ProfHacker gets you ready for the weekend with 5 links worth reading, plus a video!
- Love this: Off-the-rack anti-plagiarism software isn’t good enough for Thomas Crombez, so he built his own: However, for most beginning students, the obvious sources to scavenge are simply found through Google. They do not bother with scholarly databases or real books anyway. So what better way to detect their scams than Google itself?
- Julia Gergits offers an optimistic gloss on the ways working at a regional comprehensive university reshapes your expectations: Despite the challenges, teaching at a comprehensive university offers faculty freedom and responsibility that are unavailable at research institutions. I mean responsibility as a gift, not a burden: it is to be prized.
- East Stroudsburg University is 100% wrong for suspending a professor for griping on Facebook. At the risk of being a broken record, however, faculty who are going to make such comments on the record, as it were, need to make sure that they’re *actually* funny, and not just “professor-funny.”
- How can we have more genuinely open-access conferences (maybe fewer “webinars”?): there’s something deeply unsettling about a conference that purports to be all about digital media and the future of communication yet remains firmly within the most traditional models of academic engagement: F2F encounters. And the fact that I find this totally normal and acceptable didn’t even occur to me until I saw my friend Julie twitter “Beth Coleman via skype.” Same for Francesca for the panel all my friends are on. And I realized that not only should we be able to skype it in, we should be able to participate (however limited) online if we cannot be there in person.
- It’s almost March, so you need a new portmanteau word: Mujicomp: mujicomp revolved around the notion that ubiquitous computing needs to “become sexy and desirable… able to be appreciated as cultural design objects rather than technology… they should be tasteful, simple, clear, clean, contemporary, affordable in order to be invited into the home.”
And the video is by Gina Trapani, urging people to “Stop Multitasking and Do One Thing at a Time“!:
Image by Flickr user Andy Liang / Creative Commons licensed
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4 Responses to Weekend Reading: Post-Olympics Letdown Edition
Robert Wolff - February 27, 2010 at 1:23 pm
East Stroudsburg will undoubtedly face some tough questions in the near future, as well it should. Did the university have a threat assessment team or at least a protocol that administrators follows? It’s difficult to imagine a group of professionals suspending a faculty member for saying these things; the appropriate reaction should be some form letter that reminds the faculty member that social networking on the internet spreads one’s comments in unpredictable ways. The message should have been, “Don’t do this s__t.” But another question is whether she was singled out because of her earlier comments about the racial climate on campus.
Chris Clark - February 27, 2010 at 9:31 am
“East Stroudsburg University is 100% wrong for suspending a professor for griping on Facebook. ” Sorry, Jason, I respect you but you are 100% wrong on this. A month after the Georgia killings the university would be foolish NOT to take seriously the words “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman?” She says her administration are racists; next she’ll say they’re sexists. This person is oblivious to the real world. What rock has she been hiding under if she thinks FaceBook privacy is simple? Her actions were simply foolish. She should be a grownup, take responsibility and apologize.
Nels P. Highberg - February 27, 2010 at 1:58 pm
I, too, don’t feel a lot of sympathy for a professor who talks about killing students. Yes, there needs to be assurance that she’s not being singled out for any reason, but those comments were rather horrible, and there was more than one. We may find that the university should have done things differently, but these comments should not be ignored. I would never take a class, if I had a choice, from a professor who would say such things about me or my peers publicly. If she were one of my faculty colleagues, I would keep my distance, too.
Jason B. Jones - February 28, 2010 at 11:38 am
To be clear, I don’t want to rally too much to the defense of the professor’s comments, and I don’t have any way of evaluating her claims about bias. But employers really shouldn’t be suspending people for blowing off steam, even if they do it in a hamfisted way.
A couple of quite different points:
Is this all that different from the loving parent who occasionally admits to wanting to kill her kids? (If we called child services every time a parent vented in this way on Facebook or Twitter, it would be overwhelming.) Why, or why not?
I still think that, on its face, this seems to be about something else, for which these stupid jokes are just a convenient pretext. I’m sure that anyone who reflected on it could think of people who made comparable comments–sometimes even to students!–and got away with it. It seems to me that situations like this almost always emerge when there’s some other conflict in play. What that is in the case at hand, I can’t possibly speculate.