miscellaneous

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Yawning Gap Between Student and Instructor

Byuclafaculty

Inside Higher Ed today features a YouTube video (below) from a Cornell instructor who becomes upset when someone yawns. Apparently, the lectures are routinely videoed by the Hotel School and the YouTube extract comes from the official recording. Although in this case the recording was official, it is well to note that cellphones can produce videos and that there are very small audio and video recorders that students may have in class. (The yawn is not heard on the video. There is a clicking sound which may be some artifact of the recording.) Can we say this episode is a…

Who Knows What the Shadow Writes (and Chats)?

Byuclafaculty

The Chronicle of Higher Ed is oddly promoting a guy who ghost-writes student term papers. He is termed The Shadow in the account. Excerpt: …Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write….

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Free Speech at Irvine (and Elsewhere)

Byuclafaculty

Inside Higher Ed today features an article about a legal case the right of public university faculty to criticize administrators. The case at hand arises from a complaint by a UC-Irvine professor who claims he was denied a merit increase after he made such criticisms. A lower court cited another local-origin case – this one arising from the LA County district attorney’s office (Garcetti v. Ceballos ultimately decided at the U.S. Supreme Court). In that case, an employee claimed retaliation for similar criticisms. The UC-Irvine case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit which – while not ruling on the validity…