Academia: October 2007 Archive Page

In Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden reports on the National College Media Convention:

In his opening remarks, Mattingly, a religion columnist for the Scripps Howard News service and director of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities' Washington Journalism Center, described six possible models for student newspapers, ranging from a university public relations model (with an adviser charged by the administration to actively screen all content), to an educational model (with an adviser that helps guide content but with student editors making nearly all of the decisions), to complete independence. "Whatever the rules are, know what they are," Mattingly advised the students in the audience, stressing the need to know how the rules apply when it comes down to the "moment it's a really bad story -- which at Christian colleges means sex, drugs or donors."

The student paper at Seton Hill follows the educational model. If the paper got into the habit of publishing shoddily-written and poorly-researched attacks on the administration, my role would be to correct the shoddy journalism, rather than adjust the anti-administrative slant. I'd be just as critical of students who turned the paper into a cheerleading section, if they were too timid to go after the hard news stories that might make some groups on campus unhappy. 

Good journalism will sometimes make certain groups unhappy, and those groups can and will complain, which is why I tell my students their research has to hold up under scrutiny. Because Seton Hill is a private institution, articles the Setonian publishes are not protected by the First Amendment.  But as long as a contested story is fair -- for instance, student gripes are presented alongside official responses, and the story does not include libel or a violation of privacy rights -- then a request to remove or censor a story becomes an issue of academic freedom. I cannot teach journalism unless students have the freedom to make their own editorial judgments. On the few occasions when SHU employees have panicked and asked me to intervene and remove or prevent a story, the academic dean has been very supportive of my position.

Students are starting to ask questions about the online course I'm planning to teach in January. I was very happy with the way the course went the last time I taught it, in 2006. I'm sure I will tweak the course here and there, but here are the course objectives and some other details about the course that are likely to remain essentially the same. Video Game Culture and Theory: Course Objectives (2006)

Your objectives for this course are to

• explore definitions of important concepts such as game and fun
• learn about the origins and historical development of video games,
• expose yourself to a broad range of games,
• gain experience recognizing and interpreting basic game elements (goal, risk, fiction, emotional engagement, rules, outcome, values, consequences, close playing, etc.),
• develop an awareness of the complex cultural context within which games exist (children's culture, geek culture, women's issues, political issues, economic issues, aesthetic issues, etc.),
• and ultimately, to discern the core cultural values represented in a particular game.

To that end, you will:

• play several games on the syllabus, read three books and additional shorter articles as assigned,
• complete quizzes and exercises to ensure that you are keeping up with the readings and to evaluate your progress,
• participate regularly in classroom and web-based discussions, and
• write a formal research paper (minimum 10 pages).

Neither ability to "win" a game nor programming/design talents are germane to the subject of this course. At the end of this course, you should be able to

1. Demonstrate competence in the critical reading of complex cultural texts (including games, cultural responses to games, and the academic study of games)
2. Engage intellectually and respectfully with your peers (in person and online)
3. Write a college-level paper that appropriately uses primary and secondary sources to defend a non-obvious claim (without minimizing or neglecting opposing or alternative views)

From Language Log:

Much of the blame for the public's poor understanding of science must go to a little studied but culturally pivotal genre: news report headlines. Short snappy headlines provide the lazy reader with just enough information to totally misconstrue a story.

There's a reason why the writing in newspapers doesn't look like the writing found in scientific journals. 

Newspaper readers have needs and values that differ from the those of the scientific community. Scientists require a huge level of precision in order to get their jobs done, and they are used to writing for other scientists (or perhaps college students who want to be scientists).  The documents that scientists point to as examples of clear, accurate writing presume an incredible amount of prior knowledge -- not just vocabulary words and factual knowledge, but abstract concepts like the scientific method and the relationship between applied and theoretical research.  Science papers are almost completely devoid of verbs other than "is," and science papers are almost all credited to large groups of participants (even though only a small number of participants will actually have helped write the document that bears their name).  I don't note these points in order to complain -- these are just features of the scientific world.

But science is a vast subject.  While a nuclear physicist might have a good sense of whether a particular animal study experiment is well-designed, the nuclear physicist might be unable to assess the significance of this or that particular animal behavioral observation.  So while scientists rely on their own specialized genres in order to communicate with others within their specialty, even a trained scientist must rely on a good science writer to produce generally-accessible representations of knowledge generated in distant scientific fields.

I used to write for an engineering newsletter, and I saw first-hand that few scientists are gifted with the ability to explain their work in terms that Joe Sixpack can understand. Back in 1992, when virtual reality was all the rage, I interviewed Randy Pausch, the CMU professor who recently became famous for giving an inspiring talk about how he is facing his impending death. But few people of any profession share Pausch's ability to communicate. 

Often, then, the journalists are often on their own when it comes to translating a two hours of academic rambling into an 800-word news feature that attempts to make the latest scientific discovery seem relevant to the average reader. 

But Language Log's complaint about headlines highlights another problem. Reporters generally don't write their own headlines.  For large papers, there might be a sub-editor whose job is to write all the headlines, but for middle-sized papers, the layout artists are the ones with control over the page.  They may scan the article quickly and come up with a headline that fits -- both in the sense of being appropriate to the topic, and also that fills the given amount of space.  When a story is sent out over wire services, so that hundreds of regional and local papers can reprint it, each paper will probably reprint it with a slightly different layout, meaning that the headline might need to be longer or shorter to fill the given space.

So, even if science reporters meticulously research an article, and check to make sure that their own original editors don't give the piece an inaccurate headline, once that story gets syndicated, the author has no control over the headline that will appear above the story.

Journalists have to write for a general audience, and news articles tend to simplify in order to make complex subtle points seem interesting and relevant to the general reader. A reporter who is writing on a deadline is far more likely to call up an expert on the phone and get some quick quotes than to sort through scientific studies that were written for an expert audience that does not include journalists.  Even journalists who specialize in science reporting may find themselves writing about astrophysics in the morning, human cell biology in the afternoon, and plate tectonics the next morning.

I just started a unit on science reporting in my introductory news writing class.  Tomorrow we'll start discussing It Ain't Necessarily So (which offers numerous case studies of incidents in which the media have distorted the public perception of science by latching onto a partial truth, sensationalizing, and/or editorializing).  Yesterday I invited SHU math professor Josh Sasmor to speak to my class yesterday. His final take-home message was that reporters have an obligations to be critical of the statistical evidence handed to them by their sources. (He said they should take each statistic with "that much salt," miming a something the shape of a salt lick.)

Blogcosm offers a good round-up of online reaction to a NIH agency's not-so-useful method of citing a weblog.

Several bloggers noticed yesterday that the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, which is part of the NIH: National Institutes of Health) has a style guide for citing blogs... The NLM's definition of a blog isn't bad... But the guide itself is several years late and still flawed.

Your grade for the peer-review exercise depends on the quantity and quality of the constructive feedback you provide to your peer. (So smile at the good and frown at the bad, but don't make your peer feel very sad.)

In the process, you will get specific, concrete peer feedback, which you can use to revise your paper (and perhaps raise your final grade). But for me, the real value of the exercise is that the experience of hunting for and fixing problems in a peer's paper will help you develop self-editing skills that you can apply to any writing situation.  ("Newswriting Peer Review Guidelines.")

After I teach a subject for the third time, I know enough of what to expect that I can start writing a detailed handout that encapsulates the lesson, so that when I teach the classes in future years, I can reduce the amount of class time I spend lecturing on a subject, and instead refer students to the handout as part of the preparation for a workshop. I don't generally use handouts as a replacement for classroom instruction, but when the handout is a detailed checklist, that can really help students as they revise.

I feel a sense of accomplishment getting this handout posted, since I managed to get it to the students in time for it to be useful.  The revision of the first full-length news article is due Friday, so I'll have something substantial to evaluate before midterm grades are due next week; students will be able to revise again (if they wish) after the break. 

The stress level always goes up before midterms, but I'm feeling better than I've felt in weeks -- the pneumonia that laid me flat is finally tolerable, to the point where I'm well enough to feel guilty about all the tasks I permitted myself to put off while I was sick.  Tomorrow I'll turn 39, and I'll spend most of the day grading papers. Such is life.

Inside Higher Ed:

Virtually all college students come to campus with their own cell phones, but for privacy reasons, telecommunications companies require their subscribers to manually opt in to any mass alert service. The result is that in many cases, the primary obstacle to widespread campus access to text alerts is the students themselves.

While doing some advanced preparation for an upcoming unit on statistics in my news writing class, I learned something new today (from Wikipedia).  When coming across a statistic that looks like slam-dunk evidence of bias or wrongdoing, an activist will have a motivation to present that data to journalists in order to advance a particular perspective. The problem comes when the well-meaning activist does not really understand statistics, and so presents an inaccurate interpretation to a journalist. It's the journalist's obligation to check out any statistic he or she uses in a story, often by contacting an expert who is not directly connected with whatever research is being cited, so that the expert can offer an independent interpretation of the data.

One of the best known real life examples of Simpson's paradox occurred when the University of California, Berkeley was sued for bias against women applying to graduate school. The admission figures for fall 1973 showed that men applying were more likely than women to be admitted, and the difference was so large that it was unlikely to be due to chance.^[16][3]

	Applicants	% admitted
Men	8442	44%
Women	4321	35%

However when examining the individual departments, it was found that no department was significantly biased against women; in fact, most departments had a small bias against men.

Major	Men		Women
	Applicants	% admitted	Applicants	% admitted
A	825	62%	108	82%
B	560	63%	25	68%
C	325	37%	593	34%
D	417	33%	375	35%
E	191	28%	393	24%
F	272	6%	341	7%

The explanation turned out to be that women tended to apply to departments with low rates of admission, while men tended to apply to departments with high rates of admission. The conditions under which department-specific frequency data constitute a proper defense against charges of discrimination are formulated in Pearl (2000).

Game Career Guide has an interview with some writers who work in the games industry. Hurrah for the liberal arts!

I already knew in high school I wanted to work in entertainment, so I attended some special workshops called the Media Workshops in Hollywood. There I was advised to major in whatever I wanted in college because I would learn everything I needed to know my first six months in entertainment. Taking this advice to heart, I chose to major in Archaeology.

While I continued to study programming and art in college, auditing a class in C and taking more art history classes, the archaeology emphasis has had the greatest influence on me. Combining soft knowledge like art, history, and mythology spanning the globe, with hard knowledge like biology, statistical analysis, economics, and urban planning has helped me the most in my game career.

I created a new handout that focuses on the efficient use of quoted material in MLA-style papers. Some of this material used to be part of a more general handout on using sources, but I think it will be more useful if I pull it out and create a new handout.

An MLA-style paper does not ask you to give the full name and credentials of your sources in the body of your paper, or even the full title of your source. (Save that information for the Works Cited list.)

In high school, where you might write a whole paper using only one or two sources, you got points for calling attention to the fact that you found a good source and were able to use it successfully in a paper. But in a paper you write for college, you may use three or four different sources in the same paragraph, and you may refer to several additional sources without actually quoting from them. If you bring your essay to a screeching halt in order to introduce the full name and credentials of each author, you will bury whatever argument you were trying to make.