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In the Comments
The admissions folks at my public university report that they regularly see prospective student email addresses like beerbashbabe@___ . And the parents know — in some cases it’s Mom or Dad who writes the email address on the form at the open house. --drj50
Dear Students With Unprofessional E-Mail Handles: Your Professors Notice
Recent Posts
Educause Releases Report on IT Trends | Comment
Could Google Have the Solution to All Those Inappropriate Student E-Mails? | Comment [3]
Settlement Near in Google Book Search Lawsuit? | Comment
Apple's iPhone Takes Lead in Reader Race | Comment [6]
Iowa State U. Will Make Students Pay to Set Up Land Lines | Comment [12]
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July 9, 2008
Scholars Are Skeptical of Google's New Virtual World
Rumors that Google was working on a new virtual world have turned out to be true. The company unveiled this week its three-dimensional make-believe community called Lively, promoted in the video below.
Virtual-world scholars seem unimpressed by the project. The Terra Nova blog has assembled their comments. Aaron Delwiche, an assistant professor of communications at Trinity University, is disappointed that Lively does not allow people to create their own content, a feature of the virtual world Second Life. “Google has given us an impoverished space in which content can only be developed in-house or by ‘trusted developers,’” he writes.
Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, says this about Mr. Delwiche’s observation. “I don’t think it’s true that Second Life style dedicated tools for creating complex 3D content are a prerequisite for creativity and expression. People used to build pianos out of fish steaks and chessboards in Ultima Online,” he writes of the popular three-dimensional game. “Still, I agree that it would be really cool if Google came out with advanced content creation tools that are easy to use.” —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday July 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [11]July 2, 2008
British Researcher Seeks Scholarly Input for Virtual-Worlds Think Tank
Ren Reynolds, a British-based technology researcher, has recently formed a think tank on virtual worlds, called the Virtual Policy Network, or tVPN. The goal of the group, he says, is to get scholars, industry officials, and policy makers talking about virtual worlds. The group is expected to have a presence in Europe, Asia, and North America.
One of the group’s projects will be an annual report that takes stock of public policies around the world relating to virtual worlds. The think tank is asking colleges, businesses, and governments to provide financial support for the project. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Wednesday July 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]May 30, 2008
Student Internet Posts Can Lead to Sanctions, Court Rules
A new court ruling limiting a student’s speech on the Internet—though the student in question is in high school—may prove worrisome to college students and freedom-of-speech advocates.
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that a Connecticut high-school student could be barred from running for student government after posting a blog entry calling a school official a “douchebag” and encouraging other students to write or call the official to annoy her, the Hartford Courant reports.
The court, in a decision on a pretrial motion, ruled that the post, on the site livejournal.com, violated the school policy that student-government representatives show “good citizenship.” The court also said the post created disruption at the school, warranting the school to take action.
College students, posting public statements or images on sites such as Facebook, are increasingly getting scrutinized by administration officials. For instance, The Chronicle reported earlier this year about a software program that searches for offensive content on college athletes’ social-networking sites. Three experts in constitutional law said the program was probably legal because publically posted material is fair game for scrutiny.
The question, of course, is how institutions react if they don’t like that material. In the Connecticut high-school case, the student is pressing ahead for a full trial, to get a clear ruling on whether schools can limit the rights to free speech in the Internet age. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Friday May 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [17]May 19, 2008
Robot Developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Answers Questions in Second Life
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are using the virtual world, Second Life, to experiment with artificial intelligence, according to a recent Associated Press article.
Researchers at the university’s Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory created a digital robot in Second Life whose movements and utterances are determined by a computer. The robot Edd can, among other things, answer the question, “Where are you from?”
The director of the laboratory says Edd could be a precursor to more sophisticated robots who interact with real people in subway stations or on city streets. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday May 19, 2008 | Permalink | CommentMay 13, 2008
Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online
As more graduate students deposit their theses online and make them freely available, college administrators on a number of campuses are being asked to treat creative-writing theses differently. English professors and writing students are pressing college officials to exclude creative-writing theses from open-access policies, arguing that they undermine students’ ability to get published in literary journals.
Jeanne M. Leiby, an associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, is among those who argue that writing students should not be forced to widely distribute their theses online. Ms. Leiby, who is editor of the literary journal, The Southern Review says in an article in this week’s Chronicle that she will not accept manuscripts that have been freely disseminated online.
She also says that writing students may be hesitant about making their theses open access because of professional pride. “I don’t necessarily want people to go back and read my thesis,” says Ms. Leiby, who earned a graduate degree in writing from the University of Alabama. “I’d like to think that in 15 years I’ve become more of a writer. I don’t necessarily want those early attempts associated with my name.”—Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [8]May 8, 2008
Co-Founder of Second Life Says Academics Are Biggest Trailblazers in Virtual Worlds
Cory Ondrejka, the co-founder of the virtual world Second Life who is now a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, said in a speech today that virtual worlds are here to stay, and that professors are among the most active pioneers.
“In my view the academy has been blazing the trail of adoption of virtual worlds far more than gamers or industry,” said Mr. Ondrejka, who spoke at a conference at Case Western Reserve University called Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008.
Naturally, the event was broadcast within Second Life, in Case Western’s campus in the virtual world. I attended the conference virtually, and was able to ask Mr. Ondrejka what the biggest challenge for Second Life was in being able to be more than just a passing fad in higher education.
“The challenges with Second Life is it has significant technical challenges for use,” he said, noting that it takes powerful computers and fast network connections for Second Life to function properly. “You can’t assume that your students are going to be able to run Second Life within the school’s network infrastructure.”
He argued that some form of 3-D virtual environment will catch on, though he admitted that it might not be Second Life that wins the race. The reason that the idea is powerful, he said, is that studies show that humans respond to a visual Internet, and that they express greater trust for the people they communicate with when they see a virtual representation of the person. “Learning in a place in 3-D affects us differently than text,” he said.
Mr. Ondrejka said that when professors first build a virtual campus, they usually try to exactly replicate a classroom in Second Life, with desks, chairs, and walls. But then they realize that the world allows different kinds of movement and communication than the real world. “You realize that in a world where you can fly, classrooms aren’t really that useful,” he said. So professors have built new kinds of classrooms online with no roofs. “Suddenly you see this explosion of classroom forms that matches what they’re trying to teach,” he added.
Organizers of the conference set up a booth for The Chronicle in Case Western’s Second Life campus during the event (shown below), and I manned our table between panel sessions and chatted with a couple of conference participants.
At one point my virtual avatar got stuck between a virtual chair and the wall of the booth, however, and I had to reboot my computer to get that sorted out. Luckily that’s never happened to me in real life. —Jeffrey R. Young
April 11, 2008
Notes From an Online College Fair
Check out a recent New York Times essay on a parent’s experience with CollegeWeekLive.com, a virtual college fair where students and parents chat live with admissions officers from 200 institutions.
One thing Michelle Slatalla, the essay’s author, seemed to miss about going to a real (offline) college fair was the ability to follow the crowd to the “most selective” institutions: “here there was no way to gauge whether more attendees were flocking to Bryn Mawr College or Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.”
The next CollegeWeekLive fair, which is free, is scheduled for the fall.—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Friday April 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]U. of Southern California Student and Professor Recreate Guantánamo Camp, Shackles and All
A virtual-reality project by a student at the University of Southern California is featured in this week’s Vanity Fair. The student, Nonny de la Peña, strives to show the horrors of the Guantánamo Bay military prison using the virtual world Second Life. She has recreated the prison and treats digital visitors, or at least their avatars, as real prisoners—shackles and all.
Ms. de la Peña is on track to earn a master’s degree from the university’s Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities. She produced a 2004 documentary, Unconstitutional, about the erosion of civil liberties since 9/11. —Andrea L. Foster
Update: Ms. Peña reports that she had a partner in the project. The partner was Peggy Weil, a visiting assistant professor in the Interactive Media Division of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Posted on Friday April 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [20]March 12, 2008
Colgate U. Student's Violent Message to a Gossip Web Site Leads to His Arrest
A joke about shooting fellow students, posted to a gossip Web site, led to the arrest of a Colgate University student this month.
The student, George So, a junior at the university, posted the following verbatim note to a Web site called Juicy Campus:
“I wonder if i could shut down the school … by saying I’m going to shoot as many people as i can in my second class tomorrow. I hope I get more than 50……….. For liability reasons and ip tracking I won’t leave it at that. But seriously, this site is rediculous, if it got big, and someone put the effort into writing a big long serious suicide note informing all readers that he would kill over 100 kids, they could shut down the school. Nice.”
One student at Colgate who saw the message, while researching an article she was writing for the student newspaper, did not find the joke funny at all.
She says she initially did not take the message literally, but after talking with her mother about it, she decided to alert authorities, just in case. “You just can’t joke about this,” says the student, who asked not to be named. “That isn’t even funny for a second.”
The campus police alerted local police, who also didn’t find the post funny. They arrested Mr. So after they traced the Internet address used to post the message, according to an article in the Utica Observer-Dispatch
“In today’s day and age, you need to take every perceived threat seriously,” says Charlie J. Melichar, vice president for public relations and communications for the university. “You can’t assume anything just because it’s written in such a way that it’s not serious.”
Mr. Melichar says that university officials sent an e-mail message to everyone with a campus address alerting them of the possible threat.
“As safety is our primary concern, we will have a significant law enforcement presence on campus tomorrow since all classes and activities will be held as normally scheduled,” the message said. “While some may perceive this to be an overreaction, we must take every precaution when the safety of our campus community has been threatened.”
Officials decided not to activate their emergency text-messaging system in this case, though, said Mr. Melichar.
The gossip Web site, which boasts that all postings are “always anonymous … always juicy,” has sparked controversy on many campuses.
This is at least the second instance of a threatening note on Juicy Campus leading to the arrest of a student. In December, Carlos Huerta, a Loyola Marymount University student, was arrested after posting a note to Juicy Campus reportedly threatening to shoot people on campus and then himself. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday March 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]February 19, 2008
Woodbury U. Plans for the Return of Its Virtual Campus
Woodbury University, in Burbank Calif., is greasing the wheels for the return of the Woodbury campus in Second Life.
At a conference this past weekend at Stanford University on virtual worlds, Jordan Bellino, a senior at the university, and Susanna Hendy, an instructor there, told this reporter that they traveled to Northern California not only to attend the conference but also to chat with representatives from Linden Lab, the San Francisco operator of Second Life, in order to urge them to allow Woodbury to have an island in Second Life at the discounted price reserved for educational institutions.
In June, Linden Lab yanked the Woodbury campus from its servers, accusing avatars there of harassment. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Tuesday February 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]