BlackBoard should "opt out"

InsideHigherEd wrote about Blackboard syncing with Facebook to provide a class link (which is what ultimately worked out) through the social networking site. BlackBoard, in doing so, comes off as a the creepy old dude still trying to look cool.

One of the comments makes a link here where the phrase "creepy tree house effect" is discussed, which is pretty accurate for a neologism.

One of the comments to the creepy tree house effect discusses, quite well, how she tried twitter as an opt in class aid.

To all of this I say: keep the class out of socializing. That is, by drawing a clear demarcation between class time and social time, a whole set of confusing, embarrassing, and/or inappropriate blurring of personal/professional.

Why would BlackBoard want to interface on FaceBook? Because students don't want to log on to BB's interface? Then create an RSS feed for updates to be spammed out.

Because students spend a lot of time on Facebook and not on the BB site? Then make the BB site more usable--key interfaces with the library, with sources, may a link-in with OneNote or the like...

Point is, quit trying to be "cool" and be functional. Let the students and profs work out the time spent on task, and leave the socializing to the hallways.

F@*& Off 2007!!!

I have very little good to say about the last year. It started with sheer and utter joy (we were pregnant) to then suddenly go horribly awry.

A few things I have learned over the last year:

• Few (at least if your friend group is made up of liberal-leaning folk) consider 7-8 weeks long enough to warrant full-frontal grief over the loss of a child. Hell, most don't even consider it a child, so why all of the fuss. This can make one's honest expression of pain even more isolating
• Hospitals are geared toward control. The doctors have all the control (or, by extension, the administration). Why no cell phones? It is not that cell phones would interfere (they don't in planes either), but that a central switch-board allows for centralized control. Don't believe, try to find out, from a distant town, how your loved one is doing. Or, better still, find out how or who messed up the treatment.
• Doctors are not sued enough. I don't care what you say about tort reform, the act of suing over malpractice keeps us all safer. I don't let the mechanic off the hook if my brakes suddenly don't work. And, one would think in a world where Wal-Mart can alter their first-in-the-door display in reaction to real-time buying patters (true), why can't medical professionals all be on the same page with medications?
• Sometimes when one travels for a living, that the travel has to stop for the living. There is a finite and doing so.
• Air travel does not have to be an painful as it is. Centralized control is needed. Reagan was wrong.
• Sick, old ladies often outlive everyone's fear of them dying. Then, one day, they pass on. I had two this year.
• One's grandparents should not die before they have met their great-grandkids. Being a grand-parent establishes a completely different dynamic than a parent, and this needs to be shared with ones own children.
  
• Creditors have begun using multiple numbers to circumvent caller-id. It is best to judiciously use voice-mail when behind one bills
• Institutions of higher learning are not "lean" enough to meaningfully respond to current societal needs. Perhaps they will form a committee to investigate this further. It will meet monthly, for an hour, over lunch.
• LinkedIn is a social network group that offers little to no honest appraisals of its constituents--much like high school.
• Small-town educational opportunities for ones kids continually disappoints.
• It is still not in my interest (although I still have interest) in finishing my dissertation. I don't know how to reconcile that.
• A white Christmas is more enjoyable than a non-white one. The snow adds to the overall charm.
• Children are worth every spare moment.
• I am still looking for the end to this Third Great Awakening. I am hoping that the religious climate goes back to sleep. We could use the break.
  
• I am still not excited about the role of America on the world stage. The next ring-leader (read any way you wish) doesn't look to offer any great hope on this.
• One needs, when one lives in a small town, to travel to a big city at least twice a year. Otherwise, the choice to live where one does becomes more of a sentence than a decision.
• We haven't figured out how to start a school without a boatload of capital.
• A year does not lighten the pain of losing a tubal child.
  
• My state encourages malpractice by capping damages. It forces only the small number of "glory" cases to be sought (infertility, losing a limb, etc) to the fore. Others, serious but less "showy" are, for a lot of lawyers, not worth the effort--low return on effort, hard to convince a jury, conservative peers, etc...
• A prophet (or a very educated person) finds no honor in her hometown.

So, to 2007, I burn you in effigy. I wish that you come to an end and that a new beginning may actually take place. Begone from me. I have no use for you. You have brought little joy.

No Go To Limbo

In a stunning reversal of centuries of teaching, the catholic church now allows unbaptized babies into heaven. No more limbo.

See the AP story at AOL, and especially note the reaction of Dick McBrien (the one at Notre Dame):

"If there's no limbo and we're not going to revert to St. Augustine's teaching that unbaptized infants go to hell, we're left with only one option, namely, that everyone is born in the state of grace…baptism does not exist to wipe away the "stain" of original sin, but to initiate one into the Church.”

Well, yea. Doesn’t he realize that the church was one of the original social network groups?

Aside from that excommunicable missive, to think that babies are born into original sin has always bugged me. By ordaining so, the church establishes their reason for being at the earliest a priori.

All in all it is a good reason to ignore the whole scene.