While e-mail remains the official method of communication on most campuses, colleges are expanding their presence in the virtual world, trying to reach students where they hang out. But without careful planning, that can lead to a scattershot approach as new platforms keep popping up and students' attention becomes increasingly dispersed. The…

It is no secret that educators are teaching a generation that is more stressed out, debt-ridden, depressed, anxious, impulsive, scholastically amoral, self-entitled, bored, and apathetic than perhaps any other since Aristotle sauntered through the Lyceum. But what "really" worries the author is students' preoccupation with social media. Their need…

For years college administrators have warned students to watch their step in online social realms, noting that sharing too much could hurt them later on if future employees saw their drunken party pictures or boorish writings. Now that professors and administrators are catching Facebook fever, they should heed their own advice. The author…

Student-loan debt is not just a problem for young, recent college graduates searching for their first jobs. Growing numbers of adults nearing the ends of their careers are accumulating such big debt, too, and they don't have a lifetime to pay it back. In fact, student-loan debt is growing fastest among adults ages 60 and older, with more than two…

Trying to emulate the popularity of Web sites like Facebook and MySpace, hundreds of college alumni associations have begun to offer their own online social networks, seeking to stake a claim on the computer screens of current and former students, especially young alumni. Many of the sites have struggled to attract alumni and to keep them…

Facebook is an online directory that connects people though social networks at schools, and while most students on any American campus are regular visitors to the site, many professors and administrators have yet to hear about Facebook, let alone evaluate its impact. This kind of social networking affects all levels of academe, and college faculty…

Colleges that turn to Facebook as a creative way to reach out to students may run into a roadblock. This article presents how the officials of Ursuline College found that out. Facebook is a popular online social-networking service that is created for individual profiles only. The Ursuline College used Facebook to help students find both…

Stakeholders want to know whether the graduates remained in the states where they got their professional science master's (PSM) degree, what their job titles were, and the type of employers they were working for. Business leaders, governors, and university-system heads want to know if graduates are contributing to job creation and work-force…

Sebastian Thrun gave up tenure at Stanford University after 160,000 students signed up for his free online version of the course "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence." The experience completely changed his perspective on education, he said, so he ditched teaching at Stanford and launched the private Web site Udacity, which offers…

The author discusses her experiences using the "Facebook" social networking website, and the evolution of its use from a window on students' opinions and activities, to an uncomfortable forum where response to grades were visible in real time, and because of the instructor's known potential presence, students may have been intimidated from sharing…

People connect on Facebook by asking to "friend" one another. A typical user lists at least 100 such connections, while newbies are informed, "You don't have any friends yet." A humbling statement. It might make one want to find some. But friending students can be even dicier than befriending them. In the real world, casual professors may ask…

A month ago, the author wrote about the "official" materials one submits for a tenure-track academic hire, like a statement of one's teaching philosophy and a list of references. But in the Internet age, the "unofficial" part of an application is what exists about a person online. In 2009 the author wrote columns about the role of social media,…

In October, Myanmar's pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, got a quirky request on YouTube. A hyperactive instructor in a plaid jacket posted a video inviting her to do a Skype interview with his "World Regions" geography class at Virginia Tech. Ms. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate often compared to Nelson Mandela, might have…

Independent scholars are a growing part of the academic landscape. They may have been jilted by the academic job market, or are uninterested in either being on the tenure track or in cobbling together full-time work as adjuncts. Like traditional professors, they perform research, secure grants, and publish books and papers. In some cases, their…

When the University of Southern California announced that it would shutter its tiny German department, the outcry was out of proportion to the handful of faculty members and students directly affected by the move. In addition to students who advertised their dismay on Facebook and faculty members who complained that their efforts to bolster the…