Salon calls out a Time magazine journalist for his factual errors and sloppy journalism. It sounds to me more like an editorial disguised as journalism. The author misses the Time magazine connection to TimeWarner’s telecommunication services. There’s likely no conspiracy here, but the synergy deserves to at least be acknowledged.
Author: john
Online study group grounds for expultion?
TheStar.com | GTA | Student faces Facebook consequences
A Ryerson University student is facing academic misconduct charges for organizing a Facebook group for fellow chemistry students to “get help with some of the questions the professor would give students to do online.” As he describes it:
“So we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we’d post the question and say: `Does anyone get how to do this one? I didn’t get it right and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.’ Exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the Dungeon [a physical study space],” said Avenir yesterday.
I can see that the prof might be worried about an online version of answer keys that I’ve been told have been popular in fraternities for years. Yet if this is a method of studying that students find valuable, and they go about it in an honest way, it should be encouraged…especially since they’re going to do it anyway. It might be more work for an instructor to structure questions so that answers can’t be shared, but it’s work that all students would benefit from.
History suggests copyright crusade is a lost cause
History suggests copyright crusade is a lost cause (Ars Technica)
The fundamental lesson is that property rights are not—and never have been—created by Congressional fiat. Property rights emerge spontaneously from the social fabric of a community. …
If copyrights are a form of property right, then the history of American property rights provides clues about how the copyright system will need to evolve in the future. It suggests that Congress’s current strategy of imposing ever more draconian penalties for breaking laws that lack broad public support is a recipe for failure.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
This Course Brought to You By…
This Course Brought to You By…. (Inside Higher Ed)
Here’s an interesting story about a university course with some pretty blatant corporate ties:
[The] IACC [International Anticounterfeiting Coalition] sponsor[ed] a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real.
I can almost understand how this might have seemed like a good lesson for the students of a course to learn a new marketing tactic, but it’s a bit fishy that they 1) received $10,000 from the organization, and 2) received materials to teach from. As an instructor, this is perhaps the most egregious thing–that the classroom became a pulpit for the IACC to present their view to paying students. It doesn’t sound as though critically engaging the issue of counterfeiting (or guerrilla marketing) was a part of the course at all.