betajames

They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. The mindset is deeply familiar to me and it doesn’t surprise me when I learn that old hacker types get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about 4chan even if trolls and griefers annoy the hell out of them. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture.

Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.

One of the biggest challenges of not being at a university that has an existing OCW infrastructure is that you can't rely on the strength of said infrastructure to publicise your courses. This means that you are going to have to do a lot of the legwork yourself if you want to get the word out about your OCW materials. Social media is obviously good for this. Every time you put up new material (or an entirely new course) send out the link (and brief description) to colleagues using your social network platform of choice (for me, it's Twitter). That way, your professional colleagues will always know what you are up to (and will pass on the link to their colleagues). You might also consider going "old school." Every time you publish new course material, send out a quick email to your dept chair, campus colleagues, and Dean. These are the people, after all, who might have a significant amount of influence over your career

While it may require more personal effort from faculty, the reward is a unique opportunity to create a new model for publishing academic learning content that avoids the mistakes of the old system. Faculty can learn from their librarian colleagues, whose past experiences in managing scholarly communication offers a lesson in how not to structure a publishing model.

Here’s where things went wrong. For years faculty gave away (and in many cases continue to give away) their scholarly works to publishers who would edit and repackage the content and then sell it back, at hard-to-justify prices, to the same academic institutions that had produced it. Few faculty paid attention as the institution’s librarians financed the system by paying exorbitant journal subscription fees. Give away the intellectual capital of the institution; buy it back at unsustainable prices. An oversimplification, but that’s roughly how we got into this mess.

While professors across the tenure spectrum scored within the average range of “emotional exhaustion,” tenure track faculty had the highest score at 22.3, edging toward the “high degree of burnout” designation. In contrast, those not on the tenure track had the lowest scores at 16.4, and tenured faculty were in the middle at 20.9.

Surveyed faculty also fell within the scale's average range of burnout when assessed for “depersonalization,” a category marked by heightened cynicism and a tendency to abandon tasks. Notably, however, tenure track faculty had the most heightened levels of depersonalization as well, coming in on the high end of the scale's overall average at 6.8. As with the "emotional exhaustion" category, non-tenure track faculty scored the lowest -- 5.2 -- and tenured professors were in the middle at 6.6.

While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are “stealing” their “property,” people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them. Glee’s protagonists — and the writers who created them — see so little wrong with this behavior that the word ‘copyright’ is never even uttered.

The Stanford scientists pointed out that, because the study only looked at chain letters that reached a large number of people, it was impossible to see any letters that might have had a subcritical ratio of receivers to senders—these letters would have died out too quickly to achieve the wide-reaching spread that the earlier researchers wanted to study. It's entirely possible, the Stanford researchers noted, that the Internet may not be able to sustain a chain letter that follows the usual supercritical path where each person passes it on to more than one person.

The importance of social media is perhaps best illustrated by the government's response to it. Many sites have been filtered or blocked in Iran, including YouTube and Facebook. The speed of the internet was also deliberately slowed down. And Prominent bloggers, like the former vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, were among those first arrested. More recently the so-called Iranian cyber army has attacked reformist websites, and the organisers have had their computer files deleted.

The story of Oxfordgirl gives a clue about the real role that Twitter played. There is no doubt that she helped spread news about the Iranian protests -- often very quickly. Twitter played an important role in getting word about the events in Iran out to the wider world. Together with YouTube, it helped focus the world's attention on the Iranian people's fight for democracy and human rights. New media over the last year created and sustained unprecedented international moral solidarity with the Iranian struggle -- a struggle that was being bravely waged many years before Twitter was ever conceived.

But an honest accounting of Twitter's role in Iran would also note its pernicious complicity in allowing rumors to spread.