Ethics: April 2006 Archive Page

Alloy's team craft the proposal, shape the plot and create characters. Even the writing of the book is often farmed out to a team of authors. The process is more similar to television writing than most readers' idea of the creation of a novel and the packaging closer to creating a boy band than promoting a new literary star.

Among Alloy's hit series are The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recently made into a film, and the Sweet Valley High books, which became a TV series. This weekend Alloy had three books in the New York Times children's paperback bestseller list. It did not return calls for comment.

After Alloy's input, Opal was picked up by Little Brown, a division of media giant Time Warner. Little Brown, too, was unavailable for comment. --'Lit chick' debacle that damns the publishers (Times Online)

If this is true, then it may be true that Kaavya Viswanathan really didn't intend to plagiarize from Megan McCafferty's novels, since it's theoretically possible that a ghostwriter did the plagiarizing for her.

At Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops, we believe in doing the right thing. Our products are intended for adults and as such, we only market to them. While some studies suggest that over 80% of our adult customers started eating Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops before the age of 18, the intent of our marketing efforts is to encourage customers to switch glass pop brands and not to get young people to start licking. In fact, we've introduced a million dollar youth prevention campaign with the highly effective slogan "Licking Glass Pops as a teen? Then you're missing the point!" --Responsible Marketing (Shards O' Glass Freeze Pops)

Preceded by the SNL "bag o' glass" skit from the 1970s. Still pretty good.

The Connections class for fall 2006 is going to do a session on SHU etiquette centering around how students can appropriately present themselves to faculty and staff on campus. E-mail, phone, meetings, classroom, verbal encounters are all open for discussion.

With this in mind, will you please give your replies to the following so that we can relay to the students what SHU expects of them.

E-mail me your comments when done.

YOUR COMMENTS WILL BE ANONYMOUS!!!!

Thank You,

Lynda Sukolsky

Please share with others on campus that will have some comments to make on this subject


What is your best piece of advice on how to interact with faculty/staff appropriately?

What is your pet peeve in the classroom around student behavior?

How would you instruct a student to e-mail and/or phone you?

When meeting with a student, the student should....

Additional advice or "don't ever do this".

BONUS-- anyone have any real life stories they can share of what not to do? ALL PARTIES REMAIN ANONYMOUSWhat is your best piece of advice on how to interact with faculty/staff appropriately? (Seton Hill University -- Connections)

It's our obligation as members of an educational community to tell our students what behavior is appropriate, and to reinforce our expectations on a regular basis. Asking students to investigate the boundaries is a great opportunity to get them thinking about such expectations. This time of year, I'm sure plenty of SHU faculty and staff will share horror stories.

But I'm concerned that our contributions may contribute to the impression that we hate students, or that we think they aren't capable of improvement.

It's not only students who violate social norms. I've worked with professors or staff members who put girle pics on their screen savers (visible from the hallway), abused their positions of authority in the classroom during election season, mocked students behind their backs, misused university equipment (taking laptops home over the weekend so their teenagers could play games with it, then returning the laptop on Monday infested with a virus that incapacitated the software I was hired to use... I'm still bitter about that, in case you can't tell), hit "send" without thinking, and left telephone messages when they were too angry to see straight.

And while I have plenty examples of student missteps to contribute, every day I work with students who are better writers, more advanced thinkers, more socially conscious citizens, and simply better human beings than I was when I was an undergrad.

When people drink they become totally different people and I do not feel that I should put myself in that situation because if something were to happen, I would mostly likely have no chance to protect myself from a 200 pound kid, who isn't even thinking rationally. Next thing, I'll wind up dead in a ditch. Now do you see why I think I have a problem? hah

I do not feel that people should be as paranoid and protective as I am, but I do think that there are precautions that people should take. I feel that I should be aware of who lives around me and I reguarly check my state's sex offender registry website. It is called Megan's Law and I think that it is important for people to log in and see who their surrounding neighbors are. --Gina Burgese --PA Megan's Law Website Info (GinaBurgese)

Gina is not currently taking a class with me, but from time to time she uses her blog as a soapbox. This entry really impressed me.

A member of a WOW guild suffered a stroke in real life and died. Her guildmates, knowing her only through the game, but nevertheless wanting to offer some remembrance for one of their own, decided to hold a memorial service in the game. A rival guild decided that would be a great time to show up and kill everyone. Hilarity ensued.

Now, is it sort of creepy and vaguely sad that a group of people elected to hold a virtual funeral? I'd say so. It lends a depressing weight to the stereotype of basement-dwelling gamers who can't function in the real world. In my opinion, it trivializes the real loss that this person's real-life loved ones feel. But saying gamers aren't the most socially adept subculture isn't going to surprise anyone, and the fact is, these people did have a relationship with the deceased, however unorthodox. You can't criticize someone for feeling grief simply because they haven't met the deceased in the physical world.

[..]

Is killing a person's avatar the same as killing a person? Of course not. It's not close. But it does have a real effect on that person. You are inflicting suffering upon someone else, even if only putting them through the tedium of building up another character. We have ways to describe people who get off on inflicting suffering on others. One of them is "sadistic." Another is "evil."--Joe Rybicki --The Real and the Semi-Real (1up.com)

Worried that I would not like him, my victim had used his humor to engage me, to make me laugh, to join in his witty barbs, and because I did like him, I had joined in. But we were not on equal footing and my comments contained a much more powerful threat because I did not have to like him, and he knew it. --Amy L. Wink --Navigating Whitewater (Inside Higher Ed)

A professor reflects after shutting off a class by getting too chummy with a jokester, and losing sight of where her obligation to teach must overpower the desire to join in the fun.

A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan '08, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty -- the 2001 novel "Sloppy Firsts" and the 2003 novel "Second Helpings."

[...]

Little, Brown signed Viswanathan to a two-book, $500,000 contract while she was in high school. This is the first book that the Harvard sophomore has produced for the publisher under that deal, and it reached 32nd on the New York Times? hardcover fiction bestseller list this week. --David Zhou --Student's Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy (The Harvard Crimson)

In his decision, Spooner wrote: "It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work."

He added: "For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes." --Judge: Web-Surfing Worker Can't Be Fired (Yahoo!|AP (will expire))

This sounds reasonable. An employer certainly has the right to discipline workers who are not doing their jobs, but simply the act of using the internet shouldn't be a terminal offense.

Five, the television channel, denied it was disappointed that Diamond, a radio and TV presenter and outspoken Daily Star columnist, had decided against being crucified. No date has been set for the broadcast of the programme. If shown, it may have to change its original working title, Crucify Me. --Nico Hines --'God made me cancel my own crucifixion' (Times Online)

In my Intro to Literary Study class, I'm teaching Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues -- a play about a TV commercial director hired to film the crucifixion of a rebel leader in a Central American country.

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms' use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)--a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population. The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients' messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety. --Farsetta and Price --Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed (Center for Media and Democracy)

TV news is expensive to produce. As stations compete with each other for market share, they are pressured to produce slick stories that will hold viewer interest. And publicists are happy to provide professional-looking "reports" that highlight their clients.

Has your local TV station aired a marketer's PR videotape and presented it as if it were an original news report?

I called a disabled colleague a spaz after hearing he'd spilt coffee over yet another expensive bit of computer kit.... I use the term with irony as someone who was regularly called a "spaz" in the school playground, though I'm visually impaired and not what we once called "a spastic".

To confuse the issue, a non-disabled colleague had overheard and told me that she found that term offensive and thanked me not to use it in front of her. I was offended that she was offended because I didn't feel it was her place to be offended... after all, it's not her word and she wouldn't have been taunted with it. --Damon Rose --The s-word (BBC News)

Because I regularly teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and because this year I'm teaching a collection of Flannery O'Connor short stories, I've had plenty of class discussions about racially charged language.

Lately I've been spending time in each literature class introducing the concept of disability studies, in part because physical characteristics such as missing limbs or scars are often used by authors as a short of shortcut to characterization.

But hearing that a company recently marketed a wheelchair called the "Spazzo" makes me completely confused. Perhaps I shouldn't be.

At any rate, this article reminds me that language is power, and that terms used by mainstream society to label subgroups, and terms used by subgroups to refer to themselves are often points of conflict.

"Wouldn't shooting cell-phone users in research libraries be counterproductive?" you might well ask. "Wouldn't that actually make the library more noisy?"

A fair point. Yes, it would. But not for long.... --Scott McLemee --The Silencer (Inside Higher Ed)

On one level, blogs are little more than personal journals posted on the Internet for all to see. They provide a forum for teachers to share ideas with colleagues around the world or simply talk about themselves and others. But under a wider lens, the sometimes funny, sometimes searing blogs paint what may be the rawest portrait seen of the teaching profession in transition -- and by some measures, in trouble.

Read some and find out why more teachers than ever -- some estimates say up to half in this decade -- are leaving the profession feeling exhausted, disillusioned and underpaid. --Valerie Strauss --Blackboard Blogging: Web Journals Become the New Fly on the Wall of Teachers' Lounges (Washington Post (will expire))

This article begins with the approach that blogs are gossipy and snarky vehicles of personal opinion: "Some teachers use blogs in the classroom to communicate with students and allow them to critique each other's work. But it is in the personal blogs that teachers have some of the most open, and occasionally brutal, discussions about themselves and their profession."

My Students Impressed Me Today (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In my "Intro to Literary Study" class, I assigned Arthur Miller's recent play, Resurrection Blues. At the beginning of the class term, I told my students that it wouldn't be in the bookstore yet because Amazon.com said the book wouldn't be published until early February, just a few weeks after classes started.

When the book did arrive, I let them know it was in the bookstore. Because I know that the bookstore returns unsold copies shortly after midterms, I warned them in early March to pick up their books, or to order them online.

A week ago, I reminded them that the next book we were going to cover was the one that arrived in the bookstore late, and I asked who had already picked up a copy. Only one student's hand went up.

Then, the other day, one of the other students stopped me in the cafeteria and said, "The bookstore already returned that book, and there are about nine of us who don't have copies."

I tried to be pleasant, but I didn't say, "Oh, that's too bad, we'll have to reorganize the syllabus to account for your lack of planning."

This morning, fully expecting most of the students to show up unprepared, I collected their 200-word reflection papers (which is something I usually don't do, though I warned them at the beginning of the term that I might do it sometimes), and announced that I was reorganizing the syllabus.

I didn't go on to say "to account for your lack of planning," but that was only because I was sure it didn't need to be said. I was tsk-tsking at them and pointing out how I kind and magnanimous I was, since I wasn't giving them a pop quiz to slam their grades, that really affected the beginning of the class. But then I looked more closely, and saw that at least three students had copies of the book on their desks, and it turned out that most of the other students had managed to borrow whatever copies were available.

While a few students still weren't prepared, enough of them were that we could have had a decent discussion. I told them that I had come to class all prepared to be crabby and disappointed, and that I was sorry I had underestimated their responsibility.

The complex choices facing leaders in the Middle East have long confounded observers. But two graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University are hoping their video game based on the conflict will help players find solutions _ and raise capital for their new company.

Asi Burak and Eric Brown, along with a team of fellowr students, have spent more than a year building PeaceMaker, a computer game that attempts to simulate the violence and political turbulence of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. --Daniel Lovering --Students hope Mideast video game will produce insights, investors (OhmyNews)