Southwest Virginia Blogs

Facebook, the uber-popular college networking web site, is providing options for users to protect their privacy after a new feature it recently added angered thousands of students.

The new "news feed" feature the site offers shows users any recent changes friends have made to their profiles -- be it changing relationship status, adding friends or joining groups. In what can only be classified as the definition of irony, some users may have opened up the site to find, via newsfeed, that their friends had joined a group called "Students against facebook news feed."

The web site's creator reacted quickly and now students can decide if they'd like certain changes they make to their profiles blocked from the new function.

What are your thoughts? Is this much ado about nothing since all of the information being provided on the news feed is available anyway or did Facebook cross the line in creating a feature that some users have referred to as "stalkerish"?

As a response to the manhunt of William Morva on Aug. 21, Virginia Tech officials are debating whether to use a text messaging system to stay in touch with their students. One of my colleagues, Albert Raboteau, wrote about Tech's recent considerations.

The discussions are coming on the heels of a rash of articles in recent months about how text messaging and instant messaging have taken the place of e-mail in the lives of the millennial generation. Here's just one I was able to find. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find an active link to the AP story that I think started all the flurry of writing about texting and IMing. If anybody has it lying around, please send it to us in the comments section.)

Anyway, several universities around the country, including Penn State, have launched programs to begin using such systems. Penn State is working with e2Campus, one of a handful of companies who are trying to market their technology wares to universities.

Another school that has already started to use the technology is Montclair State University in New Jersey. MSU's program started last year (2005-06), and I wrote about it at my previous paper when they first rolled out the new phones that were part of the package. There, students can use the tricked up cell phones to check where the shuttle buses are on their routes around campus, to get into their university e-mail accounts and also to receive text messages from the university about school-wide news. They also have the option of using a personal security device linked with the police department that is able to track a student's movement through a global positioning system. (The idea, for example, is that a student who goes jogging alone might want to put the security device on for the time of the run, in case of emergency.)

All of these features sound like they might work well in getting students to sit up and pay attention to university happenings -- school closings because of weather, news about an upcoming rally or other event -- or even help with personal safety and peace of mind. But I do question how well they would work in a real, large-scale emergency. As many learned on Sept. 11, 2001, cell service was so jammed that the phones were almost useless. E-mail was the best way to stay in touch that day. When I was in New York City for the August 2003 blackout, none of my friends were able to use their mobile phones. I also heard from many students at Virginia Tech that they had spotty service throughout the day when Morva was running loose because of the overloading of the system with parents trying to call in.

All of that makes me wonder if the service or networks would be able to handle the volume of the text messages that a university would want to send to its students in an emergency. Are the systems just providing a false sense of security?

Last Monday, we ran a story about technology on college campuses that was (understandably) overshadowed by the mayhem of an escaped inmate running around Blacksburg and killing two people.

Now that things are sort of back to normal, I wanted to post a little something on the technology story. In the course of reporting it, I talked to several professors at some local colleges -- Radford University, Roanoke College and Virginia Tech -- who had very different opinions about the effects of technology on their students and on the classroom. Some of them embraced the new ways of reaching students, and some were concerned that the gadgets and Web sites were just a distraction.

One of those distractions -- cell phones -- was even the subject of research done by one of the professors I spoke to. Peggy Meszaros, the director of the Center for Information Technology Impacts on Children, Youth, and Families, recently completed a study on college students' use of cell phones. Together with undergraduate students in the Kappa Omicron Nu Honors Society, Meszaros collected surveys from 568 Tech students and reported the following findings:

• More than 80 percent of the participants said they use their phones between 6 p.m. and 12 midnight, the largest percentage of time that they talked.


• Almost 80 percent of the students' cell phone bills are paid for by mom and dad.


• Young women talked with their immediate family members more frequently than anyone else -- an average of 16 to 30 minutes per call. The next most frequently called person for young women was their boyfriend or girlfriend.


• Young men talked most frequently with their girlfriend or boyfriend -- an average of 16 to 30 minutes per call. Family members or relatives came in second, with an average of 5 to 15 minutes per call.

Meszaros will report more extensive findings on the study, "Cutting the Wireless Cord: Effects of College Student Cell Phone Use and Attachment to Family and Peers," at a November symposium in Minneapolis for the National Council on Family Relations. And as she said a few weeks ago, "The landscape of technology is changing by the minute."

Albert Raboteau, a fellow Roanoke Times reporter, is delving into the effects of the Internet and other technology on cheating in today's college classrooms.

He's been talking to some professors and others in administration but hasn't had any luck with reaching out to students. He's looking specifically for students who would be willing to talk about a time when they cheated, using some kind of technology. It's clearly a touchy subject, but he would at least like to understand the student piece of this story.

So, if you're an area student willing to talk about your experience bending the classroom rules -- or maybe if you've watched it happen but didn't say anything -- please contact him at albert.raboteau@roanoke.com or 540-381-1663.

At a conference last week in San Diego on educational technology, an MIT professor touted his plan to provide low-cost laptops to children in developing countries. Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop Per Child and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, said he thinks giving laptops to children will do more for education in poor countries than previous efforts to give them to adults, because children are more creative and open to change.

The San Diego Union-Tribune noted that professors, politicians and others in this country think the idea would also work closer to home for young Americans from poor families with limited access to the Internet. (One feature of the laptops is that they would have wireless capabilities.)

Negroponte's group is searching for comments from educators at all levels about the hardware, software, educational content and other details of the project on the wiki part of its site.

I'm wondering what teachers and professors of education and information technology think of this idea as well. Would you want to see something like this available here, too?

Last month I attended a four-day conference for higher education reporters at the University of Maryland. My time there was well spent and I think most of the 25 or so reporters who came from all over the country got something out of it as we shared story ideas and listened to experts in higher education talk about issues facing the industry.

And while I heard some interesting opinions on everything from college athletics to demographic trends among college students I wouldn't describe any of it as shocking news.

Until Montgomery College President Charlene Nunley mentioned, almost offhandedly, how next year's budget might have to absorb millions of dollars in costs because of CALEA.

The response from the crowd of reporters - who cover higher education for a living, mind you - was a collective, "huh?"