News coverage is important to every policy area. While some people have personal knowledge of certain topics, many rely on mass media for direct, up-to-date, and in-depth reporting. This is especially the case with education because only a third of American adults currently have a child in elementary or secondary school. What most people know…

Businesses have always maintained records pertinent to the enterprise. With over 90% of new business records now estimated to be available in electronic form, organizations struggle to manage these vast amounts of electronic content while at the same time meeting collaboration, knowledge management, regulatory, and compliance needs. This case…

The pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) is a high-tech setting aimed at restoring health to critically ill children. When childhood death occurs in the PICU, it constitutes a special context for parent bereavement. The purpose of this interdisciplinary qualitative research was to gain a deeper understanding of parents' needs around the time of…

This publication is intended for financial aid administrators and counselors who help students begin the aid process--filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), verifying information, and making corrections and other changes to the information reported on the FAFSA. The Federal Student Aid Handbook consists of the Application and…

This third edition expands coverage on such topics as the law and students with disabilities, confidentiality, sexual harassment, student searches and tuition vouchers. It also includes some new topics such as bullying, copyright law, and the law and the internet. Both public and nonpublic school educators are aware that courts, over the last…

The late 1980s was an exciting time to be a CIO in higher education. Computing was being decentralized as microcomputers replaced mainframes, networking was emerging, and the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was introducing the concept of an "internet" to hundreds of thousands of new users. Security wasn't much of an issue;…

In this essay, Bryan R. Warnick responds to the increasing use of surveillance cameras in public schools by examining the ethical questions raised by their use. He explores the extent of a student's right to privacy in schools, stipulates how video surveillance is similar to and different from commonly accepted in-person surveillance practices,…

People connect on Facebook by asking to "friend" one another. A typical user lists at least 100 such connections, while newbies are informed, "You don't have any friends yet." A humbling statement. It might make one want to find some. But friending students can be even dicier than befriending them. In the real world, casual professors may ask…

This article presents the highlights of the 2007 American Library Association (ALA) annual conference held at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of librarians showed up early for a day of service, volunteering in libraries, schools, and other Washington-area institutions. As the conference wound down, some 2000…

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the people of the United States from unreasonable searches and seizures. On first reading, these protections seem clearly defined. The amendment was meant to protect Americans from the kinds of random searches and seizures that the colonists experienced under British colonial rule. Under…

Blogs are a hot topic in academia. A search on "blog" in the "Chronicle of Education's" Web site returns nearly two hundred articles, covering such topics as the dangers an impolitic blog can do to an institution's leaders (Read, 2006) or the blogger's career (Tribble, 2005) and the mutual use of blogs by instructors to lambaste students (Lipka,…

As any instructor knows, the easy availability of internet content has greatly increased student opportunities for work that is less than original. Today, the term plagiarism can range in meaning from using an unattributed phrase or sentence (accidentally or intentionally) to submitting entire purchased works as one's own. The profusion of online…

With K-12 students seeming to, at all times, have one foot in the real world and one in the virtual, school districts are starting to acknowledge a new collective responsibility: to teach kids what it means to be a good digital citizen and how to go about being one. The movement to address and characterize digital citizenship originated in the UK,…

This article discusses a new state law which has stirred up a fierce dispute over privacy rights, as innocent school employees in Michigan have begun learning that they have been misidentified as criminals. The Student Safety Initiative, a series of laws that took effect January 1, required Michigan school districts to obtain criminal-background…

Students in the US are increasingly discovering that online socializing is far from private and that sharing personal details on social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook, can have unintended consequences. A growing number of colleges are moving to disabuse students of the notion that the Internet is their private playground and what they type…