Academia: September 2008 Archive Page

Via Crooked Timber and BoingBoing:

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters' EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base. (Courthouse News)

So, putting this into context... if I, through the sweat of my own brow, manually enter hundreds of bibliographical citations into EndNote, the owners of EndNote are telling me that I can't use a third-party tool in order to convert that information (that I, myself, entered) into a different format.

Every door on every floor is closed, whether or not students are present. This seems so different from my days as a student, when you always left your door open if you were in, I suppose to signal your willingness to talk and to avoid homework if you could just find the smallest pretext to do so. It helped with circulation as well, also a crucial matter in our un-air conditioned rooms.

These days you could launch a flare and not harm a single student. The students who answer their doors invite us in kindly, and seem generally pleased with the attention. Some of them have maintenance complaints, which we address. All of them have television sets connected to cable (cable TV had not yet hit Southwestern in my era), and of course each student has a computer, and an Ipod, and usually video games. Each room seems so self-contained, so independent, and seemingly so isolated from any group activity. -- Todd Diacon, Inside Higher Ed

When I first introduced my Seton Hill students to blogging in 2003, before Facebook had mainstreamed social networking into a neatly wrapped package, my students posted a mixture of personal and academic material.  Now that even my committed bloggers do most of their social networking elsewhere, I have started pitching the academic blogs as a more professional practice for real-world writing.  But my student Andy LoNigro just posted a thoughtful reflection on the weblog taxonomy promoted by Crawford Kilian in Writing for the Web 3.0.  Andy pushes back a little, in a way that makes me think that perhaps the reports of the death of social blogging have been greatly exaggerated.

I began to think about what categories our blogs for Dr. Jerz would fall into? I first thought about a category called Academic Blogs but what we write isn't always for academics. We have the opportunity to express our freedom and creative abilities. The more I looked into it and thought about it I realized that my blog here at SHU has an aspect of each of the categories that Kilian talks about in this section, thus creating a blend of all of them spawning the name: Blender Blog. It's like taking all of the cateogories and throwing them in a blender. -- Andy LoNigro

So, will "blender blogging" catch on?  My colleague Mike Arnzen coined the term "pedablogue," I use "xenoblogging" in my blogging rubrics, and my former student Evan Reynolds coined the wonderful term "drive-by blogging" (to describe the sudden bursts of not-too-terribly-focused blogging energy necessary to catch up when a blogging portfolio is fast approaching).

As it happens, in another class I teach a design tool called Blender 3D, and there are plenty of hits for "blender blog" in that sense.

The technical term is "deep packet inspection," a process by which universities can examine the contents of electronic files that pass back and forth on their networks to see if they contain copyrighted material like the latest M.I.A. single or an episode of Gossip Girl. It's the equivalent of requiring institutions to steam open and read every letter that passes through the campus mail. It's also expensive, slows down the entire network, and won't actually work, because the small number of students who are responsible for the most egregious piracy also tend to be the students with the technical know-how needed to stay three steps ahead of whatever new filtering mechanisms the university might devise.

The entertainment industry insists that it doesn't necessarily want to go this way, but that's obviously a lie. Earlier this year, it supported legislation in Illinois and Tennessee that would have required colleges to implement "technology-based deterrents" to piracy if they received more than a certain number of infringement notices. Around the same time, colleges across the country began seeing a 20-fold increase in the number of infringement notices they received.. When colleges protested the new burden, the RIAA said their past voluntary cooperation meant they were legally obligated to comply in the future. (Inside Higher Ed)

My provost sent this link to the English faculty, inviting us to share our responses.

My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. "You're not living in the real world," he said. I reacted with a young man's defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don't forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching. There is a deep pleasure in sharing the things that you have labored to learn in solitude. It's inspiring work -- rewarding, interactive, human work so different from what we do at our desks -- and it turns out that writers, many of us natural entertainers, often do it quite well. (David Gessner, New York Times)

Coming from a school where the teaching load is 4/4, his 2/2 load seems like luxury, though of course I'm aware that the reduced teaching load carries with it an increased expectation of publication.  After almost 10 years as a full-time faculty member, I'm still adjusting to the feeling of watching conference deadlines, opportunities to contribute to anthologies, and the ghosts of book proposals go whizzing past me as I patiently explain to yet another class of freshmen how to download an e-mail attachment or how to do the pagination in an MLA style paper. As a grad student, I feared that I wouldn't have enough to say; my reality is that I have plenty to say -- both to my students and my colleagues, but never enough time.

Or, to be more precise, the conventions of the student-centered classroom mean I have to make my points in parallel to or as part of the substructure for the student conversation. I don't have 45 unbroken minutes to speak (saving 5 minutes at the end for questions), so I never quite get to drop the kinds of pearls of wisdom that I recall and treasure from my own undergraduate experience.  And at this phase in my life, I never have the 8 or 12 hours of uninterrupted time that I found were necessary to churn out the chapters of my dissertation -- and even the once or twice a week that I can get to the office during the summer are often only useful to dig myself out from under the backlog.

Nevertheless, I will never find myself in the soul-sucking position of working on  writing project because I *have to* -- everything I've written, I wrote because I wanted to, and it just happens to be a benefit that I get to list it as an accomplishment on an annual report.

The Commonwealth of Virginia announces plans for a free, open-source physics textbook.

The Virginia Physics "Flexbook" project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open-source format that can be used to strengthen existing physics content. The Commonwealth is partnering with CK-12 (www.ck12.org) on this initiative as they will provide the free, open-source technology platform to facilitate the publication of the newly developed content as a "Flexbook" - defined simply as an adaptive, web-based set of instructional materials.

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines (a government website that identifies research backing up good web design practices).

This article should be required reading for all aspiring writers and professionals -- not just women.

I have spent too much time being rattled by terse e-mail from editors, agents who have told me that I'd never get a book deal, and bosses who have berated me as not being "detail-oriented." I think that in order to break through any kind of glass ceiling, or simply to get through the day, you have to become impervious to the daily gruffness that's a part of any job.

I used to think that perfection was the pathway to success. Not so, according to women I have interviewed who have reached the apex of their professions. Rather, it can lead to paralysis. Women, I have found, can let perfectionism stop them from speaking up or taking risks. For men, especially if they are thick-skinned, the thought of someone telling them "no" tends not to be viewed as earth-shattering.

One tactic I've found useful in getting over the perfectionist tendency is a shock therapy called soliciting feedback. Not only does it demystify what your boss thinks about you, but it also gives you the data to become a more valuable employee.

The other dose of shock therapy I've undergone is reprogramming my brain to think that, yes, girls do brag. I've indoctrinated myself with the idea that my job is a two-part process. One part is actually doing the work and the second part is talking about it, preferably in bottom-line terms. --Hannah Seligson

Last year a colleague in the English department described a conversation in which a friend revealed a dirty little secret: "I use Wikipedia all the time for my research--but I certainly wouldn't cite it."  This got me wondering: How many humanities and social sciences researchers are discussing, using, and citing Wikipedia? -- Lisa Spiro

When the subject is pop culture, political rumors, new internet trends, or if the author is clearly citing something way out of his or her subject domain (such as an engineer citing the literary origin of the term "robot" or a humanist explaining a geek joke) then I would prefer that the body of the paper identify that the source is Wikipedia, in which case I would register the link, absorb the fact that the author has just signaled that this point is simply explanatory and not crucial to the main argument, and I would move on.

But if a growing number of academics are using Wikipedia in their published scholarly work, then the "No Wikipedia, Ever!!" mindset requires re-examination.