Iranian Blogger Said to Be in Solitary Confinement – The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com

Violations of Press Freedom should be of concern to us all.  When journalist are intimidated, then authoritarian forces can act with impunity. Here is the case of one Iranian blogger.

On Friday, an Iranian blogger and human rights activist, Mojtaba Samienejad, reported that a fellow blogger who had been working as a journalist for a reformist newspaper, Fariba Pajouh, has been in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison for three weeks.

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via Iranian Blogger Said to Be in Solitary Confinement – The Lede Blog, September 11 – NYTimes.com.

Innovative Practices for Challenging Times

An message from Michael Nanfito and NITLE.

In March 2009, five exemplary projects from the liberal arts community received the NITLE Community Contribution Award, which includes an opportunity to publish a case study with Academic Commons. Today, I’m happy to announce the publication of “Innovative Practices for Challenging Times,” a new issue of Academic Commons that showcases these projects and gives readers a chance to find out how their leaders made them happen.

Articles featured in this issue of Academic Commons include:

War News Radio” by Abdulla A. Mizead. Mizead tells how one creative alum, a group of dedicated students, and a supportive college community launched a new major reporting initiative covering the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Come for the Content, Stay for the Community” by Ethan Benatan, Jezmynne Dene, Hilary Eppley, Margret Geselbracht, Elizabeth Jamieson, Adam Johnson, Barbara Reisner, Joanne Stewart, Lori Watson, and B. Scott Williams. Find out how a group of inorganic chemists used social networking technologies to build a scientific community for support, exchange of ideas, and friendship — all in the interest of improving chemistry education across campuses and having a bit of fun in the process.
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Curricular Uses of Visual Material: A Research-Driven Process for Improving Institutional Sources of Curricular Support” by Andrea Lisa Nixon, Heather Tompkins, and Paula Lackie. When students work with visual materials in all parts of the curriculum, how do you make sure they get the technical support they need? An extensive research study of faculty and students led to a new coordinated support model. Nixon, Tompkins, and Lackie explain how they got it done.

The History Engine: Doing History with Digital Tools” by Robert K. Nelson, Scott Nesbit, and Andrew Torget. The History Engine offers a rich digital repository of episodes from American history and even more important, a chance for undergraduates to “do history” long before the senior seminar or capstone course.

The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project: A Case Study” by Ken Newquist. The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project, or CLAMP as it’s better known, proves the power of collaboration across campuses. By creating a network of Moodle users from multiple campuses across the country, CLAMP has developed a highly effective system for adapting the open-source software Moodle for the specific needs of liberal arts colleges.

At NITLE, we’re pleased to partner with Academic Commons to bring you these case studies and to enable their authors to share the knowledge they’ve developed along with their projects. We thank the featured authors and their partners for their work and Academic Commons for collaborating with us. If you would like to nominate a project for the next round of awards, please contact me at mnanfito@nitle.org by November 16, 2009.

Is Multitasking Making it Hard for You to Think?

Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

You know what this means. This means that the people around you — the husband who’s tapping the computer keys during an important phone conversation with you, the S.U.V. driver with the grande latte and the cellphone, the dinner companion with the roving eye and twitching thumbs — are not only irritating, they are (let’s not be fainthearted) incompetent.

via The Mediocre Multitasker – NYTimes.com.

Ouch!  Leave it to the New York Times to put it so directly and sarcastically.  They are also exaggerating a bit.  The Standford study did not so so far as to find anyone incompetent.  Nonetheless, if other research backs the Stanford research up, it is disturbing stuff.  Basically what the study found was that people who multitask are not very good at it.  People who don’t do it regularly are better appear to do it better.

Even more strangely, regular multitasking seems to impact the multitaskers ability in a whole range of cognitive functions!  The research dealt with media multitaksers, i.e. people who have lots of windows open on their computer, say one for chat, one for browsing, etc., even as music is playing, or the tv is on.

(So what was I going to write next?  I forgot.  I had to answer an email and then the movie caught my attention for a bit.  Oh yeah, I was looking for a quotation from the article.)
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Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead investigator and a researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said: “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”

The study’s results were so strong and unexpected that the researchers are planning a series of follow-up experiments. “It keeps me up late at night,” Professor Nass said. “I worry about both the short-term and long-term effects of multitasking. We’re going to be testing the heck out of high and low multitaskers.”

To the rest of the world, though, the people who trudge through life excited and unnerved by an occasional cellphone call while walking or watching the sun set (isn’t that multitasking?), the study’s findings aren’t quite so shocking. A constant state of stress, deluges of ever-changing information, the frenzied, nanosecond-fast hustle and bustle — this is bad for you? It’s surprising and it’s news that it’s bad for you? Before they lie down to take a well-deserved and uninterrupted nap, the trudgers of the world would like to say, “We told you so!”

via The Mediocre Multitasker – NYTimes.com.

As a frequent, very frequent, multitasker, this is all scary stuff.

There is a more detailed report on the study on the Stanford University Web site.  Read the abstract and full study here.

Mubarak’s Son and Facebook

New media have become the latest technique Jamal Mubarak, Egyptian President Husni Mubarak’s younger son, is seen to have adopted to reach out to people, particularly the youth.

Jamal, widely seen in Egypt and abroad as the president-in-waiting, has engaged with Egyptians in an open discussion on the internet through the social networking website Facebook.

Impotence, ED, low libido level are some of the highlighting benefits of viagra no prescription cheap using zinc supplements. There are number generic cialis of ergonomic chairs available in the market. The bacteria buy cheap viagra which live here have the function of contraceptives. This pleasurable experience generic levitra cheap in the lives of others. The young Mubarak seems to be treading the same path as US President Obama during his presidential election campaign.

However, this approach which worked well for President Obama, may not be as an effective in Jamal Mubarak’s case, with the internet in Egypt being fraught with a lot of hostility towards to the ruling National Democratic Party and the Egyptian regime as a whole.

via Middle East Online.  (Thanks to Ed Webb)

Sex Offenders Banned from Social Networks in Illinois

This is an odd piece reporting on new legislation in Illinois.

A week ago, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a bill, HB 1314, making it illegal for convicted sex offenders to access a “social networking website,” defined as:

“an Internet website containing profile web pages of the members of the website that include the names or nicknames of such members, photographs placed on the profile web pages by such members, or any other personal or personally identifying information about such members and links to other profile web pages on social networking websites of friends or associates of such members that can be accessed by other members or visitors to the website. A social networking website provides members of or visitors to such website the ability to leave messages or comments on the profile web page that are visible to all or some visitors to the profile web page and may also include a form of electronic mail for members of the social networking website.” So, if you get on the sex offenders list in Illinois there is a bevy of sites you cannot so much as visit. And it’s not just the usual suspects of Facebook and MySpace. LinkedIn, Focus, YouTube, and Twitter would all be off limits as well.

I am not sure what to make of all this.  These days online social networking is essential for career development, and that is what sites like LinkedIn are for.  Sites like Twitter are increasingly working themselves into the mainstream of our social fabric so that you need to be subscribed to them in order to have access to information about everything from what is going on at your church to what is on sale at the mall.
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And then there is the matter of who is a “sex offender.”  It is hard to have much sympathy for people who abuse children, sexually assault women, or perpetrate sexual violence against of their fellow human beings, and we all want to be protected from them.  But apparently when you ask for the sex offenders registry of those living near you, you may not just be getting those people.

It’s surprisingly easy to get on the sex offenders’ registry of many states: visiting a prostitute, streaking, and urinating in public can all get you marked for life; though, to be fair, none of these are qualifying offenses in Illinois.

via Out of the Frying Pan and into the Mildly Uncomfortable Sauna: The Not-So-Bad-But-Still-Unconstitutional Social Networking Ban | Citizen Media Law Project.

The 12 most annoying types of Facebookers

Facebook, for better or worse, is like being at a big party with all your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers.

There are lots of fun, interesting people you’re happy to talk to when they stroll up. Then there are the other people, the ones who make you cringe when you see them coming. This article is about those people.

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This article is brilliant.  So which type do you find the most annoying?  And let’s face it, most of us tend toward one or two of these though of course none of us reading or writing this post reach the point of being annoying, of course.  Still, which do you come closest too?

SAR Academic Freedom Media Review

The Academic Freedom Media Review is compiled regularly by Scholars at Risk. Here is the review for July 31-August 7, 2009

Police clash with Honduran students
BBC News, 8/5

Researcher Resists Coptic Pressure (in Arabic)
Ad-Dustour, 8/5

Shift in Middle East Studies?
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 8/4

Reforms to Women’s Education Make Slow Progress in Saudi Arabia
Andrew Mills, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/3

Scandals Lead to Promises of Reform in Australian International Education
Shailaja Neelakantan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/3
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IRAN: Iranian-American academic detained in Tehran
Jonathan Travis, University World News, 8/2

Barriers to Religious School Graduates lifted
Brendan O’Malley, University World News, 8/2

NIGERIA: Supreme court reinstates sacked academics
Tunde Fatunde, University World News, 8/2

Professor Speaks on UN Arab Human Development Report 2009 (in Arabic)
Al-Fayhaa, 7/31

Note: For more about the United Nations Human Development Reports, see the UNDP site.

Researchers Say Facebook Can Fuel Jealousy and Increase Time on Facebook

Amy Muise and Emily Christofides, both Ph.D. candidates, and Serge Desmarais, an associate professor of applied social psychology at the University of Guelph, in Ontario have conducted a study into Facebook the relationship between jealousy and Facebook usage, discovering that spying on their significant others often people question the partners’ honesty and fidelity, and that time spent on the Web site tended to increase as a result.

The undergraduates were asked questions like “How likely are you to become jealous after your partner has added an unknown member of the opposite sex?” and “How likely are you to monitor your partner’s activities on Facebook?” The answer to both of those questions was “very likely” for a substantial number of participants. The respondents said they spent an average of nearly 40 minutes on the Web site each day, with women spending more time than men.

More than three-quarters of the participants said they knew their partners had added as “friends” people with whom they had previously had flings. And more than 92 percent said their partners were at least somewhat likely to have “friends” they did not themselves know.

Rising jealousy can be attributed to the social-networking site, which makes speaking with not-so-close friends easier than before, the researchers say. Many people add as friends people they have met in passing, rather than adding only acquaintances they see regularly. Men in the study reported having 100 more friends, on average, than women did. Women outscored men on the jealousy scale, averaging a score of 3.29 out of 7, while men scored 2.81. Three-quarters of those who completed the survey were women.
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Jealousy created by the site also seemed to increase people’s time on the site, fueling a vicious cycle of more jealousy and more time on Facebook. “Facebook may expose an individual to potentially jealousy-provoking information about their partner,” the article says, “which creates a feedback loop whereby heightened jealousy leads to increased surveillance of a partner’s Facebook page.” Several participants admitted being “addicted” to the site—”No one can help themselves,” one wrote. “I always find myself going on there checking new pictures and screening them. I can’t help it!” wrote another.

via The Wired Campus – Researchers Say Facebook Can Fuel Jealousy and Increase Time on Facebook – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

For more, see “More Information than You Even Wanted: Does Facebook Bring Out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy?” in the August edition of the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior.

Special Topics: Teaching Tools for the Global Age

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

Special Topics: Teaching Tools for the Global Age
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education

This series addresses a critical challenge for higher education: to prepare graduating students to cope in a world that is at once increasingly globalized and increasingly fragmented. To meet this challenge, colleges and universities must help students understand other languages, cultures, and societies, as well as the relationships that connect them. International education is an expensive and complex undertaking; however, technology–the harbinger and engine of modern globalization–offers a number of cost-effective tools that can be used in the classroom to facilitate teaching about the peoples of the world and the relationships between and among them. Each session listed is priced at 1 program unit.

If you have questions about this series or would like to propose a topic for presentation, please contact Michael Toler at michael.toler@nitle.org.

* Technology and Less-Commonly Taught Languages, March 19, 2009, 4:00 – 5:15 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Hiroyo Saito (Director of the Language Learning Center, Haverford College) and Rachid Aadani (Assistant Professor of Arabic, Wellesley College). Registration Deadline: Friday, March 6, 2009.
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* Faculty Development Abroad: Connecting Campus and Community via Online Writing Tools, May 14, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Shila Garg (Dean of Faculty) and Joe Benfield (Instructional Technologist), both of The College of Wooster. Registration deadline: Friday, May 1, 2009.
* Video Conferencing for Global Education: Tools for Teaching and Administration, August 13, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Todd Bryant (Language Technology Specialist, Dickinson College), and David Clapp (Director of the Office of International Students and Off-Campus Studies, Wabash College). Registration deadline: Friday, July 31, 2009.
* Internationalizing Curricula in the Sciences: Uses of Media and Technology, September 10, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Mark Stewart (Chair of the Department of Psychology) and Stas Stavrianeas (Professor of Exercise Science), both of Willamette University. Registration deadline: Friday, August 28, 2009.
* Models for Collaborative Teaching in Cultural Studies: Working Across Campuses, October 8, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Registration deadline: Friday, September 25, 2009.
* Global Knowledge through Gaming: Teaching about the Real World through Virtual Ones, November 12, 2009, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Featuring Chris Boyland, Director of the Language Learning Center at Bryn Mawr College. Registration deadline: Friday, October 30, 2009.

Study Abroad Blogs

Recently I was asked for information on blogs associated with abroad programs. I’m posting the information here in case it is useful to anyone else. It’s just a few links that came to mind. I know there are many others and I will post them when I remember them. Please, also, post them in the comments if you know of any.

Student blogging from abroad, in a structured manner, is common. What is less common is innovative or pedagogically sound uses of it. There is a very interesting project supported by National Geographic called Glimpse. This is a user-generated, professionally edited website in which students and others post blogs, images, travel tips, etc. In addition to the site, there is a magazine that you can pick up a newsstands here and there. It’s a handsome, glossy publication.

One of the earliest projects of this sort (2005-2006) that I am aware of was the Blogging the World project involving Middlebury, Haverford and Dickinson.

Some International Education offices use a blog for practical reasons, simply to post news, such as this from my undergraduate alma mater, VCU.

Others, like Bucknell, consolidate student postings into a central blog.
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At Cornell students maintain blogs and the links are collected on a central page.

There are some study abroad podcasts, too. Here’s the Japan Study Abroad podcast.
I haven’t listened to it because I don’t speak Japanese, so I can’t tell you what is it about.

Here are Pacific University’s Study Abroad Podcasts.

There are more study abroad podcasts in the iTunes podcast directory, if you go to iTunes and simply search on “study abroad.”