Ethics: October 2008 Archive Page

Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character.

The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data. (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Robert.

Via Karissa:

Mr. McCarraher defended his client by revealing his ingenious trump card- the victim's Facebook page.

On that page was a picture of her at a fancy dress party. She was smiling.

Here are some of the lawyer's touching words in describing the victim: "What we have is a person who has post traumatic stress but is quite capable of going out and having a good time at a fancy dress party." -- Chris Matyszczyk

A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn't recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and cavorting, blinking and wiggling in throes of mercantile ecstasy. 

It took me about five minutes to see their new trick. So I looked around and found a more aggressive ad blocker, which, fortunately for me, blocks even more of the non-intrusive ads that I had been willing to put up with.

On Gameshelf, Andrew Plotkin offers a great discussion of flash ads. This line sums it up pretty nicely:

You cannot get me to start watching ads by making them more intrusive; you can only make me hate you more.

I will put up with text ads, or graphic ads that don't blink. I won't put up with things that reach across into the content area, that add paid hyperlinks in the content area, or that otherwise interfere with my ability to use my browser (popups, disabling the "go back" button, etc.). 

There are millions and millions of pages on the internet, and if yours annoys me, I will leave.

I'm saving this for the next time I talk to my journalism students about surveys. Language Log.

Do you think surveys asking for people's opinions about the way things are, rather than verifiable things they have done, are an even more extreme form of stupidity, resulting in nonsense like "43% of employees believe managers may be snooping on them" being passed off as news or even social science?

__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

Does it sometimes occur to you to just refuse to do any more surveys until the morons who make them up show some signs of getting their act together?

__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

A journalism student at NYU published a Generation Y-ney piece on PBS's MediaShift.

The first thing I notice when I walk into the class is that there are 14 girls and two boys. Already NYU is dominated by females, but the journalism department is exceptionally estrogen-infested. Professor Quigley begins by explaining how blogs are becoming more imprtant and asks if any of us have a blog.

One hand slowly rises. It's mine. (Alana Taylor)

It's certainly... interesting to have a student publicly evaluate a class in this manner, after the class has been in session for a few weeks.   While she is careful to distance her essay from a personal attack on her professor, she complains about the old-media stance of the course, and the program as a whole. Based on the scarcity of student bloggers in this particular classroom, it seems to me that the professor is pitching the class at the right level -- though the generic term "blog" is far less familiar to today's teens than branded bloglike entities "Facebook" or "MySpace." 

My former student, Amanda Cochran, now a grad student at NYU, reacts to Taylor's piece.

Like Taylor, I am one of the only bloggers in my graduate school class, and I'm looked upon as a novelty. As many of my readers know, blogging was an important part of my undergrad experience. We were on the cutting edge of journalism (and still are) at Seton Hill -- as it would seem in light of this report. I know about blogging. I know what I need to do to write a good blog. This ability has enhanced my resume and, more importantly, my understanding of online media and its direction. However, it is true that few other students do know about blogging and its ramifications on their future careers.

Okay, so Taylor made a point. So what? She has done much more harm than good to her career by this stunt. Taylor, looking oh-so-Facebookish in the picture posted with the piece, did invade her classroom, as cited by NYU professor Quigley. However, more importantly, no matter if she isn't a traditional journalist or not, she violated a journalistic tenet of disclosure to her subjects for a completely unworthy assignment. If I were an employer, I would think twice before hiring her -- and that's enough in this competitive business to stay unemployed. (Amanda Cochran)

Taylor had planned to write a follow-up for MediaShift, but editor Mark Glaser did so instead.

'Hi YouTube, it's me, Kiki,'' the teenager said to the camera as she swiveled in her chair to jazzy background music. ''And today I'm going to show you how to cheat on a test - the effective way.''

She demonstrates her technique, slipping a small piece of paper with the answers in a clear-tubed pen as she rationalizes her reasons for cheating. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Kiki's video includes a link to her blog, where we learn she is a community college student who wrote a few weeks ago, "I think I want to start being in the media right now. You know, being seen in movies and television."  Well, you've got part of your wish, Kiki.

It's hard for me to imagine what's going through the head of someone who posts a video like this, but at the same time, I can't help but feel amused. First of all, there's a lot of stuff on YouTube, so it's not surprising to find someone has posted a video about cheating.

Second, how many words can you put inside a clear plastic pen tube?  We're talking about filling up the inside diameter, not the outside diameter.  Even if you have really good eyes, and can discern two lines of text, we're talking about 20 words.  In the time it takes to watch Kiki's video, you could say those 20 words to yourself 20 times over, or spend a minute making up an acronym to help you memorize key terms. (The YouTube article on how to cheat on a test with a fake Coke bottle label actually describes something that requires some forethought and talent, and users have rated it much higher than Kiki's method.)

Since I teach small classes where each student is expected to contribute during class, and because most of my classes are writing classes, I can de-emphasize the "memorize facts and spit them back" activities, and instead focus on process. 

When I gave a vocabulary quiz last semester, I let my students bring in a one-page cheat sheet.  I figured that the benefit the student would gain from having to filter the material and decide what was important enough to go onto the cheat sheet would be more beneficial to their learning than cramming. But in that case, I wasn't intersted in getting them to memorize any particular vocabulary words. Rather, I was calling attention to the process of deducing the meanings of unfamiliar words by having them break a word down into its components (prefix, root, suffix).  I also had them invent new words. (Examples I included were "post-cardiofractal" and "circumvore".)

Along the same lines, I let students in Writing for the Internet consult their textbooks and even look on their classmates' computers while they were doing an in-class HTML exercise. (My only stipulation was I didn't want them to ask each other for answers.)  Again, I wasn't asking student to memorize HTML, but rather asking them to internalize the technical steps that go into creating and uploading a web site, so that we can move on to the much more important issues of content and audience.

For my second time teaching "New Media Projects," I have replaced routine "prove you can use this tool" quizzes with peer-focused screencasts.  Rather than have students prove to me that they can perform certain design and programming skills in class, I am asking them to use Cam Studio to record a video of them talking a novice through some steps that demonstrate their skills.  So far we have screencasts on Blender 3D (a modeling and animation tool), Inform 7 (a programming environment for text-based games, which I don't think had been covered on YouTube before), and an open topic that's simply supposed to be interesting to Seton Hill University students.  This phase of the course is designed to get students familiar with various unfamiliar tools. Of course there's only so much they can learn in the two or three weeks we spend on each tool, but when each time they watch and comment on a peer's screencasts, they'll get a slightly different approach to using the tool.

(BTW, also quoted in the Sun-Times article is Liz Losh, whose path I cross on the blogosphere from time to time.)