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The article discusses the use of the Internet by college students for academic purposes. While almost all college students use the Internet on a regular basis, very few distinguish between peer-reviewed, scholarly sources, and any random Internet page. This can cause problems when students use improper sources for their academic research, which has a side effect of lowering the quality of papers as a whole. Accrediting agencies are now considering information-literacy programs as measures of an institution's performance to encourage education in the use of academic resources.

The article reports that Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox Web browser, released Firefox Campus Edition for free download in September 2007. A key feature of the new browser is the Zotero citation system developed by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. The system is designed to help students and scholars mark and manage information on the Web that they want to cite in research papers. It also includes a plug-in that allows users to listen to music and manage playlists.

The article reports that three graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attracted a flurry of attention in April after an academic conference accepted their randomly generated, nonsensical paper. Now the students are stars of a lighthearted video they made when they went to the conference even though their invitations had been withdrawn. The three, Jeremy A. Stribling, Maxwell Krohn, and Daniel Aguayo, are computer-science students studying parallel and distributed operating systems. The students were nevertheless able to raise enough money online to travel to the meeting, held in July at an Orlando hotel.

The article presents information according to which Ed Brent, a professor of sociology at the University of Missouri in Columbia has developed a computer program that not only grades his students' essays but also gives feedback on how they can improve their work. The program simply runs through the students' papers to see if those elements are thoroughly presented, analyzing the semantics and assessing the writer's understanding of the topic. If a student leaves something out or gets something wrong, the program will flag those mistakes, to help the student improve the next draft.