The team behind a contest for student bloggers dropped me an e-mail, announcing the launch of their third annual blogging scholarship. The scheme offers students who blog the chance to win a $10,000 scholarship. The contest has just started accepting submissions, but you only have until the end of the month to apply. While this is a laudable effort at providing an imaginative way to fund your way through college,

Students at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC are trying out something different. Instead of doing an essay as part of a course in agroecology, they are producing a 12 to 15 minute podcast. It follows a larger interdisciplinary project on podcasting at the university I was involved with last year, which brought together students from journalism and agroecology to create a new kind of academic podcast,