the Sam Jackson College Experience

Though we have seen college blog networks come and go over the last few years, there is one especially promising network on my radar that I thought I would share with everyone today. The College Blog Network is a recent entry to the scene but more blogs join daily. It’s intended to facilitate communication between student and other college bloggers (with .edu e-mail address). You can create feeds of the general college blogging firehose, get links to new blogs, compile favorites, vote for the best, etc.

I wanted to encourage all readers with .edu email addresses to both sign up their own blogs, and also to go to the site and give the current Yale blogs a “thumbs up”! You have to register, but it only takes a second to do so.

I saw that TCBN was advertising for “college blogs” on some search engines, and driving traffic in some other ways, and I hope to see some strong growth here. The site is developing a great blog widget, which you can see in action on the homepage and at rocloop.com right now. Once it is less beta-y, I might try to put it up here.

Anyway, classes are over for most people (I have one which meets during reading period) and I have 3, 20 page final papers due in the next week and a half or so, and will have to blog correspondingly less. In the meantime, check out the archives for my blog, and go look for other interesting posts on TCBN! And don’t forget to bump this site and any others you find interesting : )

This is what one of my professor’s did today–not with any ill intent, but with potentially catastrophic results!

Step 1: Assign a 20 page long research paper, worth 70% of the course grade. Have it be due May 5th.

Step 2: On April 22nd, send out this e-mail (names changed):

Dear [course] students,

In response to queries:

The paper is due this Thursday. You may bring it to class, or if need be, bring it by 5 pm to room # of [building]. Give it to [name] at the main desk, or, if she is not there, anyone else in the office.

The papers will be graded and returned to [name] by May 11, and will be there in the fall if you don’t get them this spring.

Also — don’t forget! — in addition I want an electronic copy.

Best,

[Professor]

Step 3: Success! Fewer papers to grade because, imagining themselves to have only 2 days to complete their probably unstarted 20 page papers, the students’ heads have all exploded.

Step 4: For plausible deniability, send out another e-mail, a little bit later, acknowledging your mix-up:

Dear [class] Class:

Big mistake on my part! i confounded our due date with that of my other class. The real due date is May 5, with the same procedures to be followed as in the last e-mail. Don’t forget the electronic version.

Sorry!

[Professor]

Aiee!!! In all fairness, this was just a simple mixup between two classes’ final paper due dates, and not some ingenious attempt to drive part of the class insane, but it certainly caused me a fair amount of moral trauma! I read of the message just before going to a meeting with another professor to discuss topics for a separate 18 page paper, and was somewhat visibly shaken… : ( Still, the “oops” e-mail did come only 15 minutes afterwards, so that limited the time in which any drastic actions could have been taken.

Still, a message to all professors around finals time: be careful, please! For the sake of your students. : )

Bulldog Days 2008 are upon us here at Yale, and the campus is teeming with excited admits and their families. I did not attend Bulldog Days as a prefrosh last year, and I found myself conflicted about it: I had applied the Yale early, been accepted, and not applied to anywhere else. Taking time away from my internship to go the New Haven might have vindicated my decision, but what if it left a sour taste in my mouth? Yale turned out to be just about everything I hoped it to be, Bulldog Days or not.

There is a lot going on for Bulldog Days, which happily means I have many opportunities to profit from free improv shows and plentiful other student group-led events designed to entice and enthrall admitted students, catching their interest a year early to cement their favor and boost participation in the fall.

The campus is supposed to be “dry” during BDD, and prefrosh are supposed to be kept too busy with fun events to get into much trouble; hopefully that will for the most part hold true, because people should leave with happy memories, not bitter trauma. So, to the 2012 prospectives: enjoy Yale! Visit classes! Welcome, Hope you like it here! For those of you who couldn’t make it, don’t worry. You’ll have lots of chances to get to know your peers and Yale!

Photo courtesy Anna Ershova

If you are a current Yale student, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take 2-5 minutes to complete a short survey I am running for my sociology class. I am hoping to find out which residential college has the best understanding of online privacy and answer some other questions about conceptions of online privacy.

The survey is online at http://www.samjackson.org/privacysurvey/ and I would really appreciate your help. It is completely anonymous, if you want to enter the drawing for the prize only an e-mail address is required and that will be kept separate from survey results too.

I will publish my paper and data when I am done, and it should be interesting! But again, if you are a current Yale University undergraduate, please please please take my survey.

Thank you!

Also, in a random other note, I got added to the Alltop Education page! At the very, very, very bottom. Maybe we’ll get some through traffic from it? Who knows.

Yale actually has blogs that it hosts on its own, at blogs.yale.edu. They’re open to faculty, students, etc to be set up. If I knew about this, I forgot. Not the best consolidated resource for student blogs, as it doesn’t appear to be especially well utilized, but worth a look all the same. This site is separate from the special admitted students website that Yale has, which has some student bloggers on it.

I found…

• the Center for Language Study has a blog (and a twitter–language labs are often very trendy)
• A lot of information about Yale’s Windows server infrastructure from Ken, who works for Yale ITS.
• Beth Castle, another person who works at Yale but is not a student
• The best one of all is perhaps this old defunct blog about a Labrador retriever puppy (not to discredit the other blogs, just to showcase my love of puppies)
• Interesting academic blogs (mostly now all abandoned) on projects like ethnographies of Islam in Egypt.
• A very cool art blog called Range of Vision, from Ken, technical director of the Yale center for Digital Media Center for Arts at Yale (I was afraid it was related to DMCA–digital millenium copyright act). Married to Beth, I think? Hasn’t been updated in a year.

… and a few more. But essentially, no one was home. There were a few official blogs for Yale institutions of one or another variety, but nothing really especially active. Does no one know about the blogs? Were all the bloggers abducted by aliens? Anyone with a NetID can make one. They are blocked from being indexed by search engines, which might stop some from getting involved: I know there would be opportunity for abuse, but it can be very limiting. Apparently “This service was developed in response to a number of requests from students, faculty, and staff for a publishing tool kit that would allow people to post and maintain blogs for a variety of topics.” — but I’m not sure where all these people requesting blogs went.

What doesn’t exactly make sense:

What you should know. Privacy, commenting, etc. All accounts on blogs.yale.edu are considered “personal space.” While many bloggers intend for their material to be widely distributed and easily accessible, we need to balance the ability to publish with the privacy of users. In line with this policy, we have disabled search engines from indexing the content of blogs.yale.edu, which means that a Google search will not find your blog. If you would like to publicize your blog you are free to do so. There is, however, an internal search engine that you can use to explore blogs.yale.edu

Why not make this a user-adjustable option? If the privacy is of the utmost concern, what’s the point of enabling an internal search which could turn up results? It just feels like a bit of a strange situation here, where there is clearly uncertainty with what to do with this pilot program.

Here’s the Yale Alumni Magazine’s take on them:

September/October 2005
It’s like traveling back in time to when only geeks knew how to navigate the Internet: in April, the university launched the pilot version of a tool that will host blogs for students, faculty, and staff. As of mid-August, though, the Yale University Weblogs site had not yet been publicized, and the early adopters were mostly IT types from around the campus. But not all the posts are about “OVID interface problems” or “Site e-mail aliases in Sakai”: you can also turn up some nice pictures of a Labrador puppy named Willie and speculation about the plot of the new Dukes of Hazzard movie.

Nothing seems to have changed, although there sadly haven’t been any updates about Willie for several years. Whatever happened to the development of the blogging project? The university needs to move forward in technology adoption. That’s part of why I applied to be on the library policy standing university committee. We’ll see how that goes.