These deceitful Facebook links—posted by hackers who have stolen student login information—have become a primary concern among campus technology leaders, and some colleges and universities are using security programs that isolate student computers before they do damage to the entire campus network.

Much like hackers have used suspicious eMail messages to solicit personal information from web users, spammers are now “clickjacking” Facebook accounts and posting links to friends’ Facebook pages. It appears to Facebook users that a friend has shared something with them—perhaps a contest to win a cruise or an Apple iPad. If they click the link, their information is stolen, and the process begins again…

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Hackers “want you to jump off of the Facebook server and jump onto another server, so it can take your [information],” said Frank Andrus, chief technology officer for Bradford Networks.

Facebook apps can be a source of malware on campus networks, but an application launched last fall claims to scan Facebook news feeds for infected links or posts.

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The survey results were indicative of nontraditional students who find time before or after work to take classes and earn a college degree. Enrollment in online educational programs has skyrocketed in the past two years – especially at community colleges — as millions of adults return to school during the country’s economic downturn.

“Students live online; our classes need to live there as well,” said Ken Baldauf, director of Florida State University’s Program in Interdisciplinary Computing, adding that students’ technological preferences show that traditional classroom lessons might soon be a campus relic. “Lectures need to transform into brainstorming sessions, and textbooks need to move online to take advantage of the wealth of resources available there.”

Incorporating familiar online platforms such as Facebook or other learning management systems that have similar interactive functionalities, Baldauf said, would be key in satisfying technology preferences for students with jobs and family lives, and those with neither.

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Academics:
Remember high school? You spent days polishing your application essays and nights worrying about a rejection letter from the university of your dreams. You’re at that university now, paying a small fortune for the small class sizes, award-winning professors and diverse, gifted classmates that you dreamed about two or three years ago. And now you’re trying to leave?You have probably already started taking those advantages for granted. Unless you’re considering a semester at Oxford, you might be unpleasantly surprised at the academics at your host school. There’s a reason foreigners come to America’s universities – they really are the best in the world.

Classes:
As budgets are cut, so are class schedules. Unless you’re in the biggest major on campus, there are classes that are offered very infrequently – classes that you’ll miss out on. It might be the seminar on women in journalism or on South American popular revolutions. Ever since the spring of my first year, I had been yearning to take a class on natural language processing (don’t ask – it’s really nerdy). I would have missed out on the chance to take that course if I had gone abroad. The kicker is that your junior year is when you start having enough priority to register for the classes that filled up when you were a freshman or a sophomore.

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U.S. News writes about the 15 most wired college and university campuses and how many computers there are on campus per college student:

U.S. News surveyed more than 1,700 undergraduate programs last year, and 1,280 schools reported data on both their total student body (combined graduate and undergraduate population) and the number of computers available to students on campus. Of those schools, the average number of computers per student on campus is .14. That means, on average, there are roughly seven students per computer on college campuses nationwide.

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