Category: General Technology

I’ve just received the following in an email message from Harvard Business School Publishing. If this represents the mainstream view of publishers, and I suspect it does, most of the works currently posted on many of our Blackboard courses would be considered to be infringing, even if they would be permitted by our current policy

We do not permit the posting of our cases, articles, or chapters on “e-reserve”
course pages for student access, nor in “electronic coursepacks” that link to
our digitized content, nor on course management systems such as WebCT or
Blackboard, unless doing so via our Course Planning system. Such unauthorized
postings are equivalent to distributing our copyrighted content to students, and
doing so without our permission infringes that copyright. This is so even if the
content is being used for the first time and is password-protected, accessible
only to students in the course, and taken down at the end of the course. Please
do not post or display HBSP content in this way. Using our Course Planning tool
is every bit as easy and functional.

I wonder if this kind of notice is going to become a trend and what will happen if faculty ignore it.

National Public Radio is reviving a radio series from the 1950’s called “This I Believe” that was hosted by Edward Murrow. The show featured essays from both the both the famous –Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller and Harry Truman– and the not so famous. One of the more interesting entries on the site is the comparison of two essays by Elizabeth Deutsch–one from when she was 16 and another 50 years later as a professor at Cornell.

Murrow’s introduction to the original series is chilling in the similarities between our current situtation and the concerns in the US during the 1950’s about the Cold War, McCarthyism and racial division. For many of my conservative friends, the 1950’s were seen as America’s golden age, but Morrow’s short explanation of the need for the country share this personal philosophical essays offers a much more unsettled vision of life.

An Aside About Personal Philosophy Statements

One of the first exercises when I enrolled in my graduate program in adult education at Syracuse was the construction of a personal philosophy statement Roger Hiemstra, who chaired the adult ed program at that time, and Ralph Brockett, who was teaching the course, shared a common belief that ethical practice by teachers required continued and careful reflection on the nature of reality, meaning, and human nature. I’ve continued the tradition in many of my own courses, even though many students find the exercise very difficult–as I did.

(Ralph went on to edit a book published by Teachers College Press on Ethics in Adult Education, and Roger outlined his rationale statement in a chapter in that book.)

Yahoo! News – Ted Nugent to Fellow NRAers: Get Hardcore
Speaking at the NRA convention–I guess as an invited guest–rock singer Ted Nugent drew the biggest cheers when he told the assembled crowd that they shouldn’t be restricted from using their weapons to protect themselves:

“Remember the Alamo! Shoot ’em!” he screamed to applause. “To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want ’em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot ’em.”

I lost my momentum and enthusiasm for blogging after losing my domain in the great Bloghosts fiasco, but recently I have been inspired to post about some of the things that are going on in my professional life. Like Gardner Campbell, another Bloghosts refugee, I’ve registered a new .net domain and have set up this WordPress blog to start grabbing some thoughts and sharing them.

We may move this to MT at some time in the future, but this will do for the time being…