May 12, 2009, 3:55 pm
By Sara Lipka
Times are tough for graduating seniors, and Carleton College is deploying a listserv to help them find jobs.
“Our seniors are graduating into the worst economy in decades,” the college’s career center says on its Web site. “Let’s show them the power of Carleton connections.”
That power, for now at least, is coursing through good old-fashioned e-mail circuits. Once a week the career center sends five graduating seniors’ self-promotional “ads” to alumni, parents, and friends of the college who have signed up for the program, “Engagement Wanted.” Recipients are encouraged to offer anything they can: advice, leads, internships, etc.
The seniors’ interests vary. “Economics major seeking full-time employment opportunity in the financial services industry,” says one profile. “Enthusiastic newcomer to the publishing industry looking for jobs or internships,” says another. “Do you have any…
Read More
May 8, 2009, 4:03 pm
By Sara Lipka
Rumblings this week about the recording industry’s antipiracy offensive centered on what form it’s taking in the supposed post-mass-lawsuit era.
Ray Beckerman, a lawyer in New York who writes the blog Recording Industry vs. the People, went looking for new lawsuits against alleged illegal file-sharers, found three, and called the Recording Industry Association of America’s stated end of its mass-litigation campaign a “total fabrication.”
Ars Technica characterized the RIAA as cagey, for fudging the definition of “new cases,” but the lawyer Ben Sheffner, on his blog Copyrights & Campaigns, said the “new” lawsuits were just “conversions of previous ‘John Doe’ suits against defendants whose names have now been revealed through the subpoena process.” Wired.com headlined its item “Nothing to See Here.”
Indeed, the announcement back in December was that the RIAA would stop suing…
Read More
April 29, 2009, 4:09 pm
By Sara Lipka
College-admissions offices overwhelmingly consider social media important for recruiting students, and more institutions are creating blogs and online profiles, new studies show.
Thirty-three percent of admissions offices kept blogs in 2007, and 29 percent maintained social-networking profiles, according to a report released today by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, known as NACAC. The report, “Reaching the Wired Generation: How Social Media Is Changing College Admission” (available to NACAC members), is based on survey responses from 453 colleges in the spring of 2007.
But social media evolve quickly, show more-recent data published by the author of the NACAC report, Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. A survey of 536 colleges in the fall of 2008 found that 41 percent of…
Read More
April 17, 2009, 8:49 am
By Sara Lipka
So much for the long-awaited, fiercely contested Webcast in the recording industry’s hottest piracy case. A federal appellate judge ruled today that it cannot happen.
Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor, had asked to Webcast a court hearing in the case against his client Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University whom Sony BMG Music Entertainment sued for copyright infringement. The presiding federal judge, Nancy Gertner, approved the request in January. But the recording industry, fearing that the hearing in U.S. District Court in Boston would become a circus, appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Today, that court barred the Webcast, which was to be recorded by the Courtroom View Network and carried gavel to gavel by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Judicial rules close federal courtrooms in Massachusetts to all for…
Read More
April 2, 2009, 2:07 pm
By Sara Lipka
This week’s sign that the Twitter revolution is upon us: campus officials’ tweeting financial-aid advice to television characters.
Lyla Garrity, a cheerleader turned Christian youth leader on Friday Night Lights, a series about small-town life in Texas, dreams of Vanderbilt University. But — conflict! — her father loses her college savings in a bad business deal. As it stands, Lyla may have to follow her boyfriend, Tim, to the fictional San Antonio State University (he tells her she’s too good for that).
Melanie Moran, associate director of Vanderbilt’s news service, recently discovered that “LylaGarrity” is following the university’s Twitter feed. Also, the character’s own feed, created as a marketing ploy for the show, mentions her dream college.
“Vanderbilt is a wonderful school and I still have faith I’ll be able to go there someday,” Lyla wrote on March 23. A week later,…
Read More
March 31, 2009, 4:40 pm
By Sara Lipka
Paras Kaul wants you to listen to her brainwaves.
Ms. Kaul, director of Web communications at George Mason University, is better known as the “BrainWave Chick.” With electrodes and digital technology, she has devised increasingly sophisticated ways to perform the music of her mind. (It’s got an eerie, ethereal sound, something like Brian Eno’s ambient compositions.)
To project her brainwaves, Ms. Kaul wears a headband that presses three electrodes against her brain’s frontal lobe. A Bluetooth adapter transmits data to a laptop, where software converts brainwaves to a Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and synthesizers play it.
“All I have to do is be on stage and meditate,” Ms. Kaul says. She doesn’t like that word — meditate — but says that low-frequency brainwaves, those we produce when we quiet our minds, make the nicest music.
Audience members, she hopes, will…
Read More
March 23, 2009, 4:12 pm
By Sara Lipka
A defendant in a lawsuit who asks the federal government to intervene in his case might be careful what he wishes for.
The U.S. Department of Justice rejected over the weekend the argument that the recording industry’s litigation against alleged copyright infringers is unconstitutional. Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School defending Joel Tenenbaum, a student at Boston University being sued by Sony BMG Music Entertainment, had asked the Justice Department in February to prevent copyright holders from collecting statutory damages except from offenders seeking commercial gain.
The Justice Department fiercely denied that request, in a 31-page memo filed on Saturday.
“The remedy of statutory damages has been a cornerstone of our federal copyright law since 1790,” the agency said. Even copyright violations not motivated by profits limit the legal distribution of…
Read More
March 12, 2009, 4:33 pm
By Sara Lipka
Joel Tenenbaum, poster child for opposition to the recording industry’s mass-lawsuit campaign, has won much sympathy (and many Twitter followers), but going has been tough lately.
This week the federal judge on Mr. Tenenbaum’s case admonished his legal team, led by Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School and founder of its Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The judge, Nancy Gertner, denied a motion they had filed, calling it “plainly flawed,” and suggested that they were not, as judicial rules require, conferring “in good faith” with the other side, the recording industry.
“Nothing entitles the defendant to engraft his own conditions on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the local rules of this court,” Judge Gertner wrote, “or to dispense with them where they fail to suit his counsel’s teaching style.”
Students in Mr. Nesson’s “CyberOne” course have been…
Read More
March 6, 2009, 4:23 pm
By Sara Lipka
The collapse of online music services like Ruckus has left a void in students’ legal downloading options, which the recording industry promotes, colleges encourage, and federal law now requires them to offer.
Enter Choruss, a new blanket-licensing system that would bill colleges and compensate artists based on how much music students were downloading. The project, financed by Warner Music Group, is still in the works, and its president, Jim Griffin, has been out and about lately taking questions.
Last week he spoke to music-industry types at a conference of Digital Music Forum East, and this week he checked in with campus officials in an online chat with Educause. In the latter, Mr. Griffin appealed to educators’ sense of intellectual property. “It’s become voluntary,” he said, “to pay for music products.”
His solution: to pursue “intelligent monetization” by working with…
Read More
February 19, 2009, 12:55 pm
By Sara Lipka
The most visible defendant in the recording industry’s supposedly dwindling mass-lawsuit campaign may still get his day in court Webcast — just not next week, a federal appellate judge decided yesterday.
Joel Tenenbaum, backed by Harvard Law School, has become a poster child for opposition to the recording industry’s copyright-infringement litigation. A graduate student at Boston University, Mr. Tenenbaum was sued for illegally downloading seven copyrighted songs. Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society is fighting to stream his case online.
Last month a federal judge in Massachusetts, Nancy Gertner, ruled for a Webcast of a pre-trial hearing — filmed by the Courtroom View Network and carried gavel-to-gavel by the Berkman Center — but the recording industry appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and several…
Read More
Follow Wired Campus through your favorite RSS reader.
Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.