Manners and Higher ed.

The image comes from one of my guilty pleasures - a meme themed blog on graphs and images (original found here). I've edited it for my more sensitive and/or delicate audience.

Much of what we teach - particularly in comp 1, seems to be life skills or manners: how to behave in a professional environment. Maybe that's a bit of what "analyzing your audience" means - thinking about how others will perceive you.

RePost: the interwebs - relevant analogies.

The following appeared on my original blog.

Intellectual intercourse requires maturity and an understanding of consequences. A recent NPR report presents several cautionary tales on cyber security / responsible online behavior. Scroll down to the “Excerpt: ‘The Future of Reputation,’” by Daniel J. Solove for a (haunting? sobering?) discussion of online ethics, gossip and shaming.

An adolescent girl engages in mildly (?) socially irresponsible behavior as a result became a pariah. She dropped out of college as a result. When you consider her transgression, the punishment really doesn’t fit the offense. Keep reading and the subtitle, “Chapter 1: When Poop Goes Primetime” may put you off as a potentially offensive, but if you read the section called, “The Internet as Teenager” all may become clear.

Personifying the technology and applying understanding of the stages human development, may bring a fresh perspective and an inroad for discussion. According to the article on NPR, the internet, “is now maturing into its second decade in mainstream culture — its teenage years….the teenage Internet is taking on all the qualities of an adolescent — brash, uninhibited, unruly, fearless, experimental, and often not mindful of the consequences of its behavior. And as with a teenager, the Net’s greater freedom can be both a blessing and a curse.”

There might be something to this. Scatological metaphors and analogies really work in explaining the web. Fortunately for myself, degrees in literature gave me a thick skin for such allusions (if you suffered through The Fairy Queene or Ubu Roi, you can handle anything). Unfortunately, even when successful in communicating a complicated idea, you can look foolish. Ted Stevens (R. Alaska), the octogenarian senator in charge of the committee regulating the internet, caught considerable flack for comparing the internet to plumbing but he has a point.

Many, including The Chronicle and others, rail against the overuse of Wikipedia as a solitary source of research. I developed an explanation for students that works. It’s brief and, in its own odd way, elegant, but I don’t always share it; particularly not until we’ve established trust and a mutual agreement on acceptable language in the classroom (and yeah, it’s a scatological metaphor).

on texting ettiquette

With any new social phenomena, we adjust and rules and manners evolve. Texting in inappropriate situations is a contentious issue for people of just about all ages. Texting's turned out to be more dangerous when driving that drinking, and spring this year has brought with it a recent rash of texting in my classes.

Slate Magazine just surveyed it's readers and came up with a short, simple rule for determining ettiquette.

a concise, easy-to-remember rule that we could all consult when deciding whether to reach for our phones. More than 300 thoughtful comments poured in, the overwhelming majority from people who believed that there's too much texting in public. I expected to find a clear generational divide, with younger readers expressing less angst about looking at their phones. Surprisingly, though, young people had some of the strongest feelings about texting—they were annoyed at their phone-obsessed friends (Jump to source)

It interests me that they use a scatological analogy; I've said before that scatological analogies work really well for the interwebs (It may be one of my funniest posts ). I don't like their solution because I don't see how it can help for my classes, but the goal works in most situations:

NOTE: for the record - my syllabi clearly details an etiquette that if violated after one warning - results in a record of non-engagement which counts toward your grade as would an absence.