ReadWriteWeb

This is the ninth year for the Imagine Cup, Microsoft's student technology competition. Teams from all over the world, representing 70 countries, have gathered this week in New York City for the Imagine Cup finals. It's down to the final round today with those making it to the very last round of the finals presenting the projects they've designed and built.

These projects do not simply highlight new technologies or innovative applications. As part of the Imagine Cup mandate, the students' projects must tackle some of the world's most pressing issues, as outlined by the United Nations' Millennium Goals. These include combating disease, ending hunger and reducing childhood mortality, to name a few.

Google will begin renting laptop computers for $20 per month, a senior Google executive told Forbes. The laptops will run Google's Chrome OS, a computer operating system that does away with local storage and applications in favor of a Web browser...and only a Web browser. The browser, of course, is Google Chrome. Initially, the $20/month laptop package will only be offered to students, the report states, but it is surely a precursor to Google's greater ambitions, in both educational institutions and the enterprise.

Should teachers friend their students on Facebook? Should teachers text their students?

There's no real consensus here. "No, never." "Maybe, sometimes." "Yes, but responsibly." Nonetheless many schools and districts are drafting policies that dictate how school staff can interact with students via new networks and technologies - in many cases, restricting or banning student-teacher interactions.

Such is the case with a set of guidelines, set to be voted on this week by the Virginia Board of Education, that will establish the state's policy for how students and teachers can interact via text-messaging, social networking, and online gaming. In a nutshell: they can't.

Over the past half-year, we have written extensively about e-books and e-readers. We've discussed the merits of e-books over paper books. We've covered Kindle e-books outselling hardcover best-sellers and their strength over the holiday season. We've even included the growth of e-readers and e-books in one of our Top Trends of 2010 posts.

But, as ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus discussed in "5 Ways that Paper Books are Better than E-Books," everything from price to packaging to, most importantly, the feel of physical books may keep them on the shelves for a long time to come. Now, in a study called "Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education," another round in the debate has been settled on the side of paper. 75% of student preferred old-fashioned, paper-and-board textbooks over electronic versions.

So much for bathroom passes and hall monitors - these days it's technology that is making the art of skipping class much more difficult for students, and we're not just talking about security cameras. A forward-thinking school district in Connecticut is looking to crack down on wayward students, faculty and even equipment by making use of radio frequency identification (RFID) in its schools.

"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.

Earlier this morning, Barnes & Noble revealed NOOKstudy, a new software e-reader for Mac and Windows that focuses on making electronic textbooks more useful. Barnes & Noble developed this software with input from students and universities. NOOKstudy will allow students to read and annotate textbooks, as well as store copies of their syllabi, lecture notes and other course-related documents. The software, which will be available for free, is scheduled to ship in August.

More universities have begun to establish investment vehicles using endowments and donations, and the University of Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation released a report recently on some of the university student-led venture capital funds. The report, based on a survey of 13 VC funds in which students manage, administer, and make investment decisions, aims to provide an overview of the student-led venture investing community - its goals as well as its returns.

Google just announced that it will now make Google Voice - the company's free VoIP telephony and voicemail transcription service - available to all students with a valid .edu email address. Currently, Google Voice is still only available by invite, though Google has gradually opened the service up to more users since its launch in May 2009. Last August, for example, Google opened up Voice for all active U.S. service members with a .mil email address. If you are a student, you can now get an invite by going to google.com/voice/students.

Remember when you had to have an @edu email address to gain entry into Facebook's once-closed social network? Those days are no more, but a new social network pitching itself as a "Facebook alternative" wants to bring that level of privacy back to today's students. Collegiate Nation, a site that has been in development since 2007, is now poised to take advantage of the recent Facebook privacy debacle with the launch of a new network for college students only.

Besides the network's exclusivity, there are three other factors that could make it an easy sell for those looking for a way out of the Facebook rat race. According to mom-turned-entrepreneur Evelyn Castillo-Bach, the woman behind the network's creation, Collegiate Nation's three main pillars are: Privacy, No Advertisements and Total User Control.