Cornell in Crisis

Cornell University is in trouble. A laptop was stolen containing 22,546 social security numbers of students -- half were alumni -- and 22,731 social security numbers for faculty and staff, including 4,284 retirees.

The files on the computer containing the names and social security numbers were not encrypted and the laptop was left in a physically unsecure environment, which violates University policy, according to Simeon Moss '73, director of Cornell University Press Relations.

Moss said that the data on the laptop contained “no other sensitive data elements” besides names and social security numbers and the University is “confident” that it has identified everyone whose data was on the computer.

This isn't the first time Cornell has been hacked:

Last June, a computer at Cornell used for administrative purposes was hacked, and the University alerted 2,500 students and alumni that their personal information had potentially been stolen. In 2005, the University alerted over 900 individuals that their personal information was stored on a computer that had been inappropriately accessed.

One wonders why Cornell appears to so casually protect vital identifying information that can publicly wound the innocent and destroy a private life?

There is a lack of urgency in Cornell's security and protection policy and if the university want to continue to attract the best and the brightest -- and the most ripe for ripping off -- the school needs to condemn those at fault, punish them beyond relief, and restore a sense of urgency and intimidation against any and all threats against those it is vested to protect.

Blog Comments or Formal Peer Review?

Noah Wardrip-Fruin poses a fascinating question on his blog: Is peer review enough of a catchall against prejudice and misinformation; or can adding blog readers to the process also help expand the understanding of the author:

The blog-based review project started when Doug Sery, my editor at the MIT Press, brought up the question of who would peer-review the Expressive Processing manuscript. I immediately realized that the peer review I most wanted was from the community around Grand Text Auto. I said this to Doug, who was already one of the blog’s readers, and he was enthusiastic. Next I contacted Ben Vershbow at the Institute for the Future of the Book to see if we could adapt their CommentPress tool for use in an ongoing blog conversation. Ben not only agreed but also became a partner in conceptualizing, planning, and producing the project. With the ball rolling, I asked the Committee on Research of the University of California at San Diego’s Academic Senate for some support (which it generously provided) and approached Jeremy Douglass (of that same university’s newly formed Software Studies initiative), who also became a core collaborator — especially (and appropriately) for the software-related aspects.

We applaud this effort to reconfigure and expand the expectation of a book's vetting.

We always feel "the more eyes on it, the better" and breaking up the book into publishable chapters on a blog is a great way to disconnect arguments from each other to see if they can sustain an individual whole -- or if the pieces risk falling hard to the ground in shattered disenchantment.

Open Facebook Office Hours

Standford's "Office Hours" on Facebook begs of being just a bit too cute for the room:

Stanford University is bringing office hours to Facebook by spotlighting world-class faculty on its Stanford University Facebook profile (http://facebook.com/stanford).

At most universities, instructors set aside a few hours each week for students to drop by for conversation. Stanford Open Office Hours is a public version of that tradition, an experiment that will bring conversations with some of Stanford's most interesting people to Facebook.

Office Hours are supposed to be an opportunity for moments of private clarity between a professor and a student -- and once that delicate dyad is made public for scraping eyes and promotion -- the entire intention of the relationship changes in a bad way.

We understand Stanford wants to be cutting edge and barrier-breaking -- we just hope their Facebook effort is more passing totem than protocol setting.

Universal Pass or No Pass

We support the idea of dropping letter grades at the university level and implementing a universal grading system of "Pass" and "No Pass."

Letter grades have become meaningless and students are terrified of getting anything less than an "A" on any project. 

In fact, many students are of the mind that just by showing up for class they should be rewarded with an "A" grade when doing the bare minimum for a class is rightly a "C" and never an "A."

Grade inflation is a terrible result of this non-meritocratic system of grading performance.

A Pass/No Pass system encourages daring and risk-taking.  Students would only get a "No Pass" if they refused to come to class or hand in any of the assignments. 

The power of the Pass is in the freedom it brings to the closed mind and the horizons it provides to the open thought process of wondering instead of worrying.

The Broken University

Is the university system broken?

Do we care more about making money than mending minds?

Are students interested in learning or in just finishing a program of study?

Is the mandate of the university now to just award degrees instead of contributing to the intellectual goodness of the world?

When did the university become a meme for commerce instead of a place for communion and fellowship?

How did the core covenants of the university break and can they ever be sealed back together again?

TurnItIn.com Will Still Rat You Out

We love the whole idea behind TurnItIn.com as a necessary intellectual watchdog against student plagiarism and intellectual falsity and the news this week that, despite student protest, TurnItIn.com does not violate a student's Copyright.

A federal appeals court granted a boost to fair use advocates Friday when it ruled that an online cheating-detection service storing thousands of student essays did not violate the intellectual property rights of the essayists.  Students who claimed TurnItIn.com breached their copyrights because it placed their works in its database brought the lawsuit. The site compares new essays submitted by teachers with a database of other essays to determine whether plagiarism was at work.

We celebrate the decision to let TurnItIn.com continue its mission to preserve preexisting work while demanding students still create original and persuasive arguments without copying.

We have used TurnItIn.com in the past and we would never want to give up such a magical and powerful cudgel for training young minds to think right first without worrying about the honesty of their fair use arguments later.

Facebook Makes You Stupid

We knew it was coming: Social Networking makes us stupider; and the current culprit is Facebook.

Facebook user GPAs were in the 3.0 to 3.5 range on average, compared to 3.5 to 4.0 for non-users. Facebook users also studied anywhere from one to five hours per week, compared to non-users who studied 11 to 15 or more hours per week.

We use Facebook -- not to study or to learn -- but to socialize with our SuperPoke Pets friends, and we confess here in the public square that we certainly do feel dumber after logging into Facebook, yet we have no real idea how to extricate ourselves from the morass of communal fun and silliness.

Banning Laptops and Beating WiFi

We are reminded of the early, heady, days of the internet when university campuses were just beginning to provide WiFi access to the school network instead of requiring a tethered Ethernet cable.

Students, of course, abused the new wireless freedom by bringing their laptops to class and surfing the internet when they should've been taking notes.

One Ivy League professor, fed up with the inattention of several of his students, would start each class by picking up a push broom and whacking at the WiFi repeater node attached to the wall above him to prevent his students from wireless surfing.

When the WiFi node was reinstalled by the next class, the professor would, once again, pick up his stick and beat the repeater off the wall.

The fight between wood and ether continued all semester with the professor getting a weekly repair bill from the university IT department for replacing the damaged WiFi node.  The professor religiously fed that dunning notice into his paper shredder.

We cannot help but leap for the heavens in admiration of that sort of well-intentioned university Luddite fighting against the inevitable wave of change.  We have always loved our Paper Tigers, our windmill combatants and those that choose to save the village by poking a finger in a dike to prevent the flooding of history.

Here's how one professor at Colorado University currently handles the indelicate negotiation between student performance and tempting technology:

Associate Professor Diane Sieber led a seminar last month for her colleagues at CU on how to handle laptops in the classroom, so that professors have options beyond banning laptops or changing their teaching methods to try and compete with Facebook.

Sieber lets her students write "social contracts" each semester to help govern the classroom. She is the director of the Herbst Program of Humanities for Engineers, which teaches writing, ethics and "digital citizenship" to engineering undergraduates. Technology-related rules are consistently high on her classrooms' lists, with students asking that laptops be used solely for academic purposes and cell phones be banned, Sieber said.

"They ask their classmates 'Please don't watch movies on your computer, because if I'm behind you I can't focus," she said.

Last fall, Sieber had 96 students in one of her courses and she took note of which ones were frequently using their laptops. After the first test, she alerted the 17 students who used their laptops intensely that, on average, they performed 11 percent worse than their peers who weren't glued to computer screens. The number of students on laptops eventually dwindled to a half dozen, and the test scores of students who stopped using their computers during class shot up, according to Sieber.

We cringe at that example of Colorado University coddling of student feelings when instructors know in their bones it is better for everyone involved in the classroom to ban laptops outright and to always beat WiFi nodes into bloody bits.

The Harvard Media Cloud

The Harvard Media Cloud is a fascinating project funded by the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet & Society:

Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started below.

We appreciate the idea of tools that help us make connections to information.

The Media Clouds sounds a lot like Google Trends to us, but we're willing to wait and see how the Harvard visualization of the information gets presented and distributed for analysis.

A Virtual Donation of an Ethereal Notion

We love e-books and the easy way one can publish new work on a variety of reader devices.

We also appreciate and respect when hardcover books are donated to a library.  There is history in the print; there is provenance in the handing down; there is the mouldering stink of ink and finger grease on the pages.

We are uncertain, however, if a gift of 200,000 electronic books should carry the same glimmer and glitter of a similar hardcover donation:

Cambridge University Library is now home to one of the world’s largest collections of Chinese monographs – following the gift of 200,000 electronic books by the country’s Premier.

Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People's Republic of China, visited the University recently as part of the University's 800th Anniversary celebrations.

The gift is one of the largest single donations received in the University Library's 650-year history and almost doubles the number of electronic books at its disposal.

Is there antiquity in a copiable e-book; can bites and byes be handed down with any authority; has the human aesthetic been deodorized from the virtual page?

While the spirit of the donation is confounding and intense, we to not believe e-books should be the measure of the man in donation or the ethereal university in its appreciative sycophancy.