Legal experts say the recent banning of a popular gossip web site at a public university could violate students' First Amendment rights and meet stiff challenges in court, but campus officials stand by their decision.

Most community colleges cannot match the budgets and endowments that are typical of four-year colleges and universities. But that doesn't mean they are lagging in terms of educational technology: In a recent survey on technology integration in higher education, community colleges actually scored slightly higher than four-year institutions.

A Missouri mother on trial in a landmark cyber bullying case was convicted Nov. 26 of three minor offenses instead of the main conspiracy charge in a cruel internet hoax that allegedly drove a 13-year-old girl to suicide.

Higher education is discovering that Google isn't the only game in town. The search-engine giant, along with competitor Yahoo, has long been the most-used search site, but other search tools have surfaced in recent years that could help college students do more in-depth research of video and audio files and web sites that have cluttered the internet.

Several trends, already firmly established, now seem poised to exert a significant impact on international relations and human interaction. As a result, educators might do well to take heed of four of the more ubiquitous of these trends, which I'll allude to by means of these labels: (1) parallel computing, (2) cloud computing, (3) brain mapping, and (4) the "global dis-assembly line."

The Federal Communications Commission is likely to consider a plan this month to auction public airwaves with a mandate that the winning bidder set aside some space for free nationwide broadband internet access, a proposal staunchly opposed by the cell phone industry, Reuters reports.

The New York Times reports that the rising cost of college, even before the recession, threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the annual report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

A Colorado man accused of posting comments about his ex-girlfriend on the web site Craigslist has been charged under a rarely used criminal libel law, reports ABC News.

Using a webcam, a microphone, and the internet, some students applying to Wake Forest University can now sit in their living rooms at home and have a "face-to-face" conversation with an admissions counselor at the university, Wake Forest reports.

An emerging field called collective intelligence could create an Orwellian future on a level that Big Brother could only dream of, reports the New York Times.