The Rutgers webcam case was recently linked to this year's presidential race.

As the trial of former Rutgers University freshman Dharun Ravi riveted the nation earlier this year, there seemed to be a widespread consensus that his high-tech spying on his gay roommate was heinous and should be punished.

But when the jury convicted Ravi of bias crimes and invasion of privacy, there was little public agreement about what should happen next.

What’s a just penalty for an 18-year-old offender who seemed to have been clueless about the risk of such dire consequences?

On May 21, Judge Glenn Berman will have to make that agonizing choice, in the face of a rising chorus of calls for lenience and sentencing guidelines that presume a prison sentence of five to 10 years.

The unusual details of the crime don’t make the judge’s decision any easier.

Although Ravi was not charged in the death of his roommate, Tyler Clementi of Ridgewood, N.J., the young man’s suicide hovered over the courtroom every day, and many assumed that humiliation from exposure contributed to the 18-year-old’s tragic decision to jump off the George Washington Bridge.

In conversations in barbershops, office cafeterias, and kitchens, the case has had enormous power in sparking serious conversations about the pervasiveness of prejudice and the pain of bullying. These discussions reveal a vast spectrum of views about how to make the punishment fit the crime.

Would incarceration reflect a reasoned sensitivity to the feelings of the victim and an appropriate revulsion against bigotry? Or would it show an overreaching effort at deterrence, or even vengeance?

This quandary comes against a backdrop of growing intolerance for intolerance.

To appreciate the sea change in the public reaction to bias and bullying, consider the remarkable contrast in last Thursday’s news.

The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office filed papers insisting that Ravi go to jail for an incident in which there was no physical attack. That same day, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, was fending off reports that as a teenager he cut the hair off a fellow student who later came out as gay.

The assault, in which the victim was held down by a group of students, apparently was shrugged off as boys-will-be-boys behavior at the time.

Today, some want the harshest penalties for Ravi. They include A.C. Willment of Ridgewood, a 57-year-old copy editor at a legal publication. She was horrified that he destroyed potentially incriminating text messages and, she believed, showed no remorse in his two media interviews after the verdict. “I don’t believe for a second he’s sincere about feeling sorry or that he cares about anyone but Dharun Ravi,” she says.

The court decision means students will have access to at least some free book excerpts online.

A federal judge in Atlanta has ruled mostly in favor of Georgia State University in a copyright case that would allow professors to continue posting excerpts of published works online for their students.

In a case closely watched by academia and publishers, Senior U.S. District Judge Orinda Evans rejected 69 copyright claims filed by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications. She found that Georgia State had violated copyright infringement law by using five longer excerpts from four books.

The suit was the first of its kind in the country and examined a key way college professors teach and students learn in the digital age.

In the lawsuit, publishers accused Georgia State of “massive” copyright violations for allowing professors to download and reproduce excerpts from published works for course materials without getting publishers’ permission or paying licensing fees.

The decision, if upheld on appeal, means students will continue to have easy access to excerpted academic and scholarly material posted in online reading rooms managed by colleges.

The publishers’ highly publicized lawsuit, filed in 2008, was heavily watched by research librarians across the country, and several blogged about the verdict, which was issued May 11, over the weekend.

“The judge’s ruling is significant not only for Georgia State University, but for all educational fair use in general,” Georgia State University President Mark P. Becker said. “While the broader implications of this case will be analyzed for weeks and months to come, Georgia State is very pleased to have been a trailblazer in this increasingly complex digital copyright environment.”

The case tested the application of the “fair use doctrine,” which allows someone to use published material without the consent of the copyright owner. It also limits the amount of material that can be used and serves to ensure that the use of copyright material does not diminish the market for it.

The decision highlights the importance of providing academic faculty a cost-effective, legal way to spread important knowledge to students, said Kerry Heyward, a Georgia State attorney.

Only two in 10 computer programmers are women, according to federal statistics.

The rise of the brash, stylish, computer-geek-turned-cool-guy known simply as a “brogrammer” among popular technology startups threatens to further alienate women from enrolling in computer science courses, where for years they have been vastly underrepresented, higher-education officials said.

Mainstreaming of the label “brogrammer”—a combination of bro and programmer—began among technology companies appealing to recent college graduates who are experts at writing computer code. It has since seeped into higher education, where students said it has reinforced the archetype of a tech-savvy student ready for post-graduation life in the technology industry: A man.

“Some people say brogrammer is not sexist, because women can be programmers, too. They’re just called hogrammers,” said Xanda Schofield, a junior computer sciences major at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., where the college’s president has pushed for more women in technology-focused majors. “Hearing that, you realize that people just don’t understand the problem. They’re trying to make programming cool by excluding women, making it boys only. It makes me wonder why someone would try to apply a social construct that’s discriminating when you can just appeal to all students.”

Faculty members and campus decision makers nationwide for years have warned of falling rates of women students in the computer sciences, which hasn’t always been so thoroughly dominated by men. In 1985, nearly four in 10 undergraduate computer science degrees were awarded to women. By 2009, that number had plummeted to 18 percent. The U.S. technology industry reflects a similar trend: Two in 10 programmers are women, according to a 2011 report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Read the full story on eCampus News

Over the next decade, as many as two-thirds of all new jobs will require education beyond high school.

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has released a blueprint to transform career and technical education (CTE) in order to provide high-quality job-training opportunities for students. These efforts aim to reduce skill shortages, promote business growth, encourage new investments and hires, and prompt innovation and economic growth.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the new efforts at the Des Moines Area Community College in Ankeny, Iowa, where he also discussed the reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006.

The Obama administration already has made investments to align classroom teaching and learning with real-world business needs.  ED and the Department of Labor are in the process of distributing $2 billion in Trade Adjustment Assistance grants to strengthen community college programs and workforce partnerships.

The FY 2013 budget proposes an additional $1 billion to help 500,000 (a 50 percent increase) high school students participate in Career Academies, programs offered in high school that combine college curricula with a career emphasis, such as healthcare or engineering.

As the nation recovers from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, 60 percent of jobs added nationwide last year went to those with at least a bachelor’s degree, and 90 percent to those with at least some college.

Over the next decade, as many as two-thirds of all new jobs will require education beyond high school.

UD Mercy saw a 30-percent increase in bandwidth usage this week.

If Marquette University students weren’t on spring break this week, the school’s IT officials would have faced an internet bandwidth nightmare.

The Marquette Golden Eagles were building a lead in the second half of their first round NCAA Tournament game March 15 against the underdog Brigham Young University (BYU) Cougars when Mary Simmons, Marquette’s director of security and networks, saw that the campus’s bandwidth was “pretty much pegged,” or maxed out, even on the slowest week of the spring semester.

Whoever was left on campus, Simmons said, was streaming the game online, and IT staffers could track the sky-high use of network bandwidth.

Even with just a smattering of students and university employees on the private Milwaukee campus, Simmons had ordered the IT department to combine the school’s two internet “pipes” that have been expanded in recent years.

Even the student pipe – four times larger than the faculty pipe – wouldn’t withstand the demand while NCAA Tournament video was streamed by hundreds of people.

“I knew even the student pipe would just be too small for everyone who would be streaming this game today,” she said in an interview with eCampus News as the Golden Eagles took a commanding lead late in the game. “If the students were here this week, we might have problems.”

Providing sufficient bandwidth has been a problem faced by college campuses of every size since web video streaming became widely used in the late-2000s. The problem is compounded during March Madness, when students tune in to CBS’s online streaming site to watch their teams play on a laptop, tablet, or smart phone.

There were 26.7 million unique visitors to the NCAA March Madness Live online streaming service in 2011, according to a report from Turner Sports Media, up from only 2 million viewers in 2007. Viewers streamed more than 10 million hours of online video during last year’s NCAA Tournament.

Viewers watching March Madness games on an Apple iPhone or iPad accounted for 36 percent of all live streaming, according to the NCAA. All this while TV viewership jumped 15 percent in 2011.

Streaming video and bogging down campus networks isn’t isolated to March, of course. Colleges nationwide have reported exponential increases in video streaming thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and other services bringing TV shows and movies to laptops, mobile devices, and video game systems.

Technologists at the University of Detroit Mercy kept an eye on web traffic and bandwidth usage in the hours before the school took on the powerhouse Kansas Jayhawks in a first-round March Madness bout that marked UD’s first NCAA Tournament appearance since 1999.

"The truth of the matter falls somewhere in between, and we should strive to develop or reinstitute programs to reflect that," said one reader. Copyright: Christopher Halloran.

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has criticized President Obama for encouraging more Americans to seek higher education, even going as far as to call the president a “snob” and noting that “a lot” of Americans have no desire to go to college. Is there any merit to his viewpoint?

We recently asked our readers what they think about the issue—and while one might assume Santorum’s comments would be poorly received among educators, some agreed that Santorum might have a point.

Some readers said President Obama is forgetting about important programs like career-training schools, while others believe Santorum’s comments dig at a larger stigma that exists in today’s culture: judging those who don’t hold a bachelor’s degree.

Here are five diverse viewpoints from our readers [comments edited for brevity]:

What about the economy?

“Santorum certainly hasn’t listened to business owners who need educated Americans to work for them. Does he really want to demote ‘a lot’ of Americans to the most meager economic status? All recent studies indicate that, without education, they will have just that. I agree with setting the goal of educating the public to the fullest extent possible. It is healthy for a democracy. Higher education comes in many forms: liberal arts, science and math, technical skills, art and music, vocational skills, online courses to improve or learn new skills. It is not snobbish to ask Americans to aspire to do their best, it is elitist to promote mediocrity for the middle and lower economic classes.” —David F. Withrow, director of technology, Harford Day School, Bel Air, Md.

“It’s an insensitive and ignorant remark by someone who obviously has his education under his belt already. Does he know that only 4% of Black and Hispanic males have a college degree? Furthermore, less than 60% of students are graduating from high school in the Chicago Public School system—counting approximately 500 schools. We need educated people to keep our democracy strong and embrace freedom in this great country of ours. [Santorum] is disconnected from the mainstream of America.” —Louise Eggert-Nevins

“Many will never escape the death grip of poverty without a solid education. If someone doesn’t want to go to college, they don’t have to, but the fact that the President thinks it is important enough to try to ease the burden for those who do is a good thing.” —Tina Roberts

Click here for the full story

"The countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow," Obama said, repeating a point he has made many times before.

President Barack Obama on Feb. 27 urged the nation’s governors to invest more state resources in education, saying a highly skilled workforce is crucial for the U.S. to remain competitive with other countries.

Obama made his pitch at a White House meeting with governors in Washington, D.C., as part of the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association. The president and first lady Michelle Obama hosted a black tie dinner with the governors Feb. 26.

Obama said at the Feb. 27 session that he sympathized with governors whose state budgets have been badly squeezed during the economic downturn. But he said that was no reason to trim resources from schools.

“The fact is that too many states are making cuts in education that I think are simply too big,” Obama said. “Nothing more clearly signals what you value as a state than the decisions you make about where to invest. Budgets are about choices.”

He reaffirmed his view that decisions about education should be left to states and not the federal government. “I believe education is an issue that is best addressed at the state level,” the president said, “and governors are in the best position to have the biggest impact.”

It was a message directed largely to Republican governors, many of whom have complained of too much federal intrusion in state matters—including education. Several prominent GOP governors were in the room as the president spoke, including Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

For more school funding news, see:

$5 billion program would focus on teacher quality

Obama seeks more money for education, setting up showdown with Congress

School Funding Center at eSN Online

Obama earlier this month granted waivers to 10 states, freeing them from some of the toughest requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, as long as they measure student progress with their own tough standards.

He called on governors to assist that effort toward a more state-centered approach to education by spending more on education.

“That does not mean we have to invest in things that aren’t working,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense to break some china and move aggressively on reforms. But the fact of the matter is, we don’t have to choose between resources and reforms; we need resources and reform.”

Specifically, he called for more teachers in the classroom. He also noted that 21 states require students to stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.

A major lawsuit is drawing attention to illegal downloads.

Young people want their music, TV and movies now — even if it means they get these things illegally.

A recent Columbia University survey found, in fact, that 70 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had bought, copied or downloaded unauthorized music, TV shows or movies, compared with 46 percent of all adults who’d done the same.

With such an entrenched attitude, what can be done about widespread online piracy?

Certainly law enforcement has gone after scofflaws like these, hitting them with fines and, in some cases, even jail time. Congress is considering controversial anti-piracy bills that would, among other things, forbid search engines from linking to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement.

And there are lawsuits pitting media heavyweights against internet firms — notably Viacom’s billion-dollar litigation against YouTube.

But here’s a radical notion to consider: What if young people who steal content weren’t viewed as the problem?

What if they and advocates for maximum online access could persuade the entertainment industry to loosen its tight grip on its coveted, copyrighted material — quite the opposite of what the industry is trying to do right now?

“The real problem is not pirates downloading illegally, but a failure to innovate on the part of the content providers,” says Steven Budd, a law student at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Like it or not, that’s how a lot of people of his generation view the situation. And some experts think they’re gaining clout, as they insist on easy access to music and other content while the internet world loudly protests anti-piracy legislation that it says unfairly puts the responsibility of policing piracy sites on search engines and other sites.

“We’ve seen the emergence of a real social movement around these issues,” says Joe Karaganis, vice president of The American Assembly, a public policy institute at Columbia University, which oversaw the recent survey, funded by a grant from Google.

He’s talking, in part, about “blackouts” staged by popular internet sites that included Wikipedia, the user-generated online encyclopedia, and Reddit, the social news website. With support from Google, Facebook, and Twitter, they were protesting the proposed federal anti-piracy bills.

But here’s the surprising part — a lot of young people don’t necessarily expect to get movies, TV shows and music for free.

“I do think people would pay for this content if it’s reasonably priced and it’s available when they want to watch it,” says Srikant Mikkilineni, a law student at Drake University in Des Moines.

Not wanting to mar his law school record, Mikkilineni pays for the songs, movies and TV shows he downloads. But he does so grudgingly. “Right now, they want us to pay multiple times for the same content,” he says, complaining that that’s not reasonable.

If he buys a DVD, for instance, it’s $15. He can watch it on his laptop — but it’s illegal for him to copy it in order to watch it on his iPod or smart phone.

Many young people point to Apple’s iTunes service as a model that could be replicated by other entertainment companies.

“iTunes changed the landscape for music because it made it far too convenient and much easier than downloading music through alternative methods (even illegal ones),” says Matt Gardner, an information technology student at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

But even more than convenience, a recent study at Duke University found that cost was the major factor that drives college students to copy entertainment content illegally.

Only one in 10 campuses have a mobile website.

A surge in the percentage of recent high school graduates who use smart phones to research colleges and universities could turn campus web development on its head.

Colleges’ mobile sites, once considered experimental by campus leaders, could take priority over traditional websites, and soon.

Fifty-two percent of prospective college students said they had viewed a school’s website on a mobile device in 2011—more than double the percentage from 2010. And 48 percent of those students said the mobile site experience bettered their view of the campus, according to a survey conducted by higher-education consulting company Noel-Levitz and the National Research Center for College & University Admissions.

Two percent of student respondents said their mobile site perusing hurt their perception of the college or university.

Only 4 percent of students who used a mobile device to view a college’s site used a tablet.

Read the full story on eCampus News