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The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind are suing Arizona State University for its use of the Amazon Kindle to distribute electronic textbooks to students, saying the device cannot be used by blind students.

The groups say the Kindle has text-to-speech technology that reads books aloud to blind students, but that the device’s menus do not offer a way for blind students to purchase books, select a book to read, or even to activate the text-to-speech feature, according to a joint statement by the two groups.

In a lawsuit filed last week, a journalism student was also named as a plaintiff.

“While my peers will have instant access to their course materials in electronic form, I will still have to wait weeks or months for accessible texts to be prepared for me,” said the student, Darrell Shandrow, in the groups’ statement. “These texts will not provide the access and features available to other students.”

In a statement to the Library Journal, a university spokeswoman, Martha Dennis Christiansen, did not answer any specific questions pertaining to the lawsuit.

“Arizona State University is committed to equal access for all students. Disability Resource Centers are located on all ASU campuses. The centers enable students to establish eligibility and obtain services and accommodations for qualified students with disabilities,” she said. “These efforts are focused on providing the necessary tools so that all students with disabilities have an equal opportunity to be successful in their academic pursuits.”

The complaint asked the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate similar practices at Case Western Reserve University, Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College. —Marc Beja

Of the four universities linked originally by the proto-Internet in 1969, two of them were part of the University of California system: the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara campuses. Now, as the system grapples with a staggering budget crisis that might close institutions and forever alter what’s considered one of the crown jewels of public education, a proposal comes suggesting that salvation lies in going online.

A new cyber-campus “would have selective admissions; tuition somewhere between community college and the on-campus UC price, part-time and ‘anytime’ options and lectures by the best faculty from the entire UC system,” wrote Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the system’s Berkeley campus, in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. “Our online students might miss the keg parties, but they would have the same world-class faculty, UC graduate student instructors, and adjunct faculty.”

“UC-XI,” which is what Mr. Edley calls his vision for an 11th system campus, can be built upon social networks that connect students to instructors and to one another. Hard-to-virtualize facilities like science laboratories could be opened up at night or on weekends. And, Mr. Edley says, the faculty can step up to ensure “UC-caliber instruction and learning.”

Mr. Edley does acknowledge that there have been some failures in online education, “but none involved degree-granting instruction by a premier institution with the kind of market appeal that UC campuses enjoy.” Well, the Board of Trustees of the Illinois system, which sent its expensive GlobalCampus online project back to the drawing board earlier this spring, might disagree. And one can argue about the definition of “market appeal,” but officials in Texas and Utah, both struggling with online-education initiatives, clearly thought their institutions had a certain cachet, at least within their states. But Mr. Edley prefers to focus on more successful ventures like Britain’s Open University and the for-profit University of Phoenix.

“We’ve had decades of increasing dysfunction in Sacramento and smoldering doubts in some quarters about the value of supporting public education,” Mr. Edley writes. “Now comes the resulting surge in victims — present and future — in families and throughout the economy.”

Online learning, he concludes, could save the California dream of a top-notch education for all. The best offense in a crisis, he concludes, “is often innovation.” —Josh Fischman

Some professors are unsubscribing from scholarly e-mail lists because they say that discussion has shifted to academic blogs, to social networks like Facebook, and to Twitter. In response, the groups running some of the largest academic e-mail lists are adding Web 2.0 features to their mix of services. Many devoted fans of e-mail lists, meanwhile, say that the form is far from dead, and that discussion on e-mail lists are richer than what’s happening in the blogosphere or other new forms.

The latest installment of The Chronicle’s College 2.0 column argues that e-mail lists may soon occupy a space like radios did in the television age, sticking around but fading to the background. Are e-mail lists still part of your online diet?

Here’s the first post from this month’s guest blogger, David Wiley.

Summer is a time to take a step back and review campus policies while fewer students are on campus. As you do, please consider this parable of the inventor and the trucker.

Once upon a time there was a brilliant inventor. Day and night she dreamed and schemed, until one sunny day she had a “Eureka!” moment. She sketched out the design of a breakthrough product, and worked and reworked it by showing it to friends and getting their feedback.

When she was satisfied that the design was ready to take to production, she began contacting venture-capital organizations and banks. It was a long, painful process, but finally she acquired the money she needed to put her ideas into motion.

Money in hand she began searching for employees – production specialists, designers, marketing experts, and others. Finding the right people for the enterprise proved more difficult than finding the money to start the enterprise, but at last she succeeded in hiring the right people.

They all set to work. It was alternately glorious and tedious, fulfilling and demoralizing. There were false starts and breakthroughs; there was tension and laughter; there were tears of frustration and tears of joy. They persevered through it all, and at length the day arrived when they had a product ready to ship.

Relieved and ecstatic, the inventor began contacting shipping companies. But she could not believe what she heard. The truckers would deliver her goods, but only subject to the most unbelievable conditions:

• The inventor had to sign all the intellectual-property rights to her product over to the truckers.
  
• The truckers would keep all the profits from sales of the inventor’s product.
  
• The shipping deal had to be both exclusive and perpetual, never subject to review or cancellation.
  

Every shipping company she contacted gave the same response. Dejected, but unwilling to see the fruits of all her labor go to waste, she eventually relented and signed a contract with one of the companies.

This parable is, of course, a story about a researcher and her interactions with academic-journal publishers. While the scenario is all too familiar to us as academics, the parable hopefully sheds some light on the way academic publishing works. As a faculty member, I am expected to:

• Come up with original ideas for useful research.
  
• Find grants or other financing with which to conduct the research.
  
• Identify and hire graduate students and other professionals to help conduct the research.
  
• Participate in actually conducting the research.
  
• Determine what the results of the research mean for my field and for society.
  
• Write up the results of the research in a clear and communicative manner.
  
• Surrender all my rights to the written results of my research to a publisher who will sell my work and make a huge profit by so doing.
  

And when I say a “huge profit,” let me provide a concrete example. Reed Elsevier reported profits over $800-million from its Elsevier publishing division in 2008. Not over $800-million in total revenue – over $800-million in profit.

How does a company make such an incredible amount of money? By persuading you and I to do their work as volunteers. We not only write the articles they publish, but we also volunteer our time to review the papers they publish. And then, inexplicably, our universities pay publishers exorbitant subscription fees so that we can regain access to the results of our own research, writing, and peer-review efforts.

Unfortunately, this lunacy is the water in which all academic fish swim, making it sometimes difficult to recognize. There was a time in the past when publishers held a monopoly on distribution and academics had no method of disseminating their work that did not involve giving away their rights and interest in their own work. The Internet has changed the status quo, however, and each of us now has equal access to a means of distribution exponentially more powerful and affordable than the paper-based distribution of yesteryear.

Since we faculty already write and review the articles, and we have direct access to the most efficient distribution system in the history of humanity, why are we still handing over billions of dollars of increasingly scarce resources to journal publishers? You will find that the answers to this question have nothing to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge or the economics of those activities.

I believe that colleges should take some time this summer to consider how they might shake up the old publishing system and encourage free open access to their professors’ research articles. Institutions like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and most recently the University of Kansas have made great strides in improving the dissemination of their faculty’s research output while simultaneously helping faculty members reclaim their interests in their own work by adopting “open access” policies. Perhaps it’s time for your university to consider an open-access policy, too. —David Wiley

Welcome to our new guest blogger, David Wiley, who we’ve featured in past articles for his innovative experiments in open education.

Mr. Wiley is an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, where he studies open education and walks the talk by doing open teaching of his BYU courses. He’s also tinkering with new open textbook models as “chief openness officer” of Flat World Knowledge and as a member of the board of the Open High School of Utah. This month Mr. Wiley will be sharing some ideas here on Wired Campus. Thanks for joining us, David.

Robots could roam the Moon within the next three years, thanks to scientists and students across the world who are vying for the Google Lunar XPrize, a $30-million international competition to collect data and images with robots and send them back to the earth.

“The Moon is the hottest real estate in the solar system right now,” said William Pomerantz, senior director of space prizes at the XPrize Foundation, which is sponsoring the competition. “Every major space agency across the planet is looking to go back to the Moon, which means every university that has space research is focusing on the Moon.”

To win the prize, teams must safely land a robot on the Moon’s surface, travel at least 500 meters, and send a specified package of data, called a “Mooncast,” back to Earth. Mr. Pomerantz said the “Mooncast” would likely be one gigabyte, which translates to about 15 or 20 minutes of high-definition video and a collection of panoramic pictures.

The first team to complete that task by December 31, 2012, will win $20-million. The second team to land will win $5-million, and another $5-million will be awarded in bonus prizes. If no prize is claimed by the first deadline, teams will have until December 31, 2014, to claim a reduced prize of $15-million.

Mr. Pomerantz said the vehicles would be the first to land on the moon since 1976, and that the U.S. hadn’t seen any live or new surface data since 1972. “We’re hoping to show that these robots have capacities to show real scientific research,” Mr. Pomerantz said. “We want to inspire and educate people in same way Apollo did.”

Of the 19 teams, which must get at least 90 percent of their financing privately, several include groups of students or faculty members paired with researchers. About 30 universities are involved with the teams, Mr. Pomerantz said.

They include Omega Envoy, led by students at the University of Central Florida; Astrobotic, led by William L. Whittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from the University of Arizona; Stellar, whose team includes several faculty members from North Carolina State University and Duke University; Jurban, comprising researchers and a consortium of historically black colleges and universities; Italia, an effort by four Italian universities, and Independence–X Aerospace, which has a partnership with Malaysia’s MARA University of Technology.

“Tranquility Trek” is the name of the first mission for Astrobiotic, scheduled to begin in May 2011, and researchers plan to use the robot to inspect the historic Apollo 11 site. Team Jurban plans to launch September 12, 2011.

The competition is “a wonderful stepping stone as we try to move out further into the cosmos,” Mr. Pomerantz said. —Erica R. Hendry

Moffett Field, Calif. — An unusual new academic institution called Singularity University, started by a well-known entrepreneur and a futurist known for his claims that computers will soon outsmart humans, welcomed its first class of students last night. But first the new students posed for a class picture and had a “spit party,” where they submitted saliva samples to have their DNA sequenced.

—Jeffrey R. Young

The University of Kansas will make more of its faculty research free to the public online.

“The University of Kansas has been interested in reforming what has been kind of a dysfunctional system of scholarly communication for years,” said Ada Emmett, an associate librarian at the university. “People fundamentally agree with providing the widest possible access to our scholarship.”

The university already has over 4,400 articles in its digital repository of scholarly work, ScholarWorks, which was opened in 2005. Any new research will be added to that collection, and Ms. Emmett estimated that anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 articles are published by the university each year. She will oversee a task force to administer the program. The plan has not yet been finalized, but she hopes it will be in place by next year.

After Harvard University passed a similar plan last February, faculty members at the University of Kansas began to research how they could adopt one.

In April the University of Maryland rejected a plan to allow for open access to its research journals. Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a longtime promoter of open access to scholarly publishing, wrote that the reason many of the faculty voted against the plan was because they feared that the policy would limit the freedom of professors to submit work to journals, or that it would harm subscriptions to other journals, and that there was no specified opt-out clause. The University of Maryland’s proposal was not a mandate, but a suggestion.

“Ironically, because the Maryland policy mandated nothing, there was no need to build in a waiver provision,” Mr. Suber wrote. “Hence, no one could point to an explicit waiver option to answer fears that encouragement might harden into an expectation.”

A. Townsend Peterson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, said that similar issues arose there but that after the faculty members were able to ask questions of the university senate, their fears of publishing restrictions were dispelled. Faculty members can request a waiver if they do not want their work to be used, he said.

“Anybody who is in academia should be aware of and concerned about the commercialization of academic publication,” Mr. Peterson said. “Academic communication should not be about typing in your credit-card number. It should be something we’re trying to share globally.”—Marc Beja

YouTube will make its debut in classes at Brigham Young University this fall, after administrators decided to lift a nearly three-year ban on the video-sharing Web site.

As of last Friday, students and faculty and staff members could access YouTube from anywhere on the campus, said a university spokeswoman, Carri Jenkins. Previously, students could choose to view YouTube off the campus, but the site was restricted from all campus computers, including those connected to the Internet in campus housing.

“We looked at the increasing opportunities for educational material and information on YouTube, particularly to be used in the classroom by students and faculty,” Ms. Jenkins said.

The university first restricted access to YouTube in 2006, after administrators said certain content could be found offensive and was inconsistent with the university’s mission statement and honor code, which requires faculty and students to avoid online content that is not “virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy.”

The university reconsidered the ban earlier this month, following complaints from professors and shortly after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released an official YouTube channel, Mormon Messages.

To help students filter the content they can now access on YouTube, the university now provides BeSafe@BYU, which lists its Internet policies and offers tips for dealing with violent, pornographic, and profane material. —Erica R. Hendry

A number of new technologies in computer graphics, online searching, and workplace collaboration — many of which may soon become available to colleges and universities — were on display Wednesday at the Microsoft Research TechFair 2009, in Washington D.C.

Many of the 13 projects on exhibit — all of which are under development in Microsoft’s six worldwide labs — involved workplace communication and research. Project designers say the tools could help make academic collaboration, either between students and professors or among universities, much easier.

“Our goal really is, how can we further research, how can we further education, how can we really change the way people think about the work that they do?,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

Highlights from the fair included:

The Social Desktop
It’s easy to share a link to a Web site because of its URL, but there’s no way to link directly to items stored on a computer’s desktop, said Cezary Marcjan, principal software design engineer for Microsoft Research.

Mr. Marcjan’s project, Social Desktop, adds URLs to files and folders on a computer desktop, allowing other users to access them — and add comments or make changes — using any type of browser.

“Especially if people are using different operating systems, it becomes very, very hard,” Mr. Marcjans said. “This way, we can just publish this content and ask people for annotations, and we can collect those items on the desktop.”

Viveri: A Platform for Search Incubation
Scott Imig, a senior software-design engineer, calls Vivieri, Microsoft’s ongoing search-engine project, a “platform for new search ideas.” Vivierie collects content from multiple sites and can present that data in typical search-engine style or in a topic-specific form. Results from a general search may be listed or categorized by Web site, Mr. Imig said, but topic-specific searches can be represented as word clouds or other interactive features.

Mr. Imig also says researchers are experimenting with ways to use tools like OpenSearch and RSS to sort search results intelligently.

For highlights of the research behind other projects including Social Views of E-Mail and the Research Desktop, watch our video coverage of the fair:

By use of this code snippet, I agree to the Brightcove Publisher T and C
found at http://corp.brightcove.com/legal/terms_publisher.cfm.
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—Erica R. Hendry

A laptop containing the names and Social Security numbers of some 45,000 Cornell University students and faculty members has been stolen, The Cornell Daily Sun reports.

The computer was stolen earlier this month, when a university employee was correcting file-processing transmission errors and left the computer unattended.
In a press release, the university said it will offer a year’s worth of free credit reports, credit monitoring, and identity-theft protection to anyone affected.

On a separate Web page, the university said it would not provide any additional information on the theft, as local police are investigating the incident.

Aaron Lewis, a New York State police investigator, told The Sun that the theft appeared to be a “crime of opportunity,” not a concerted effort to steal sensitive information. He said the media attention devoted to the theft could inform the thief of the sensitive information contained on the laptop. “It’s obviously a Cornell computer and has a Cornell sticker,” he said. —Marc Beja

Northwestern University has put online more than 7,000 rare photographs of East Africa that document the European colonization of the area from 1860 through 1960.

The images made available to the public today in the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs were purchased by the university in 2002 for an undisclosed price.

David L. Easterbrook, curator of the university’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, said the collection contains photographs and postcards showing how Europeans used the landscape for commercial purposes, as well as images made by anthropologists that focuse on the daily lives of East Africans. The combination helps document how European colonization changed the area, as well as what existed before the Europeans arrived.

The visual record “adds to a written record,” Mr. Easterbrook said. The pictures “give us an opportunity to look at Africa in a different time.”

While several libraries have smaller galleries that include photographs of East Africa during this period, Mr. Easterbrook said Northwestern’s is the first large collection available online. The image-search feature on the Web site is extensive, tagging both dates and keywords. The Institute of Museum and Library Services helped cover the cost of digitizing the photographs.

The Web site was designed to be used by students as young as age 5. It has links to other resources as well as lesson plans and assignments for students at all levels. —Marc Beja

In today’s college classroom, it seems that more students have laptops than don’t. In many lecture halls, professors see several of their students typing away all class long. But some professors have to wonder: how many of them are taking notes, and how many of them are checking Facebook.

To help professors keep students concentrated on class work, several colleges have offered guidelines and suggestions for curbing misuse of computers in class and setting “netiquette” standards, like turning off the computer’s volume before class begins. Other college guides give tips on ways professors can use technology better in their class, as long as they comply with copyright laws.

The University of Wisconsin suggests professors implement a “no laptop time” when “laptop users must close their lids.” An online guide also says professors may want to create a policy in the event a student breaks the established laptop rules.

In past years, several law schools have banned all laptop use in class in an effort to guarantee students aren’t surfing the Internet during lectures.

Northern Michigan University’s guide, “Suggestions for Addressing Computer Use in the Classroom,” lists sample policies either limiting or prohibiting computer use that can be printed in a professor’s syllabus, and offers philosophical rationales for imposing the rules. “Laptop misuse is today’s version of having a ‘dirty’ magazine hidden in the pages of the textbook,” the guide says. “It is the student’s responsibility to use the laptops responsibly.”

The University of Dayton’s guide doesn’t dwell as much on student misuse of laptops during class time, but it offers ways professors can use computers to enhance learning strategies. — Marc Beja

Over at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blogs, Mark Bauerlein raised some interesting questions this week about students’ views of cheating.

Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, points to a new survey showing that about half of students have used their cellphones or other technology to cheat, and that many students do not consider their behavior to be cheating.

He suggests that they may have a point. “Don’t we see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead the healthy spread of ‘participatory culture’?” Mr. Bauerlein wrote. “In the digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the definition of cheating. Right?”

The number of colleges offering applications for their students’ iPhones seems to grow every day. Campus maps, class schedules, and bus routes are some common ones. Now the Medical College of Georgia is pushing apps into new territory: health science education.

Starting today, student with iPhones or iPod Touches can download a calculator that will let budding opticians or ophthalmologists determine intermediate and near vision prescriptions as well as proper the lens curvatures of glasses or contacts. Students can also get an app that determines proper cholesterol levels, another that lists medical abbreviations, and a device called the Medmath Medical Calculator — which churns through 135 common medical calculations, such as cardiac output, APGAR score, and the Abbreviated Mental Test score.

The medical college worked with Terriblyclever Design, a software company founded by Stanford University students that has been rolling out apps for educational institutions. —Josh Fischman

This week Blackboard’s new head of course-management software, Ray Henderson, sent a letter to customers pledging that the company will do more to follow industry software standards, and to participate more actively in their development.

Blackboard has long played a role in the education-technology standards developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. But in his letter, Mr. Henderson admits that the company “has not necessarily been a consistent standards leader.”

Among the pledges Blackboard makes in the letter is to offer full support for the so-called Common Cartridge, which lets publishers create plug-ins that they know will work with any course-management system that follows the standard. One of the stated goals of the standard is to “reduce vendor/platform lock-in,” so the plug-in components will work even if a college switches to another course-management system. “As our first new step towards leadership in standards, I’m excited to share that we are committing to fully support both the import and export of this format,” Mr. Henderson said in the letter.

Mr. Henderson has long been active in standards development, as was Angel Learning, where he was an executive before Blackboard bought the company this year.

“While we need to complement these words with the deeds of shipping software — I hope this message provides a sense of direction that you may expect from Blackboard as we review our approach and commitment to this important area of industry collaboration,” he concluded in the letter.

Michael L. Chasen, president and chief executive of Blackboard, elaborated on the policy change in an e-mail interview. “As we’ve looked harder at how we can best support our clients, especially given where we are in the e-learning industry today, we felt it was time to take a stepped-up approach to standards,” he said.

“Following the ANGEL acquisition, we have an opportunity to push harder on interoperability by driving hard to strengthen support for standards in e-learning, especially with the leadership of someone like Ray Henderson who has spent a career doing just that.” —Jeffrey R. Young

Instead of reaching the Oregon University System’s Web site this morning, visitors found an angry message directed at President Obama.

Diane Saunders, a university spokeswoman, said hackers had redirected the system’s home page to a site claiming to be “from Iran.” The message was up for approximately 90 minutes before an employee arrived at work and found the breach.

The Web page, which was sent to The Chronicle and the Associated Press by the university system, told “Stupid Fly Catcher Obama” to stop talking about Iran and the recent Iranian election, which has prompted protests since the June 12 vote.

“Iran’s election doesn’t have problem and Moosavi with his tiny brain will be in jail in near future, so don’t pay your time and money for him and for his fans,” the site reads. “70-80% of Iranian people hate Moosavi nowadays… We never cheated in elections and even Moosavi knows that.”

A message sent to the e-mail address listed on the Web site was not returned. Ms. Saunders said the hackers were most likely able to access the university Web page through ClickHeat, a free program that documents what areas of Web sites are being clicked most. She said the program does not automatically update solutions to problems that are found, and the university had not downloaded the most recent security update.

The university will pay more attention to updates for ClickHeat and five other third-party programs it uses that do not perform automatic updates, and Oregon State University is trying to find out exactly how someone was able to access the Web site, she said.

Ms. Saunders said she did not know why the university system’s page was targeted. “My guess is that hackers have ways of finding vulnerable entry points in Web sites,” she said. “I don’t know if this was a random or purposeful selection of going through our site.” — Marc Beja

As instructors prepare for the fall semester, colleges are trying to make sure their teachers aren’t breaking any copyright laws in their lectures.

The City University of New York’s Baruch College recently released an interactive guide to using multimedia in courses.

Baruch’s online guide begins with background information on copyrighted material, presented by a computer-animated middle-age man. Instructors can then click through the system’s “Copyright Metro,” which gives step-by-step verbal and written instructions on determining what materials can be used in courses legally. There are three “metro lines” that can be taken, depending on if the instructor plans to use the material in class or online, or if they have copyright-holder permission to use the material – which gets you a ride on the “express train” to the final stop, which says you can use the material.

Baruch is not alone in trying to prevent legal problems for itself or its professors. Among other institutions, Reed College has a traditional Web page that offers advice about using materials, with links to information from other college Web sites. The University of Maryland University College also has a site that has information for students and professors who want to legally use copyrighted material in classes and on the Internet. —Marc Beja

Prosecutors are reaching out to universities that may have been victims of spammers who allegedly culled e-mail addresses from more than 2,000 colleges and bombarded students with messages.

It’s the latest twist in a story that broke in April, when prosecutors announced the indictment of two brothers who allegedly used the University of Missouri computer network in a national spamming operation. The spammers are said to have deployed extracting programs that harvested more than eight million student e-mail addresses.

Martin Manjak, information-security officer at the State University of New York at Albany, said that a “U.S. Department of Justice Victim Notification System” e-mail message he received last week was the “first such notice we had received” from the department. He was one of nearly a dozen people from universities around the country to discuss the notifications in recent days on a security listserv maintained by Educause, the higher-education technology association.

“It came out of the blue as far as we were concerned,” Mr. Manjak told The Chronicle. “We had no idea that we had been victimized by these individuals, although we certainly get our fair share of spam.”

The e-mail message the university received, which Mr. Manjak shared with The Chronicle, came from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri. It begins, “Your name was forwarded to our office by law enforcement as a victim (or potential victim)” in the spamming case. The message notifies receivers of their rights as victims and provides instructions for seeking more information. It also tells recipients how to notify prosecutors if they believe they may have “information or evidence that will aid in the prosecution of this case.”

The trial is scheduled to begin November 2, but the e-mail message cautions that “most criminal cases are resolved by a plea agreement.”

Asked if he was sure the notification wasn’t itself a piece of spam, Mr. Manjak e-mailed this reply: “It would be a pretty elaborate hoax if it wasn’t from the DOJ, but I rarely use the word ‘sure’ in anything that deals with Internet security.” —Marc Parry

It isn’t uncommon to find literature rendered in the style of Twitter’s trademarked 140-character blasts. But it’s rare for such tweets to make their way into print.

Yet that’s the concept behind a new book penned by two rising University of Chicago sophomores, titled Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less. The project’s Web site calls it “a humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format.”

Emmet Rensin and Alex Aciman, who both just completed their freshman years at the university, pitched the project to Penguin Publishing. The book is scheduled to be released this fall.

Mr. Rensin and Mr. Aciman say on their site that combining classic literature and young technology “is the perfect remedy and counterbalance to the esoteric texts, which are still so vital to us—and to our GPA.”

Both students plan to work on the project this summer, though no updates have been added to their site. A Chronicle search of Twitter yielded an account for Mr. Rensin, but not one for Mr. Aciman or for the project itself. Neither could be reached for comment.

According to the site, both students have experience in writing and publishing. Mr. Aciman has worked for The Paris Review and the late New York Sun, and has also written essays for The New York Times. Mr. Rensin—whose father, David Rensin, has written five Times bestsellers—has contributed to The Huffington Post and is also an ordained reverend. Both say they hope to be writers. —Erica R. Hendry