A Place in Space: January 2006 Archives

Well, I received a serious question back about this three-month old blog and it's relation to/interaction with privacy laws that govern confidentiality between teachers and students. (How strong are these, anyway? When do they get used?)

I meant the post as a joke with/among my colleagues, yet there is an edge of challenge to my students as well. I haven't scoured the posts back in time, but it does seem some rather offensive things have been said. A recent post critiques the blatant sexism, objectification, and rudeness that's been exhibited by some. Meanwhile, a student has also sent thoughtful comments on how teachers receive good evaluations.

Perhaps the site will evolve from a competitive forum countering the equally problematic Rate my Professor.com into a useful public sphere for the discussion of pedagogy? Or it might just degrade again. Or flux between extremes...

These are "broadly" research-oriented blogs in the area of blogs and politics.

i blog speaks in the royal "we" but a very quick glance at the last handful of posts shows they are all from wainer.

Hmmm. wainer is also the poster at reslog. This one is mostly articles, and here's some on the logic of groups that might be timely!

David Brake looks like he's tried to do something similar to what I wish for - a group blog among peers & colleagues in the media department at the London School of Economics. He seems to be the only one posting.... :-/

Aha! A sample of an "upper-level Communication course" integrating student assignments: iGenerations. :-)

And I see a professor, Alex Halavais, taunting his peers and students. That's the style I seem to approach asymptotically. :-/

This wiki of the American Political Science Association was listed in the AoIR wiki. It invites projects, apparently not only by members? The APSA website appears very academic, not activist, oriented.

There's also a wiki for electronic theses and dissertations. Might be a good resource for us grad students, eh?

and here's a wiki research blog.

This fall there will be a conference close by - in Boston: Wikimania 2006. Two other conferences and a count of current wiki researchers is provided here.

“My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.”

I'm preparing the syllabus for COM375 Writing as Communication. It's a required course that students love to hate. I can hardly wait! :-) Collaboration is well-underway in the Intro to Mass Media class I'm teaching at UNH: excellent initial round of online posts, and we've already solved a technology problem and have a student suggestion for curricular material. This is what I like to see!

Yes, what is posted in a blog tells a lot about who you are and can invite a whole range of trouble. Teens and young adults may be less cognizant of these risks, an assumption that is unquestioned by this WAshington post article, which cites examples without qualifying (either rhetorically or statistically) how representative they are. Are young people as naive to the consequences as we were? When celebrities and folks we know reinvent their lives, why should we assume that the foibles of youth are irreversible?

When and how does one decide a risk is unreasonable? How compartmentalized must we be in order to protect ourselves from the ravages of a system without conscience and individuals lacking remorse? Under what circumstances can we begin to acknowledge the conditions of life/living that force us into deeper zones of protectionism and rarified self-interest and take collective action to try and change the trends?

Holly posted the link in air-l Digest, Vol 18, Issue 11 and mentioned comments by Steve Jones