Cellphone college class in Japan

Japan's degree-granting Cyber University, the country's only all-Internet university, just started offering a class people can take on their phones, the Associated Press reports. For classes on personal computers, the lecture appears on the screen as text and images, and a video of the lecturer appears in a smaller window in the corner. "The cellphone version, which pops up as streaming video on the handset's tiny screen," just displays the PowerPoint, and you can hear the lecturer through the phone's speaker. More than 1,800 students are enrolled in Cyber University, which says lecturer attendance is at 86%. "Whether students play the lecture downloads to the end can be monitored by the university digitally," officials told the AP. Meanwhile, "half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed [by their authors] on the tiny handset of a mobile phone," after which they're turned into books, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.