Digital Culture Studies

Alia Sabur is the world’s youngest college professor, beating a record set 300+ years ago by Colin Maclaurin. She was hired for her first professorship 3 days shy of her 19th birthday. In the time leading up to the start of her new position, she taught in New Orleans, at Southern University, an HBCU that is still struggling after hurricane Katrina. So, she’s smart and generous!

The wiki page on Colin Macluarin, the previous record-holder is pretty funny - after defending a master’s thesis entitled The Power of Gravity, he went on to study divinity, which naturally lead to a professorship in mathematics when he was 19.

Of course, he had an edge on Alia - he had 300 years less knowledge to learn! On the other hand, what does studying gravity look like when you personally know Isaac Newton?

It is my firm belief that sociologists are the most prolific bloggers amongst the professoriate - at least, all the blogs I read are written by professors, and chances are, if someone forwards me a link that relates to academia that they found on  a personal blog, that blog will be written by a sociologist. I am sure that if I ever took the time to investigate this and write it up, I could find a higher education journal to publish it - they love to publish articles about faculty - but then again, I would need a 20 page lit review explaining what a blog is, and then my internal rant about how it is 2008, not 1995 would start rolling, the one where I rant about how  we ought to expect  a baseline of knowledge about the internet amongst college-educated readers, and there isn’t enough antacid in the world for that to happen again.  But I digress. Sociologists blog, and I read their blogs, and I get some great information from them. Today’s gem: tips for article writers, by Ezra Zuckerman at MIT Sloan School of Management, via OrgTheory.

25 Reasons to Publish, by James Axtell.