I am not a Harper enthusiast, but I'm thankful for the 'lite' part of 'Bush lite'. It was bad enough being in bed with an elephant—being in bed with an elephant zombie is really, really creepy.

- Mary Pringle

Hello,

Nice writeup.  I find references to be a personal issue.  Personal with respect in how we reference them and personal with respect in how they are received by the critics.  My references seem to have been accepted in my assignemts for this course.  In another course, I submitted an assignment where all of my references were not accepted.  Go figure.

Anyways, thanks for the writep.

Sincerely,

Mihal

Thanks. When preparing written work for a course, it's usually a good idea to check the assignment instructions - or check with the instructor - about expectations for reference and citation format. Different instructors, different courses, different disciplines all can have very different, particular expectations and requirements for citing and documenting your research sources. (All my courses, for example, require MLA citation style.)

Thanks for this Mark, interesting. Of course the other side of the coin is that there is no longer a need for a hidden curriculum because the state now confidently promotes education in service of industry, as opposed to the people/citizenship, and people accept it as a no-brainer--"Why else would we need education other than to get a job?" One only has to look at the name of former ministrys of higher education. In Alberta, for instance, "enterprise" is confidently asserted ahead of education: Enterprise and Advanced Education. The "hidden curriculum" has been outed and is being heartily hailed. 

In a particularly "out" campaign, Mohawk College has imagined their graduates as a set of packaged "futureready" action figures: http://www.mohawkcollege.ca/futuready-action-figures.html

These images have been made into billboards used in bus shelters, targeting a portion of the community that uses public transit for education that might get them into (slightly) better paid positions. 

Couldn't agree more that presenters should indicate their preference for live-tweeting during their sessions and that peer-panelists ought not to be live-tweeting from the panel.

- Michael Shouldice

I don't see how 140 characters could be considered plain-spoken. I understand it can be useful for oneself putting ideas into context, but I am skeptical of the quaility of it as an outgoing communication especially to someone who is not at the conference and therefore does not have the context. I recognize that this could be a personal bias because I see tweeting used primarly a marketing tool and public relations tool. This of course assumes you are not using tweeting as a two way communication tool.

From an etiquette perspective I do agree that panelists should devote their attention which does not preclude someone from following incoming tweets. I think it is a useful way of asking questions. As for the audience as long as the venue is open then they should tween if they want to.

I've bookmarked an article in The Guardian that provides some excellent, practical advice on best practices and courtesy for live-tweeting (and using other forms of social media) at academic conferences.

I've been a member of Academia.edu for a few years. Can't say that it has been really useful, and the setup- with uploading some papers or links (duplicating what I do with AUSpace), is time consuming.  But I do regularly get notifcations, that people are searching for me on Academia (I didn't know I was lost :-)

Like many social networks it has taken years to reach critical mass, but they may be getting there (like the Landing!!)

Terry

You could of course use our new RSS import tool to suck down your del.icio.us feeds and, for that matter, anything you put on academia.edu. 

I've had an academia.edu account for some years and get the odd notification of people following me on it, but I've not been motivated to add anything to it so there's not much value for them or for me on the site. Way too many tools to play with, way too many identities to manage.

While I'm very fond of the Landing and am obviously a bit biased in its favour, I don't think it's the end game here. Data on the Landing are, unlike those on most commercial sites, owned by you, and it has some capacity to interoperate with and export to other sites, so it's a good alternative to commercial systems with some neat tools and services that are, in principle, available to be used by other sites, with (rather mixed) support for standards like RSS, OpenDD, FOAF, OpenSocial and its own service APIs. However, what we really need is the means to completely control our own data, and any centralized system is going to be flawed, even one with a lot of hooks into it like Twitter used to have, Facebook pretends to have (its 'open' graph is a sick joke designed to farm you) and Google Plus nearly has. I had some hopes for Diaspora but that has turned into another Elgg-like me-too that doesn't work as well as Elgg and still strongly retains the centralized model. Too much hype, too little intelligence. OneSocialWeb was a good idea that seems to have dried up. AppleSeed is moribund. I really thought OpenSocial would sort things out but that is failing in spades. Even simple protocols that perform basic tasks like OpenID seem dead or dying in the water. Most of these failures are down to Metcalfe's Law being ruthlessly exploited by the likes of Facebook and RenRen. I'd really like those systems to catastrophically fail as soon as possible because, until they do, the incentives to innovate and give people back their data are pretty minimal.