent of associates, master’s and bachelor’s institutions were considering discarding them altogether. Reasons cited included network and security, IT support capabilities and student computing needs. It’s a dramatic jump from 2004, when 1 or 2 percent of institutions were considering it.

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A recent study shows online and virtual classrooms outperform traditional teacher-and-student-and-desk methods, a boost as schools and universities experiment with various ways to move learning tools online.

The Choice post sums up the study pretty well. The study  looked at education at all levels, but mainly focused on college-level and continuing-education courses. The study found that students who took some or all of their via the Internet (participating in message boards, using interactive online tools, etc.) scored, on average, in the 59th percentile; those participating solely in traditionally classroom work scored in the 50th percentile.

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A recent study took a look at how colleges use Twitter, including which ones tweet the most, have the most followers, and follow the most other schools. Unsurprisingly, Harvard had the highest number of followers, around 18,000, with Stanford a distant second. William & Mary followed the most other users, and GW officials tweeted the most, with an average of 57.7 per day. Check out the full results at the above link.

If you’ve ever wanted to know the sexuality of that cute guy in your Chemistry class, you may be happy to know that you might soon have a way to do so.

For a recent term project in a class on ethics in the “electronic frontier,” two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed technology that allows you to figure out someone’s sexuality based on one key piece of information: who they are friends with.

Though the authors of the program won’t swear to the accuracy of all results, they did conduct a test on a sample of Facebook profiles. They looked at the accounts of 1,544 men who stated on Facebook that their partner preference was female, 21 who said they were bisexual and 33 who said they were gay.

“Although the researchers had no way to confirm the analysis with scientific rigor, they used their private knowledge of 10 people in the network who were gay but did not declare it on their Facebook page as a simple check. They found all 10 people were predicted to be gay by the program,” says a recent Boston Globe article.

The article adds that “the work has not been published in a scientific journal, but it provides a provocative warning note about privacy.” It certainly does.

A new survey by Kaplan reports that over 70 percent of admissions officers say that they or a colleague has received friend requests on Facebook, MySpace, et. al, from potential applicants. The rates are lower at professional schools (as opposed to undergrad) but are still fairly high: 48 percent at law schools; 31 percent at medical schools; 50 percent at business schools.

Apparently, the lines have been so blurred that some students believe friending an admissions officer is a leg up. Students: This is likely false, and (I’m guessing) will likely get you likely mocked around the office — especially if you hit up their personal Facebook.

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A glitch in Google software accidentally misdirected 22 students’ emails at Brown University as the school was switching over to a Google server, the Brown Daily Herald reports. According to the Chronicle, Brown was not the only school affected. The schools were switching to having their mail handled by Gmail when the error occurred.

I’ll make the joke: Wonder if Emma Watson’s mail was one of those. Let us know if Daniel Radcliffe’s email address starts popping up mysteriously.