Kairosnews is an open community of members interested in the intersections of rhetoric, technology and pedagogy. Visitors should feel free to create an account, post a blog, join in the many discussions by posting comments, or read the news gathered from other sites by our aggregator. Members can also subscribe to a daily email newsletter of updated site content. For more information about Kairosnews, consult our FAQ.
09/10/2004 - 22:41
I know these reports of distinguished faculty getting nabbed for plagiairism is nothing new; nevertheless, I think it's always good to take advantage of these opportunities to reflect on our poorly developed views of the "crime of plagiarism." Some of you may have read my Critique of Plagiarism on my website, so you probably know my attitude towards the subject varies sharply from the norm.
Of course, this law professor is obviously guilty of another type of crime; namely, letting a grad student or two write his damn book for him. They get some "research credit," he gets another item on his vita plus whatever chump change he wrings from the sale of his book. We all know faculty like this, and it's good to see a few take some heat for this despicable practice.
09/10/2004 - 06:12
EFFector Vol. 17, No. 33 September 10, 2004 warns that the Piracy Deterrence and
Education Act "is now ready for a vote by the entire House of Representatives."
And I'm sure most of us would agree that the following statistics make sense:
The PDEA would impose criminal penalties on those who share more than 1,000 infringing files on a peer-to-peer network. Recent surveys by Ruckus Network show that the average college student who uses P2P file-sharing software shares 1,100 files.
Stallman's The Right to Read comes to mind, doesn't it? Personally, I don't think protesting this will do much other than postpone it and maybe lessen the severity of P2P prosecution legislation in the long run. If it doesn't make it through this time, the content industries will just lobby for it again. And again. And again. It will eventually pass in one form or another.
Don't think I wouldn't mind at all being wrong in this prediction. But historically the trend seems to be going the wrong way when it comes to intellectual property.
The EFF sometimes takes a while to make their email newsletter available online, but you should be able to read the full message through their archives in the next few days.
09/10/2004 - 02:55
While it's never the case that all the students in a particular class like blogging, I feel my experiences with blogging in the classroom have been successful. I give students a broad range of topics on which to blog, I require them to blog the notes they use for their oral reports, and I occasionally devote class time to blogging. I've been fine-tuning the mechanism I use to evaluate their blogs, and I just posted my latest version.
The mechanism includes "coverage," "depth," "interaction," "discussion," "xenoblogging," and "wildcard".
09/09/2004 - 13:39
I've been writing about this on Techsophist as a sort of metadiscourse to help me make conscious choices about how I write now that I have a book-length writing project. The main things I've come up with that are different for me is scheduled writing every day, many mini-deadlines, and friendly competition with my office mate who is also writing her dissertation. I'd like to hear from those of you who are now post-diss about how you go about writing a big (something large enough to logically need chapters) writing project and how it differs from your usual writing process. Did you stand and write like Hemingway (I always thought that was silly)? How did you keep on track?
09/08/2004 - 01:12
Via Slashdot: Paul Graham, computer programmer, author, and inventor of the Yahoo! Store, has written an essay on the current state of the essay. While I don't entirely agree with all of his points, there are some interesting comments at the end about the influence of technology on writing, and some of the comments in the Slashdot thread are potentially provocative as well (if you're willing to brave the Slashdot signal-to-noise ratio). (Title edited for correctness.)
09/06/2004 - 22:27
The September 6 Washington Post is reporting that the NIH is considering a major policy change toward open access principles:
"The committee is very concerned that there is insufficient public access to reports and data resulting from NIH-funded research," it read. "This situation . . . is contrary to the best interests of the U.S. taxpayers who paid for this research."
The report called upon NIH to devise a system that would ensure that NIH-funded research results be "freely and continuously available no later than six months after publication."
The report also notes that scientific journals are protesting that this will hurt their publication business. No doubt. This is a move away from a finanical model which allows organizations--both profit and not-for-profit--to capitalize on resources which should be public. These publishing groups have essentially been subsidized by grant-based research. Time for that well to run dry.
09/04/2004 - 15:19
I've been meaning to blog this for a while, but it's hard to know where to start. For background, see Code Breaking: Spectrum for All by Lawrence Lessig, where he makes the case for wireless spectrum as public property (he also devotes a section of The Future of Ideas to open spectrum). See also Yochai Benkler's The Political Economy of Commons and the Open Spectrum FAQ.
Now for the story: AKMA was sitting outside a public library in Nantucket (read: a public place) using the library's wireless signal. A police officer approached him and told him he was breaking a federal law by using the signal; according to the law, AKMA should have been inside the library. In good faith, AKMA turned off the power on his wireless card, but the officer went further and said, “Why don’t you just close that up, sir, or use your computer elsewhere?’ (!)
An exchange ensued between the officer and AKMA, and there's a lengthy comment thread after AKMA's post about the incident. Slashdot picked it up too.
09/04/2004 - 04:20
Steve is asking for comments on his essay titled "When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Emailing Lists, Discussion, and Interaction." A teaser from Steve's post:
I'm not trying to say in this essay that using blogs in classrooms is a bad idea. All I'm trying to say is that they aren't very good at creating a "discussion" among a group of students, they aren't very good at fostering a "dynamic" or a "collaborative" writing atmosphere, and they aren't a replacement for using an email list discussion set-up.
It makes me think of the "Blogs Kill Community" thread on TechRhet a while back, but I know Steve's not making that extreme a claim. However, that there's a considerable number of people who, I'm assuming, have engaged with the medium but have not found weblogs to foster community is worth discussing. How can we account for the fact that some people prefer to experience online community through weblogs and others prefer discussion boards, listservs, etc.? I wonder if it's not so much the technology as it is assumptions and expectations of what community is (and what collaboration is).
09/02/2004 - 15:38
Here's an interesting piece on how we read by Kevin Larson at Microsoft Typography:
The goal of this paper is to review the history of why psychologists moved from a word shape model of word recognition to a letter recognition model, and to help others to come to the same conclusion. This paper will cover many topics in relatively few pages. Along the way I will present experiments and models that I couldn’t hope to cover completely without boring the reader. If you want more details on an experiment, all of the references are at the end of the paper as well as suggested readings for those interested in more information on some topics. Most papers are widely available at academic libraries.
Link via Slashdot.
08/31/2004 - 01:29
I love to post about new wiki resources because I know that I'm also giving blacklily8 a reading assignment 
And this piece is a good reading assignment for everyone. Bryan Lamb's Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not in the Sept/Oct 2004 issue of Educause Review is a comprehensive overview of wikis. Everything from pedagogy to IP licensing of wiki content. If you needed a detailed wiki overview to share with colleagues or students, this is it (blacklily8, correct me if I am wrong). I found it very informative.
Link via elearnspace blog.
08/29/2004 - 15:38
I've been meaning to post this call for submissions on academic blogging. The "Digressions" section of the Fall 2004 issue of Lore: An E-journal for Teachers of Writing is going to center on "the role that blogging plays for compositionists and the composition classroom." From the call for papers:
Lore invites two types of writers to participate in this discussion. First, there are those who recognize a place for blogging in the profession. Do you keep a blog as part of your professional identity? Do you have your students keep blogs or read them for class assignments? What roles do you think blogs can play in a range of professional contexts? Second, there are those who keep blogs for personal reasons. What attracts you to the "blogosphere"? Do you keep an anonymous or pseudononymous blog and how did you come to that decision?
A casual observation: I gather that they'd like these responses to be written for an audience who doesn't know much, if anything, about blogging. Responses should be ~1000 words; deadline is 22 September 2004.
08/29/2004 - 05:05
Below the "read more" fold, I've pasted pretty much everything on the flyer I received for this conference on new media and literacy, which will take place at LSU in February 2005 (no web site that I know of), but here it is if you'd like to see it in its original context. The deadline for proposals is October 15, 2004.
08/28/2004 - 14:18
The first review is in, from MSNBC of all places (it always amazes me when MSNBC has something positive to say about something related to open source). HP's nx5000 series, listed with a base price of $1199, is now available with SUSE Linux. MSNBC reports that everything works well "right out of the box." Typically, getting Linux to work on a laptop can be difficult, and next to impossible for non-computer geeks. And if you decide to purchase one, choosing SUSE over Windows XP Home saves you $50
08/28/2004 - 03:07
This special issue of The Electronic Journal of Communication is guest edited by Barbara Warnick and Laura Gurak. About the issue:
Abstract. Essays included in this issue are case studies of rhetorical expression as it occurs online. We take rhetoric broadly to mean expression for an audience in a particular context designed to motivate audience members to see or experience things in certain ways. Some of these case studies are ethnographic explorations, while others raise questions about the uniqueness of online expression. All of them use the case study or specific experience as a starting point to discover more about how online expression takes place. As such, they are, and are intended to be, suggestive and heuristic.
|
Latest comments