An e-mail scam has hit tens of thousands of users at dozens of colleges over the past few weeks, leaving network administrators scrambling to respond before campus computer accounts are taken over by spammers. Students, professors, and staff members at the affected colleges received e-mail messages that purported to come from the colleges' help…

Many suggestions by two researchers at Rand Corporation, who published a paper on etiquette for news networks, have been incorporated into bulletin-board conventions, but with new users coming online all the time socialization is slow. Some suggestions for e-mail users are provided. (MLW)

A study to test whether or not a computer network can be used to ease the isolation of housebound AIDS patients and help them get advice and make decisions about their health care is described. The research is supported by the National Institutes of Health. (MLW)

College alumni associations are providing graduates with such electronic services as bulletin boards, computer mailing lists, online alumni magazines and newsletters, alumni forums on commercial networks, and electronic mail addresses. Other anticipated uses of the technology include fund raising, classes offered on networks, electronic bookstore…

Election of a new executive director for H-Net, a humanities and social sciences mailing-list network, is marked by controversy over the large role of Michigan State University in the network, due to the incumbent's faculty status there, and over the extent of his authority. The conflict has extended to how open the network should be to diverse…

Faculty at 11 higher education institutions in California, New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico have been experimenting with computer conferencing on the BESTNET (Bilingual English-Spanish Telecommunications Network). The growing system is credited with creating an international student-faculty community that crosses cultural barriers for…

Instead of mailing photocopies of proposed scholarly journal articles to reviewers, some editors are using electronic mail or the Internet to disseminate articles to other scholars to be critiqued. They are then returned electronically to the editors. However, most journals have not yet begun this process due to lack of reliable software or…

Colleges and universities are finding that ways to misbehave in computer-mediated communication come along faster than institutions can create policies to deal with them. Although most schools have acceptable-use policies, technological advances change the environment quickly and require flexible policies. Most institutions have created a mix of…