When it comes to saving money on textbooks, students can help themselves by renting their books or buying them used. Professors can help students by only upgrading to new editions when they have to. Federal regulators can help both groups make well-informed choices by requiring textbook publishers to give their customers the information they need to be frugal. But what can the colleges themselves do?

Daytona State College thinks it has the answer: eliminate the used-book and rental markets on campus and have all students buy e-books.

By doing so, the college could save its students as much as 80 percent on course materials, says Rand S. Spiwak, its chief financial officer.

» via Inside Higher Ed

Everywhere, libraries are collapsing under their own weight, though this isn’t a matter of a tight budget restricting libraries from expensive information machines. Most libraries have all but done away with costly microfilm and microfiche readers and replaced them with inexpensive scanning and digital retrieval technology. Accessible technology has made it easier for a library to keep itself abreast of modern methods of information delivery. The issue with this universal accessibility to information is that this material is now available to the average library patron via their broadband Internet connections at home. There’s less and less reason to maintain a public building which functions as a locus of information when these things can be done from a Starbucks or a bedroom. As technology progresses, librarians are reduced from purveyors of organized information to glorified video store clerks. That is, for anyone who doesn’t already have Netflix.

» via Splice Today

Federal communications regulators said Wednesday that they were considering whether wireless devices should be subject to different Internet traffic rules than telephone and cable lines, in a potential victory for carriers.

At issue is net neutrality, a term that means high-speed Internet providers should not block or slow information, or make Web sites pay to reach users more quickly.

» via The New York Times

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

» via The New York Times

techspotlight:

LONDON – It’s been in print for over a century, but in future the Oxford English Dictionary — the authoritative guide to the English language — may only be available online.

Oxford University Press, the publisher, said Sunday that burgeoning demand for the dictionary’s online version has far outpaced demand for the printed versions.

By the time the lexicographers behind the dictionary finish revising and updating the latest edition — a gargantuan task that will take many more years — publishers are doubtful there will still be a market for the printed form. The online Oxford English Dictionary now gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers. The current printed edition — a hefty 20-volume, 750 pound ($1,165) set published in 1989 — has sold about 30,000 sets in total.

I’m certain my grandkids will never dial a phone number, or even have one. It’s time to say goodbye to ten digits along with the world’s oldest social network.  While we’re at it, let’s kill phone-tree mazes, do-not-call lists…everything associated with phone numbers.

Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. This isn’t the demise of phone calls.  Far from it.  People will still talk on their phones.  They just want the service to be simple and fun, which won’t entail punching digits into a device to start a conversation.

» via TechCrunch

Many of us have seen trouble coming for a long, long, time. Did we really believe that endowment growth, state support, and tuition dollars could or would provide an unchecked revenue stream, tempered only by short downturns in the economy, followed by fairly quick recoveries? Did we really believe that we could expand administrative structures and shortchange instruction, but still maintain quality institutions? Did we think that poor completion rates and the achievement gaps between whites and minority groups could be solved only with more money? Did we honestly believe that expensive amenities and increased financial aid for upper-middle-class and wealthy students could be sustained? Of course not.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Hardest hit will be small, private colleges in the upper Midwest and on the East and West coasts. New York’s Utica College, for instance, is planning on a 7 percent decrease in enrollment over the next five years. Larger universities are not immune either. As Marc Harding, director of admission at Iowa State, puts it: “Any university interested in growing—or even stabilizing—its enrollment in the next few years will have to reach out to a more ethnically diverse population.”

» via The Daily Beast

Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet.

» via NetworkWorld