Philip Agre, a former computer-science professor at UCLA whose disappearance sparked an online search effort, was located and is safe, according to a police report.

The bulletin said the scholar "was located by LA County Sheriff's Department on January 16, 2010 and is in good health and is self sufficient." No further details were given, and Mr. Agre or his friends who led the search effort could not be reached for comment.

A Web site by friends of Mr. Agre had not yet been updated as of Monday afternoon, and apparenlty they are not satisfied that he is back on his feet. "Those of us guiding...

Tablet-style computers could be game-changers for colleges, bringing in a new era of classroom collaboration and pushing the adoption of electronic textbooks over a tipping point. Today's announcement by Apple Inc. of the iPad tablet has education watchers predicting a wave of student purchases, major textbook publishers rejoicing, and at least one college saying it will consider giving them to all incoming students.

But wait -- it might be time to take a deep breath to let the excitement of the sales pitch fade. Tablets have been tried before, with similar fanfare, and have fallen flat. And so far e-textbook sales are growing more slowly than expected. And even Apple doesn't always hit big with new products (the Newton personal organizer being its most famous flop). Even the institution considering a give-away, Abilene Christian University, said it will have to play around...

Professors teaching Stanford University's latest course on iPhone programming urged students to give away or even sell the applications they develop for the course. After all, plenty of people have made their fortunes selling games or tools for the popular smartphones for about a dollar per download.

"Go post it and make $1-million off your project -- I encourage it," said the professor, Alan Cannistraro, who is also a developer for Apple. Now that's a motivation to do your homework.

This is the fourth time the university has offered the course, and the professors offer video recordings of all the lectures free online (through Apple's iTunes store, naturally). The course is overseen by a longtime Apple employee, Paul Marcos.

The first lecture from this semester hit the Web last week. At the...

A professor at the Catholic University of America has been testing a new e-book reader that hasn't yet hit store shelves but that is designed with textbooks in mind.

The device, called the eDGe e-reader, has two screens, hinged to open like a book. The screen on the left uses the same screen technology as the Kindle or other recent e-book readers -- it can display only in black and white, but it is easier on the eyes than a traditional monitor. But because traditional monitors still have important advantages -- like the ability to display color and play video clips -- the screen on the right uses that conventional technology.

The eDGe is one of many gadgets being unveiled this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas. It joins the increasingly crowded new category of e-book reader: Amazon has the Kindle. Sony sells the Reader. Barnes & Noble recently...

Joel Tenenbaum wants a rematch of his legal bout with a music-industry group over illegal file trading.

Lawyers for Mr. Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student who was ordered to pay $675,000 to record labels for music piracy, filed a motion on Tuesday asking for a new trial, or to reduce the hefty jury verdict they characterized as "grossly excessive."

"The award punishes Tenenbaum not only for his own actions but also for the aggregate actions of others," said the student's lawyers in their request. "The ratio of the penalty to the actual injury he caused is far beyond what any case has ever sustained."

At the time of the jury verdict, Mr. Tenenbaum said he...

Just weeks ago Blackboard said it would appeal its patent battle against rival Desire2Learn all the way to the Supreme Court, but on Tuesday both companies announced that they have settled their epic legal battle.

The companies issued a joint press release announcing that they had reached an agreement that will settle all lawsuits between them, ending litigation that began more than three years ago when Blackboard sued its rival, asserting that it had violated the company's patent on education software. Apparently both sides will license each other's technology, meaning that technically neither side won the dispute. The terms of the agreement are confidential, according to the statement, and as part of the deal, both sides agreed...

Flat World Knowledge Inc. on Monday announced an effort to make its electronic textbooks more accessible to blind students and those with other disabilities.

The upstart textbook publisher, which makes its textbooks free online but hopes students will purchase print copies or related study aids, said it will form a partnership with a nonprofit group to offer its titles in formats that are easy to use by electronic Braille devices or by software that reads texts aloud. The group is called Bookshare.

Though Bookshare already works with many major publishers of novels and other texts, Flat World is the first textbook publisher to partner with the group, said Betsy Beaumon, a vice president and general manager of Bookshare.

The move comes just months after the National Federation of...

Atlanta -- Can online science laboratories replace the experience of sitting at a lab bench with beaker in hand? No way, say many professors. But Kemi Jona, director of Northwestern University's Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Partnerships, argues that virtual labs are at least as good, and in some cases better, at teaching students concepts to prepare them for modern laboratory research.

He's a leader of iLabCentral, an effort by colleges to share their high-end scientific instruments with professors and high-school science teachers over the Internet to support virtual science labs. The project is run by Northwestern and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and supported by a $1-million grant from the National Science Foundation.

In a presentation to leaders of the...

A graduate student at Utah State University is a new kind of Civil War re-enactor. Instead of dressing up in period clothes, the student, Tom Caswell, uses Twitter to send short messages in the voice of Abraham Lincoln and other historical figures.

Mr. Caswell is one of the organizers of TwHistory, a Web site devoted to historical re-enactments via Twitter. For their first event, they staged the battle of Gettysburg in the voices of a handful of key characters, including Lincoln (whose famous speech there is, appropriately, famous for its brevity).

"Each Twitter account in the re-enactment represents a historical figure, and you are trying to portray that person's actions as accurately as possible," said Mr. Caswell, in an e-mail interview. "We use the first person to give the feeling that the event is happening in real...

Barnes & Noble says its Nook e-book device, to be released by the end of the month, was not built with college students in mind.

"Nook is not designed to be a textbook reader," said Jade Roth, the company's vice president of books. "Nook is really designed to be an e-reader for pleasure, for relaxation on the go -- not really for the educational space."

Amazon said the same thing about its first-generation Kindle, but a few months ago it unveiled a larger model that it says works well for e-textbooks. Amazon is running pilot projects at seven universities this semester to see how students and professors respond to the devices.

For now Barnes & Noble has no plans for similar classroom tests. It will, however, sell Nooks in 17 of the 624 college bookstores that the company operates, as an experiment to see how well they sell there, said Ms. Roth.