A group of college students is helping rescuers on the ground find their way around the wreckage in Haiti by pointing out roads and obstacles among the destruction. But they’re doing it all from the comfort of their classroom, using current satellite images and a program called “Open Street Maps.”

University of Nevada Cartography students are digitizing pictures of roads and waterways, and then detailing the maps with things like collapsed buildings, road obstructions, and spontaneous camps that have sprouted up to help rescue workers in Haiti.

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One of the world’s boldest experiments in higher education began in September when 180 students from nearly 50 countries around the world logged on to their computers for their first day of school at the University of the People. At first glance, the school has many of the trappings of a modern university: a provost, department heads, even an admissions committee. Yet there are glaring differences—namely, a the lack of a campus or physical classroom and just a handful of paid staff—that set it apart from its bricks-and-mortar counterparts.

Those are shortcomings the students, most of them from developing countries and without the means to pay for college, are willing to overlook.

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U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy for Haiti, said Haitian citizens are now being employed in the relief and reconstruction effort, not only adding more personnel to the effort, but also giving them a means to earn money to boost the local economy as it attempts to recover from the January 12 earthquake.

(Photo, right, Haitians work to unload U.S.-provided Meals-Ready-to-Eat from a Navy CH-53E Sea Dragon that has been flying from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, floating off the Haitian coast as part of “Operation Unified Response.”)

Speaking at the United Nations headquarters in New York January 21, Ban said that through the U.N.’s Cash-for-Work program, “we can employ many young men and women who can really devote themselves to the early phase of recovery: cleaning the streets and cleaning demolished places, and also other economic activities.”

Creating jobs for Haitians will contribute to the revitalization of the Haitian economy, he said.

Last week, an earthquake silenced telephone landlines and mobile services, leaving Haitians in the dark in more ways than one, but it’s getting better now, as tens of thousands of radios are distributed by U.S. Marines. Haitian families can now hear important public service and safety announcements, and learn when and where food and water will be distributed.

The small radios don’t even need batteries: they are powered by the sun or by hand cranking. A U.S. Air Force C-130 has been flying in pallets of the hand-held emergency radios from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida for earthquake survivors — 43,800 radios so far, with another 6,200 due tomorrow.

(Photo credit: U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant Mark Leuis showed Haitians how easy the US radios are to use)

The specially equipped radios have another advantage: they can be used to charge cell phones and as modest flashlights.

Taxpayers will be able to write off charitable donations to Haiti earthquake relief efforts when they file their 2009 taxes this spring under a bill President Obama signed Friday.

The bill would allow donations made by the end of February to be deducted from 2009 returns.

(Continue reading at NPR.org)