Ethics: May 2007 Archive Page

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed. --Jonathan Saltzman --Blogger unmasked, court case upended (Boston.com)

Lindeman, on trial for medical malpractice, paid a hefty sum for his right to his opinion. He blogged about the trial anonymously while it was going on, and the prosecuting attorney found out about it.

Update: A Wal-Mart cashier who joked about bombing the store on his MySpace page has also been sacked. "If you have a MySpace site, you better act like you're a politician," he says, "Be politically correct and don't try to be funny." That's a bit exaggerated... there was nothing "political" about his comment, and there are other kinds of humor.

Playing a game may teach the player that he can optimize the game only in certain ways (or that the game is impossible to win, like Global Thermonuclear War); but it's open to question whether the optimal game strategy corresponds to an optimal real-life strategy.

As we see more of this kind of thing (and I think we will), we as consumers of educational and editorial games, are going to need to stay alert and savvy, conscious of the way a game's rules can look like they emulate real life constraints without actually doing so. A case in point is the way Electrocity lets me participate in a fuel market without experiencing any repercussions at all from the fossil fuel burning by the people in the next town over. Would it be better all around if I just kept it in the ground? Maybe, maybe not -- but within the game there's no incentive to think about that. --Emily Short --Educational and Editorial Games (Emily Short's Interactive Fiction)

--A Fair(y) Use Tale (YouTube)

Amazing demonstration of creative repurposing of Disney's copyrighted material.

We should be jumping for joy every time a student plagiarizes, because that means our existence as teachers of composition is validated, as we have something to teach them - citation, research, the need for critical thinking. We should get down on our knees and thank the Internet for making it easier to plagiarize, because it means we will be employed for the foreseeable future, stemming the metaphorical digital tide. We should be eternally glad that plagiarism is seen as a problem that needs fixing, because if all incoming students cited their sources fairly and accurately and did clever research out of the box, then there wouldn't be much for us to do. We should leap to the opportunity to teach here. Plagiarism is a blessing, not a curse. --Mike Duncan --Objections to Turnitin (Bad Rhetoric)

Plagiarism as the felix culpa of rhetcomp. I'm not very comfortable with the idea, but it did make me think.

I do use the service... recently I noticed a suspicious paragraph, and when I used turnitin.com to print out the documentation in support of the wrist-slapping I was planning to implement, I found four or five other uncited paragraphs from the same source -- something I wouldn't have caught otherwise.

I tell myself that this student has learned an important lesson, and that it's a good thing I caught this problem early, on an assignment that wasn't worth 1/3 of the course grade.

"As for my own point of view, I see creative writing not so much as a form of self-expression (or in the case of problem students, acting out), but of learning to express one's 'otherness,' in the sense of being able to use one's imagination to devise stories or poems out of, as Keats called it, one's 'negative capability.' That is the ability not to be yourself and not to put your own limited self-interested point of view into one's creative writing. And to hold contradictory emotions and ideas together in your mind at once without judgment. To be as Emily Dickinson called it 'a nobody.'"

"In that sense, a threat of violence directed specifically toward a member of the university community in a creative writing class represents a student's failure of imagination, and should be seen as cry for help or cry for attention," [Alan] Soldofsky [director of creative writing at San Jose State] said... --A Very Scary Story (Inside Higher Ed)

It's rare to find so much specialized language quoted in a publication with a general readership. I agree with his point, but even though the audience for Inside Higher Ed is more educated than the general reader, I were this reporter I'd have used a bit more summary as a buffer between shorter chunks from Soldofsky. (In passages near the beginning and end of the sequence that features Soldofsky, the reporter does summarize.)

In this strange, strange tale the Davids are the size of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, rumoured to be discussing an alliance to take on the search leader. The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. --Who Isn't Afraid of Google? (Slashdot)

I recently submitted a proposal to give the "con" perspective on a panel about one of Google's recent innovations. If that panel is accepted, this article will be a good starting place for my research.

It's now common for companies to Google potential employees to uncover peccadilloes from the past. It took me all of 30 seconds, via Google, to discover one applicant's very public infatuation with indecorous sexual escapades and another's unhealthy fondness for abusing industrial strength pharmaceuticals. Needless to say, neither was hired. --Jim Louderback --On Media in Our Lives: Embarrassment forever (SFGate.com)

Will, this one will probably annoy you, but the reason I'm posting it is because it's written by one of the people who actually makes the decision to hire an applicant or trash the resume.

Has Louderback read The Diamond Age? His penultimate paragraph seems to refer to Neal Stephenson's ideas about the Neo-Victorians.

We could evolve into a much more tolerant and forgiving society, where everyone's secrets are laid bare, and no one -- aside from your mother -- really cares. Don't hold your breath. The more likely outcome is that we'll devolve into a new age of crushing civility, one that makes the current "PC" climate look downright permissive. I see a new Victorian Age dawning, where everyone's proper and polite on the outside, yet out of control in private, when the curtains are drawn and the power is off.

Police arrested a college student Tuesday suspected of opening fire in an off-campus apartment during a dispute over a video game console, killing one man and wounding two others. --Calif. Student Arrested in Shooting (AP | MyWay (will expire))

This article from The Week has statistics that bolster and weaken arguments frequently used by people on both sides of the debate. --How other countries deal with gun control (BoingBoing)

Blogging this for future reference. I'll be teaching a news writing course in the fall, and one of the most challenging units involves getting students to think critically about statistical claims made by advocates of a particular issue.

After reading The Tempest and reading a student's paper about Gulliver's Travels, I'm thinking about creating a unit that involves students writing reports about interviews with people from fictional countries. There might be a society that promotes free file-sharing and has a legal drinking age of 17, but where women can't vote. There might be glossy tourist brochures that offer one view of the country, but refugees and people from minority groups would offer a strikingly different view of the country. (And some of those minority views would be wildly inaccurate.)

The idea would be to get students to practice reporting about a complex subject where following the truth wherever it may lead is more intellecutually complex than getting the right answer on a multiple choice question. I want to force them out of the habit of doing what they've been rewarded for in high school -- stating their personal reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with a prompt.

A Chinese student was transferred from his high school to an "alternative education center" (?) after his parents found he had designed a Counterstrike mod with maps based on his school. Two parents learned of the map he made from their kids, and they informed his parents, who in turn reported him to the Fort Bend Independent School District administrators. --Fort Bend school trustees put off video game appeal (Houston Chronicle)

It's important to note that it wasn't just the fact that the student designed a game map that depicted the school, but that the investigation turned up swords. Further, the parents reported their own son and gave the police permission to search his room. Police found nothing worthy of a criminal charge, but without any evidence that this young man had any unusual (ore even typical) anti-social tendencies, I hope all parties can resolve this quickly.

The fact that this kid happens to be Asian wouldn't have anything at all to do with it, would it?

It does look like some members of the school board feel the body has overreacted. "He did it [designed the game level] at his house. Never took anything to school. Never wrote an ugly letter, never said anything strange to a student or a teacher, nothing," according to one board member. Other members stayed away from the meeting where the student was trying to get them to appeal the decision, so it seems that overreaction will stand for now.

A cameraman for the NBC affiliate in Houston was captured on home video sporting a Mexican flag on his camera while covering a rally in the Texas city that supported illegal immigrants, drawing angry shouts from counter-protesters.

In the first of two clips posted on YouTube.com, a counter-protester with a bull horn can be heard condemning the cameraman's flag.

"Why does Channel 2 News have a Mexican flag on their camera?" the man asked. --Art Moore
--NBC cameraman flies Mexican flag at march (WorldNetDaily)

In another clip, the cameraman is seen helping someone attach an American flag to his camera, too.

But the damage had been done. He was on duty, and should not have betrayed his bias.

One thing that I feel very strongly about since I began my post-secondary literary studies, is that high school teachers tend to teach the students all sorts of things that need to be un-taught when they get to college. It drives me crazy! Shouldn't we be teaching students skills they can build on when they get to college, not skills and habits they have to break in order to be successful in post-secondary education!?! So, one of my goals when I teach is not to teach my students things that they need to be un-taught later. That might mean expecting more out of my students than the average high school English teacher, but I think in the end it will benefit them greatly. --Lorin Schumacher --Lit Crit's Usefulness in Pedagogy (LorinSchumacher)

Lorin is a sophomore English and education student at Seton Hill. As part of a student Tiffany Brattina's blogging carnival on education, Lorin blogged this thoughtful essay.

The picture shows Stacy Snyder of Strasburg wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic "Mr. Goodbar" cup. The photograph taken during a 2005 Halloween party was posted on Snyder's MySpace Web page with the caption "Drunken Pirate."

"The day before graduation, the college confronted me about the picture," Snyder said Thursday. "I was told I wouldn't be receiving my education degree or teaching certificate because the photo was 'unprofessional.' " --Brett Lovelace --Web photo haunts graduate (Lancaster Online)

The kicker? Snyder is 27 years old.

The denial of degree happened last year; the news hook in this story is that the former student has now filed a lawsuit.

Certainly she showed poor judgment by putting that photo on her profile. Since my only alcohol consumption is about one glass of wine per year, my own attitudes about drunken photos are biased.

Snyder surely learned in her education classes why parents hold the teachers of their children to such high ethical standards. It looks like the school system where Snyder was doing her student-teaching may have been involved. According to the lawsuit, "Conestoga Valley officials told the college their students wouldn't be allowed to perform student-teacher requirements there if Snyder was not punished."

For good reason, universities don't publish information about disciplining students; neither Millersville University nor a Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education would comment on this story. We don't know whether this were just the latest in a long string of unprofessional incidents, in which case it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. If this were an isolated incident, then denying the education degree seems very harsh.