Early this decade, the number of Web-based documents stored on the servers of the University of Florida hovered near 300,000. By the end of 2006, that number had leapt to four million. Two years later, the university hosts close to eight million Web documents. Web sites for colleges and universities everywhere have become repositories for data…

Cloud computing, one of the latest technology buzzwords, is so hard to explain that Google drove a bus from campus to campus to walk students through the company's vision of it. After students sat through a demo at computers set up nearby, they boarded the bus and got free T-shirts. The bus only stopped at colleges that had already agreed to hand…