First of all, the amount of time spent dealing with allegations of infringement are huge, according to the study by the Campus Community Project. IT personnel alone spend a mean time of 750 hours at public universities, while private university IT personnel spend around 620 hours a year on this. The shorter time for private institutions generally comes about because of their smaller size, and so smaller search size, and less frequent notifications.

Overall, the costs that come with them are larger than most would expect. It was concluded that between $350,000 and $500,000 is spent annually per institution – directly and indirectly – dealing with copyright infringement notices. The quality of US education has already been questioned (most recently by US presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 3rd Presidential Debate), especially in contrast to the high cost of it. In this light, the costs incurred dealing with copyright infringements are nonsensical.

The study reports that 25% of public universities use a form of technological filtering, such as Copysense, to try and reduce infringements. As noted before, such measures are fairly inaccurate and rarely work. Less common are educational methods, which may be linked with p2p access, as at Missouri S&T. However, most universities and colleges simply disconnect pirating students from the network, and make them promise to never do it again when they want to get back on. Financial penalties are also given, but this is not yet commonplace. We will deal with this in an upcoming piece.

Source: Tackling College Piracy: At What Cost?

Most of America’s youth already know about and make use of blogs, wikis, BitTorrent sites and podcasts. IBM and the University of Arizona are teaming up to help them put their knowledge to use in the business world by teaching them how to actually create and run businesses around these “social technologies.”

Apparently, the interest in information technology among students has significantly decreased. The Association for Computer Machinery has reported that the number of students choosing to study computer science has dropped by an average of 32 percent over the last 4 years. IBM’s aim is to encourage more of today’s students to pursue a degree in information technology.

Gina Poole, IBM’s head of university relations said that “by gaining skills on Web 2.0 and online communities, students can help businesses and employers better market and sell themselves using powerful online mediums.”

The Univeristy of Arizona will in fact be the first to offer so-called ‘Web 2.0 courses’. Social networking has been a growing trend recently and has created a new set of jobs in the tech industry. The demand for a “community manager” is on the rise. IBM wants to prepare students to fill this position.

The course will help students to understand the concept behind social networking and will promote “leadership qualities, collaboration and peer-interaction” in the classes.

Source: University to teach students to implement BitTorrent and Web 2.0 in business