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?

On a HigherEd specific online forum, a post that was meant to exhibit how odd academic life looks to non-academics told the story of a recent proposal defense. I am a consummate lurker there, although I don’t have a login, which is probably for the best, because the post that took my breath away describes how the Chair of the student’s committee decided to invite the defender’s husband to her proposal defense. And I cannot quite wrap my head around that. Does he also invite the wives of male students who are defending their proposals? If he does, well, consider my feminist ire placated. But I suspect that he does not, and I cannot understand why the responses to this post don’t start out questioning why a woman’s Chair would invite her husband to what is, essentially, her workplace and her professional life.

If the student herself had invited her spouse, well, her choice. But that her Chair decided to do it without her knowledge makes the action very different, and not a little patronizing. This notion of spousal deference always hits a sour note for me, probably because I live it every time I make a major purchase, or generally try to conduct business with a man when my own partner is in the same room.What is next, really - should women bring notes from their Dad in to school, giving them permission to attend, which was often the case as little as 40 years ago at some schools?

Dear R1 Institution,

Please accept this note as permission from me that my daughter be allowed to READ BOOKS and WRITE STUFF. Call me if she gets uppity, or starts thinking on her own - we try not to encourage independence in her, in the vain hope that she will come to her senses, drop out of school, and marry a nice doctor.

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.

I must have my head too far in the books, because it never ocurred to me that people just print fake versions of real degrees from real schools and sell them, but this sure looks like the University of Cambridge seal to me. Best of all, this one comes with a transcript. It does make me wonder, though - how prevelant is stuff like this? If I saw this framed, in an office somewhere, I would assume it was real -  this is a real bricks and mortar school and a real emblem. I realize that anyone with photoshop could do something like this at home,  but it is troubling to see something so clearly meant to pass as legit being sold on Ebay. Apparently you can ask for any school that you want. Ugh.

Nothing makes a Friday fun like a random call inviting me to come speak about digital culture at a meeting this Spring. And it sure beats the stress of submitting a conference proposal :)

In the Chronicle this week was a brief article that referenced the CNet article about Universities setting up virtual campuses in Second Life. Couched in the notion that this might be a welcome relief to the lack of classroom space on many campuses was the always present fear of change, naturally, but an interesting note in the article (to me) is the collarboration between Emily Carr, BCIT, Simon Fraser and UBC, which have jointly created the Great Northern Way campus, to create, “…a collaborative initiative in education, research and technology transfer with a focus on the convergence of science and technology with art, culture and design.”

Now that is some interdisciplinarianism right there! It is funny to me the resistance that often occurs upon mention of a virtual classroom in Second Life - a defensiveness, of sorts, about how there is only one way to impart knowledge, and it cannot be improved upon, in any situation, or any circumstance, at any time whatsover, and trying to do so will only lessen the lesson.

I am not a Second Lifer (I have an account, but have only logged in to participate in specific events), but the more I read these articles, the more tempted I am, if only because building objects looks like so much fun. See also, Second Life’s Sketchy Census.

A nice, neat list of higher education associations. I had to do this, because I am getting all the acronyms mixed up!