McGill Will Review Professor’s Research on Asbestos

February 10, 2012, 3:28 pm

McGill University has announced a preliminary review of research on asbestos by a now-retired scientist after a documentary suggested that the work might have been influenced by money from the asbestos industry. Dozens of academics sent a letter last week to the university’s Board of Governors questioning the research.

David Eidelman, McGill’s vice principal for health affairs and dean of medicine, said that if the review found that ethical standards had been breached by the emeritus professor, J. Corbett McDonald, then the matter would move to the university’s formal inquiry process. He noted that Mr. McDonald had been cleared in similar inquiries in the past and had always been public about the fact that his work had received funds from an arm of the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association.

McGill no longer receives money from the asbestos industry, Mr. Eidelman added.

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concord2

That would be “La Peste”, not “La Paste”.
dpbarash

D’accord! Et merci! I dunno how that got “pasted” in.
katisumas

Remember in The Plague, the judge got it, as so often judges did fall in Camus’ other writings. This particular plague in Egypt lasted 30 years, and the last two weeks again showed thus that there are more things to admire in men than despise.

As a native speaker of French and a literarary translator of French works into English, I’ve never heard of the Resistance or of the Algerian war for Independence referred to as la peste. A “peste” is an obnoxious person that wont leave you alone, or a mosquitoe…. When Camus wrote La Peste he was using plague as a metaphor as he did in the play that preceded his novel (where the judge too got it!)
dpbarash

katisumas: I didn’t say that “la peste” was a phrase used to designate the resistance; quite the opposite, and I quote: “’La Peste,’” the book’s title in French, was also the term used by “la résistance” when referring to the German occupation of France during the Second World War.”
jpegan

aren’t you concerned about privacy? What are the laws about confidential data management? Here in BC (granted Canada is different) we can’t use any server that is outside Canada because of differing–often lower–levels of privacy protection.

You’ve no concerns about the Patriot Act, for example, if students write about contentious topics?
mikegarcia

I use Google Docs for responding to writing (using the comment function), although I don’t actually leave the grade at the bottom of the draft out of an abundance of caution. Grades are recorded on my institution’s WebCT space (basically the only thing I use WebCT for).

One additional tip not mentioned above is to make a copy of the student’s draft Doc and writing my feedback there; I share that with the student (as a view-only doc) after grading. That way their original draft survives as a clean copy that they can continue to revise (assuming revision is allowed) while still having a frozen-in-time draft with my comments.

One of the best things about Google Docs is the real-time multi-user editing of documents. When I invite a student to a conference, I have my laptop set up in my office in addition to the computer I’m using. As I advise the student on what to revise, I can also watch him/her in the beginning stages of that process (the draft changes on my screen as they change it on theirs) and give advice.
http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

In the United States, I don’t think the Patriot Act would apply. However, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) would. Here at ProfHacker, we have some standard advice whenever someone brings up the issue of privacy in the comments to a post about using an online service with your students: “Find out who reigns supreme over FERPA matters at your university, and give them a call.” (See Ethan’s “Understanding FERPA & Educational Records Disclosure.”) And if you’re not teaching at an institution where FERPA applies, then call the person “who reigns supreme” over whatever law or regulation applies in your situation. It’s best, in other words, not to rely solely upon the opinion (one way or the other) of those of us who write the blog posts about these matters or who leave comments in online forums like this one. And I don’t say that because I think people don’t know what they’re talking about; rather, I say that because the only opinion that matters is the one belonging to the person with the authority at your institution.

Find the relevant person on your campus. Talk to them about the issue. That’s the best advice, really.
shermandorn

1) Depending on the interpretation of privacy requirements by your institution, it may be sufficient that grades are private while papers and comments may be on a server. This isn’t true at my institution, but it may be true for yours. The idea of a form is great, but I wouldn’t have names in them, at least if the server is off-campus, which leads to…
2) Pseudonyms are your friend. If you require students to send you files with an agreed-upon pseudonym, you can upload files to Google Docs, comment on them and provide a view link to students (and have individual grades be private). And if you assign a code/pseuodnym to students yourself, then you can use a Google Form for the grading portion.
tanya_g

I use MS Word to grade my ESL students’ writing. It does not allow for live collaboration or feedback, but I can insert comments and suggestions and make corrections (including highlighting, different font colors, and hyperlinks to online dictionaries) as effecetively as in Google Docs. I also copy and paste the student’s original draft for him or her to compare and see the changes more clearly. Working with the digital format of my students’ writing and correcting by typing as oppose to hand-correctoin save me at least twice as much time. There are no privacy issues that I have been able to detect with Word because the communication is done over the school e-mail/LMS.
pippi

Isn’t this form you talk about a grading rubric? That’s what I call mine, and I use it in addition to the comments feature in the document itself, but I do all in MS Word. Don’t really want my students in my Google Docs environment. I send all back through our LMS.
hkacpa

I use dropbox. I open the file, enter the unique student password, post comments and grade for the work, post the grade in my excel spreadsheet and save the student’s file. Student grades, my comments and privacy all covered. The password is the student’s last name and 4 digits of their student number (listed in my grade book).
acavender

Thanks for the tip about saving a copy of the draft document. I hadn’t thought of that particular way of saving the copy I’d commented on, and it’s an easy solution to implement.

Like you, I don’t leave grades in Docs drafts–that always goes to the student separately.
acavender

Indeed it is. I just don’t tend to call it that.
abruzos

I am interested in what you said. How can you set a file password in Dropbox?
Thanks!
emmadw

I like the idea, I’ve used Google Docs with individual project students etc. for feedback, rather than for grades.
What would concern me, though, about using it for giving the grades themselves, would be the batched nature I tend to mark in. I can’t do a whole class at once – (and we have a 4 week period between submission & when they have to have their feedback), so quite often some will be done, and then a few days can go by before I do the next batch.
I could see many of my students grumbling because I’d not told them their grades. (Indeed, I currently now use the email from within WebCT to return marked work – and that can take maybe 1 hour or more to send the individual emails … I’ve had students contacting me within that hour, asking why their friend has had something & they haven’t!
avizulis

There’s a new gradebook product on the market that is mobile but stays away from the internet, with the philosophy that teachers should manage their most important asset (their task creations and data) locally and not on the web, just as you are all discussing. It works great with Android devices (like the Kindle Fire) together with Windows based desktops. It also creates/uses standard Access and SQLite databases so that data can be viewed on spreadsheets as well with not too much effort. Search for “Grades2Go.”
vannak168

good
thank you [ http://www.managerments.blogspot.com ]