buridan's blog

Ethics online: Is there a difference?:
A teacher says that he isn't giving a test grade back until Monday, because he hasn't finished grading them all," a participant wrote in an online forum at collegeconfidential.com last week.

"You walk by his desk and notice that yours is done and on the top of the stack.

"Would it be unethical to walk close to his desk on the way out and sneak a peek?"

This is one of hundreds of hypothetical scenarios rippling across the Web after it was revealed that some business school applicants - most of them aiming at Harvard University - exploited a technical glitch to get an early peek at their pending decisions online.

-----------------

Sneaking a peak without permission would be ethically questionable, because until a professors grades are returned, there is no way of knowing that they are final. beyond that it is 'snooping', and that is rarely correct action, though sometimes when the consequences are dear enough it might be, but for grades... it isn't

in short, i think what harvard, and others universities did is perfectly fine.

roanoke.com - New River Valley Current -Va. Tech to discuss raising costs:
The board will also consider a computer privacy policy developed in response to an April 2002 incident when police seized the work computer of a faculty member.

The professor, who has since left the university, had apparently received an anonymous e-mail from a group claiming responsibility for spray painting buildings and sidewalks all over campus to make a political statement. The seizure sparked concerns among faculty worried about student confidentiality and intellectual property issues.

The new policy lays out the recommended process for accessing or monitoring files on state-owned computers.

--------------

i'm just wondering if there are comparable instances of these out there in the world....

Fortune.com:
Consider the chilling example of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Way back in the 1960s it spent $24 billion (in 1969 dollars)-and at one point employed 400,000 people-to send 12 astronauts to the moon. But in the 23 years since the Apollo program ended, the engineers who carried crucial know-how in their heads, without ever passing it on to colleagues, have retired or died (or both). At the same time, important blueprints were catalogued incorrectly or not at all, and the people who drew them are no longer around to draw them again. So to fulfill the Bush administration's promise to return to the moon in the next decade, NASA is essentially starting all over again. Estimated cost to taxpayers in current dollars: $100 billion.

---------

this is something management needs to consider in the next few years.

Library of Alexandria releases FreeScience software:

Fore-edge painting:

this is a movie about fore-edge painting of books, it is really cool, or at least i think it is.

FLOSSE Posse:

This a blog, with several podcasts of interesting people in the field of free/libre open source software in education

International Women's Day:
Today is international women's day

Hello all,

To what end have I joined the educause blog community... I guess, in the end.... I think it is because I have something to contribute, plus I use ecto, so managing multiple blogs is quite easy.

I guess as for my educause related work, i'd say that officially i have none;) I'm finishing up my ph.d. in science and technology studies at Virginia Tech, while at the same time managing the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech. I also work on the On-Line M.A. in Political Science at Virginia Tech. Other than those, I have some publishing in this area both published and forthcoming.

My primary research area is the political economy of the internet, and within that, there is quite a bit that i know about, and quite a bit that i don't. Nonetheless, I've participated in quite a few interesting things in internet history and had the opportunity to participate in some fun things, so I hope that as the blog community on educause grows, i can contribute some things that are worth noting.