Grand Text Auto recently posted a description of an open tenure-track position at U of Baltimore:

"Assistant Professor, Information Arts and Technologies

The School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore invites applications for a tenure track assistant professor to begin August 2007. Doctorate or other terminal degree in computer science, interactive media, instructional technology, or human-computer interaction is highly desirable. Advanced degrees in other areas may be considered.

An article in today's NY Times talks about presidents of colleges starting their own blogs for various reasons, whether it's to get more closely connected with the campus community or to seem cutting-edge or to make comments about their personal political views.

It talks a little about how a president's image can change on campus based on what he or she writes on their blog, and that it is also dangerous for presidents to do such things because his or her critics can take comments made on the blog out of context and use them as ammunition against the president in the future.

After the discussion during the last class about majoring in video games, I decided to do some research and found out that lo and behold! There are MANY big universities that offer video game majors! This NY Times article from last year talks about how there are undergraduate and graduate programs in video game design and "interactive entertainment" springing up at bigger universities including the University of Southern California.

Although this field is not widespread in academia, I still think it's an exciting start. This short NPR audio file talks a little about video games too. USC enrolled its first class majoring in video game development this year. There are students in the clip who talk about video games in a very literary way too. One guy says how he's "very much a postructuralist, this is very much a Michel Foucault video game." Sounds pretty much like academic lit crit to me. The news commentator definitely makes the point that some of the students talk more like literary critics than game designers.

I'm still trying to find my way around social software, and I'm even wondering what isn't social software, because it seems like everything qualifies. To go along with this ubiquitous nature of social software, people are suggesting that forms of this software are becoming more prevalent in the academic sphere, which is of huge relevance to us.

if:book has many articles that talk about networked writing in academia. A few things that struck me as more interesting--

1) Google offers public domain downloads. These days, this isn't anything new, since public domain documents have always been available online, but we--or rather, I--keep forgetting that this wasn't always the case. The book publishing industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, and making texts available online won't significantly affect their earnings, but there are advantages for us, the consumers. These days, I don't buy all my books anymore. As an English major, there's lots of books to read, but I often either go to the library, or find downloadable versions online. As a consumer, I'm thankful that books are finally available for free. To me, the idea of putting books online in downloadable format refocuses the attention on the books as material to be read rather than commodities that make profit.

There was an article in the New York Times today about how MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain announced today that they are starting a joint Web science program at their schools. The gist of the article is that the web is becoming more important these days, and that an academic understanding of the web and technology doesn't merely involve knowledge in computer science but also study of social behavior and networks online.

This seems pretty relevant to our class and this blog. There were a few blog posts here and there and others that have talked about privacy online and in blogs, with references to access of information and the very public nature of very personal information. We usually talk about privacy in terms of creepiness and stumbling upon information that we feel like we should not be seeing even if it's public domain. It's appropriate that when Web Science becomes an actual field of academic study, that will be one of the main areas of research, since it is such a huge and controversial topic. I just think it's pretty cool that this new field will be so interdisciplinary. It's a step in the right direction, since I feel like when most people think about web-science they're thinking strictly in terms of the computer technology aspects of it but now, with such programs in place, people will be more aware of the sociological aspects of the web.

I came across this article in the online edition of today's New York Times Sunday Magazine. It's written by Michael Berube, who is a professor of English at Penn State and writes one of the blogs that Professor Fitzpatrick has included in our blogroll. I noted that Berube's blog was not mentioned in the author's biography at the bottom of the article.

In this piece, Berube argues that although there are indeed many more liberal than conservative college professors (the ratio is something like 3 to 1), this is not because liberal academics are trying to keep conservative academics out of their departments, as conservatives like David Horowitz maintain. Berube tries to explain this ratio by suggesting that the applicant pool for arts and humanities professorships probably has the same 3 to 1 liberal to conservative ratio (and thereby insinuating that there's something about conservative beliefs that makes one less likely to want to be an academic in the arts or humanities. But Berube never actually says this, so he doesn't have to defend it. Clever.)