Academia: September 2007 Archive Page

AP | Guardian

The morgue scene couldn't have been more grim: As doctors worked to retrieve evidence from 33 bodies riddled with gunshots, they were unnerved by the ringing of victims' cell phones, signaling loved ones seeking reassurance they would never get.

This haunting detail offers, after several months, a fresh perspective on the VA Tech tragedy.

NYT: a student helps a security guard tackle a student carrying a rifle:

The scene at the university yesterday underlined how campus security has been rethought in this country since April, when a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. Instead of fleeing out of classrooms and onto the street, students at St. John's were instructed, via text message to their cellphones, to stay where they were.

The messages went out so rapidly that Mr. Benson, a 21-year-old criminal justice major and police cadet, who held Mr. Hiraman against the wall, said he felt his cellphone vibrate with the information while he was restraining the gunman.

Fantastic little detail really helps give this "happy-ending" story some punch.

Full transcript, the very end of which is Columbia's Bollinger having the last word:

I'm sorry that President Ahmadinejad's schedule makes it necessary for him to leave before he's been able to answer many of the questions that we have or even answer some of the ones that we posed to him. (Laughter, applause.) But I think we can all be pleased that his appearance here demonstrates Columbia's deep commitment to free expression and debate. I want to thank you all for coming to participate. (Applause.) Thank you.

I understand that by inviting the leader of Iraq to speak in a public forum, Columbia's Bollinger risked fallout that could have affected his career. I was not surprised that he began with a speech that put Ahmadinejad on the defensive. And I was not surprised that Ahmadinejad twisted and dodged so much.

I am hardly an expert on linguistics, but I used to teach a freshman engineering writing course when I was in Toronto as a grad student,and from time to time, I had to teach students who had gone to high school in another language how to write college English. I remember learning that one way to translate the concept "learn" into Chinese is the concept "copy," so when I saw Mandarin speakers (many of whom were second-generation immigrants to Canada) struggling until I gave them the model, and then respectfully reproducing my work and expecting to be praised, I had to ask someone if there was a different word for Chinese "watch all the little components of what I do, so that you can improvise and do different things  as circumstances require". Oddly enough, when the students wrote their first personal paragraphs, they often wouldn't actually state the main point -- they thought it would be an insult to the reader's intelligence for a memo to spell out exactly what the client should do. (I told those students, if you don't insult your North American clients that way, you'll lose their business."  ("North America" is friendly Canadian slang referring to "Canada and that country south of us".)

Ahmadinejad's speech reminds me of so many different freshman papers I got from students with a Middle Eastern background. I don't want to start making generalizations, because I never really made a serious academic study of this (there is a whole field of English as a Second Language acquisition, so I'm sure this is nothing new), but the facial expressions that Ahmadinejad gave, the way he cheerfully evaded answers, even the way he responded (after behind reminded) to a the question of gender discrimination by saying "But as for women, maybe you think that being a woman is a crime. It's not a crime to be a woman." On the surface, coming right after his insistence that at there are no homosexuals in Iran, he looked intolerant and ridiculous -- how could he possibly think that the question accused him of thinking that being a woman is a crime? (Of course, he backed up his statement by giving only examples of traditional female roles, though elsewhere he did emphasize the role of women in science and government.)

For me, this was the money quote in this Chronicle article about a study on the college admissions process:

I have never wanted anything in my life as badly as I wanted to get into that college. ... That is not how it should be."

From the AP, via Editor and Publisher:

Colorado State University's student newspaper has lost $30,000 in advertising and had to cut pay and other budgets by 10 percent because of fallout from the use of a four-letter word in an editorial about President Bush, the Coloradoan reported Saturday.

In large type, the editorial included the words "Taser this (expletive) Bush." The editorial said it had the support of the Collegian's editorial board. "As local and national media will inevitably jump on this controversy, I strongly urge the university community to try and understand that the intentions of the students on staff, including me, were not to cause harm, but rather to reinforce the importance of free speech at our great institution," Editor-in-Chief J. David

McSwane said in a posting on the paper's Web site Friday. McSwane wrote. "My staff and I are extremely proud to be CSU students and members of this amazing community, and it is my sincere hope that our readers understand our intentions were not malicious."

Hold on a second -- the headline says the paper was "punished."  What really happened was that businesses withdrew their ads and readers complained, but the headline suggests the students are being censored. In fact, the editor might be fired, but according to the article, that will happen only if a student body does the firing.

A statement from the president's office sums things up nicely:

"While student journalists enjoy all the privileges and protections of the First Amendment, they must also accept full responsibility for the choices they make," said CSU President Larry Penley in a prepared statement.

"Members of a university community ought to be expected to communicate civilly and rationally and to make thoughtful arguments in support of even unpopular viewpoints. I am disappointed that the Collegian's recent editorial choices do not reflect the expectations we have of our student journalists nor the standards that are clearly articulated by student media policies. I also have every expectation that the readers of the Collegian will make their viewpoints known to the editor and the Board of Student Communications, which serves as the newspaper's publisher, and that ultimately, the newspaper will answer to its readers." he said.

Using shock journalism to attract attention to an unoriginal idea that can fit on a bumper sticker -- no matter how passionately the author feels about the issue -- is pandering to the lowest common denominators, like fear and sleaze. There will always be an audience for stuff like that, so perhaps the Collegian's editor can rest easy knowing his job prospects are secure.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Miki Louch.

When he was a boy, Dr. Pausch said, he had a concrete set of dreams: He wanted to experience the weightlessness of zero gravity; he wanted to play football in the NFL; he wanted to write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia ("You can tell the nerds early on," he joked); he wanted to be Captain Kirk from "Star Trek"; and he wanted to work for the Disney Co.

I interviewed Paush once for a newsletter published by the engineering school at the University of Virginia. Hearing about the occasion of his speech was a bit of a surprise.

Andy Guess (Inside Higher Ed):

So technology's utility in the classroom comes down to how it is used. The question, then, is: How can educators adapt their teaching methods to emerging technologies? And should they? Skeptics might point out that even students themselves are ambivalent when it comes to using the Internet and other digital tools for class, as the survey highlights. But the study's introduction, written by Chris Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggests what professors can expect from digital natives' evolving modes of learning, what he calls "neomillennial learning styles." As new methods of interacting with information become more ubiquitous, he suggests, citing Second Life-type virtual immersion environments as an example, students will grow up with different expectations and preferences for acquiring knowledge and skills. The implication is less of an emphasis on the "sage on the stage" and a linear acquisition process focusing on a "single best source," focusing instead on "active learning" that comes from synthesizing information from multiple types of media. Noting that traditional ways of thinking and learning are undergoing a "sea change," Dede encourages a fusion of new and old. But what form that will take, exactly, is not addressed directly in the report.

Melissa Terras writes in the introduction to Digital Humanities Quarterly v1 n2 (2007):

We at DHQ hope that we will eventually reach a wider audience (and trust our readers will help us do so), introducing the type and range of activities the digital humanities community is interested in, and featuring energetic, novel, and interesting articles on a variety of research, making use of all the Internet technologies at our disposal.

One of the papers in this, our second issue, has already done just that. Dennis G. Jerz's Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original Adventure in Code and in Kentucky, was posted on the test site for proofreading a few weeks before launch, when one of our editors featured an advance mention of it on his blog. A few days later, it was picked up by the gaming community on a popular discussion list (rec.arts.int-fiction), garnering comments such as "HOLY MOLY!" and "It is clear on a single reading that this is the most important single paper ever written on the history of interactive fiction" before it had even been formally published. It doesn't stop there: the paper went on to be featured on Boing Boing (a "directory of wonderful things" which is read by hundreds of thousands of readers), then being mentioned on Slashdot, the popular technology-related news site. (We are pleased to report our servers survived being "slashdotted" so far, which is perhaps the best load test we could wish for). Shortly after, it featured on Metafilter, a community weblog that anyone can edit with a vast readership, where comments included "What academic research should aspire to be" and "I can feel a new LOLCATS meme coming on. (I can haz mint-cake?)." On the eve of publication, we have had a request from a local Kentucky newspaper wishing to republish the paper (which our publication terms willingly permit). This paper has legs.

In addition, publication on DHQ has made the original game available again for a new audience. When the preprint version of this article became available on the internet in August 2007, Matthew Russoto modified Crowther's source code so that it will compile for today's computers. David Kinder made a Windows executable version. The colossal cave lives again.

Kaj Sand-Jensen:

Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific publications. I then discuss why we should and how we could make these contributions more accessible and exciting.

Va Tech's guidelines for evaluating disturbing student writing, as a Word file and as filtered through an analysis by Inside Higher Ed:

The document also reflects the tightrope its drafters were walking, leaving ample room for intuition and judgment in identifying disturbing writing and offering a series of questions instructors might find helpful in distinguishing creative and literary explorations of themes like violence, drugs and suicide, from a threat or cry for help. Among the questions, geared for fiction, poetry or playwrighting courses:

• "Is the creative work excessively violent? Do characters respond to everyday events with a level or kind of violence one does not expect, or may even find frightening? If so, does the violence seem more expressive of rage and anger than it does of a literary aesthetic or a thematic purpose?"
• "Are the characters' thoughts as well as actions violent or threatening? Do characters think about or question their violent actions?..In other words, does the text reveal the presence of a literary sensibility mediating and making judgments about the characters' thoughts and actions, or does it suggest unmediated venting of rage and anger? If the literary sensibility is missing, is the student receptive to adding that layer and to learning how to do so?"
• "Is this the student's first piece of violent writing?..Is violence at the center of everything the student has written, or does other writing suggest that violence is something the student is experimenting with for literary effect?"
• "Are the violent actions in the work so disturbing or so extreme as to suggest they go beyond any possible sense of purpose in relation to the larger narrative?"
• "Is the writing full of expressions of hostility toward other racial or ethnic groups? Is the writing threateningly misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or in any way expressive of a mindset that may pose a threat to other students?"

"The danger," Falco says of the Virginia Tech document (which has received approvals from the university's counseling center, legal counsel and provost's office) "is that written guidelines can be misused....that a situation would come about where you hamper creative freedom because students are afraid to write something because they're afraid it will get them thrown into a system."

Jennifer Reeger of the Tribune-Review (Pittsgurgh) reports on my colleague's local (Westmoreland County) history book.

"Thank God we do have this beautiful building," said Mike Cary, professor of history and political science at Seton Hill University and an editor of a book on the courthouse's history. "People remember Greensburg -- they remember that dome when they see it from a distance, and it's somehow inspirational for people." The courthouse, completed in 1907 and dedicated in 1908, will be celebrated in upcoming events and a book, "This American Courthouse: One Hundred Years of Service to the People of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania," scheduled to be released Sept. 14.

The student paper at Southern Illinois University publishes an analysis, assisted by an anonymous source, of evidence of plagiarism in the dissertation written by the SIU president.

"I could have made a mistake," Poshard said. "I'm not saying I didn't."

The Daily Egyptian recently obtained copies of Poshard's dissertation and original works from a source close to Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU. The source, who insisted on anonymity, said Poshard used verbatim excerpts in his dissertation that were not cited or quoted.

Previously, SIU's strategic plan was under fire because long sections were copied verbatim from a similar document from Texas A & M.