Multilitteratus Incognitus

Last weekend, while I was enjoying something on television, my iPad buzzed and kindly informed me that a few people I follow on twitter were all tweeting about #whytenure.  Woah! I thought!  What's this?   Is there something earth-shattering happening with tenure ?  I had to find out.  I saw some tweets, favorited them (for later digestion), and went back to my show. It seems to me that this was a reaction to Wisconsin and Gov. Walker's most recent attempts to mess with higher education in that state. There is no doubt that feelings around tenure, both in Wisconsin and outside, are pretty charged. I see blind acceptance of tenure as a given by most people I interact with, but I don't see why (despite their arguments). I am one of the few people, that I know in my circles, that holds the unpopular opinion (among people in academia) that tenure is an outdated institution and what's on the drawing board needs to be erased and re-conceptualized from scratch....

A while back this posting came out from the Chief Security guru at the UMass Boston campus regarding the information you post on Facebook and how, by using it, you may potentially self-sabbotage future opportunities at jobs (or ever higher education). While there is some good advice given in the article, namely: Make sure that you allow only people that you know for sure as friends and give them the access you want them to have. You never know when some stranger is looking at your personal information. the blog post, in my opinion, fails to demonstrate that this is not just a shortcoming of facebook, but rather something that every web user has to know. Before facebook (and a lot of other Web 2.0 types of applications) only a few knowledgeable people were able to put stuff on the web. They knew that what they posted was public, and eventually what they found out was that someone was archiving it! If you know a URL and want to see what a website looked like in the past, go to t...