June 2006 Archives
Via e-mail, some Seton Hill staff members are discussing this resource from Georgetown University:
Socialize Safely OnlineOnline communities like Facebook and MySpace have helped students at Georgetown and other colleges and universities connect in many positive ways. Through these online communities, students have met other students with similar interests, formed groups to explore and celebrate specific interests, and transformed the ways that we communicate with each other. And we realize how important these communities may be during your undergraduate years.
At the same time, there are some cautionary lessons that have emerged from participating in online communities. We advise you to use discretion when posting personal information on the World Wide Web. As a result, students should be aware of the following:
* You are posting content onto the World Wide Web and you cannot ensure who does and does not have access to your information.
* Information you post online may continue to stay on the World Wide Web even after you erase or delete that information from your profiles or blog.
* Future employers, graduate schools, and campus organizations may use information gathered from online communities as they are making decisions.
* Anyone with an "@georgetown.edu" email address may gain access to the Georgetown University Facebook.com community, including individual student profiles, photos and groups.
* By agreeing to the terms of use, online communities have your permission to republish your content worldwide and share information with advertisers, third parties, and law enforcement, among others.
Your profile will be a part of how others know you -- please keep that in mind as you use Facebook, MySpace and other online communities.
(I just got this e-mail, and asked the author for permission to post it here.)
Hello Seton Hill Staff,
As an alum, I thought I might be able to see if any current students would be interested:
I'm currently working with a family who is looking for a reading tutor for a child entering the 6th grade. Tutoring hours would be completed at Noah's Ark DayCare in West Mifflin, PA. from 9am-10am Mon-Fri with sign in sheet for verification. Hours per week can be flexible and additional materials can be provided if necessary.
I happened to be on campus today, with my little pocket digital camera, and caught the signing ceremony.
On Monday, June 19, Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa. will formalize an agreement with Beijing Union University to develop Seton Hill University degree programs which will be taught on Beijing Union’s campus.... Signing the agreement to establish a sister-school relationship will be Professor Sun Quan, vice president, Beijing Union University and Dr. JoAnne Boyle, president of Seton Hill University. -- (SHU press release)
I came across this very straightforward, honest, yet sensitive rejection letter for the small publication firm "Snowbooks."
SnowbooksIf you think about it, we have a financial incentive to put as little thought and effort into sifting through submissions as possible. We've got a lot of submissions to get through and not enough time. Plus, many publishers aren't looking to take any chances with new material; they want obvious, commercial successes, ideally from authors with a track record.
Snowbooks could hire a team of people whose job it is to give detailed constructive feedback to submitting authors and to point them in the direction of other publishers more attuned to their style, but there's no obvious way for us to make that idea profitable. We'd be spending money that other firms aren't and it wouldn't necessarily make us any more financially successful - and it's the same with any other publishers you'll deal with. We're like shoppers at a January sale: we grab the two or three things that catch our eye as quickly as we can and move on. We're not critics so much as opportunists.
Given that a submitted manuscript is inevitably an author's pride and joy, and that a book's acceptance and future fortunes are bound up with its author's own hopes and happiness, it's almost criminal that publishers get to accept or reject submissions with so little feedback or accountability. The best we can say at Snowbooks is that we think it's a bad situation, but we don't at the moment have a solution to it (although we have some ideas for the future which we think will help - see our new process, above).
In the meantime, all we can suggest is that you don't trust publishers. They're not your friends and they're not even that great at spotting what readers will like.
There's a blogging angle to the biggest current sports story.
Fans stunned by crash - Pittsburgh Tribune-ReviewWear your helmets, sports fans.Across the country, people learned of the crash -- even before some Pittsburghers -- through blogs, well ahead of Internet posts by major news and sports outlets such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN. A search of the Web found blogs on the crash from as far away as Africa.
As an English professor, an author and director of the Writing Popular Fiction Program at Seton Hill University, Lee McClain of Norristown is naturally drawn to reading and literature.
The programmer as journalist: a Q&A with Adrian Holovaty
OJR: I think one can safely assume that everyone in the news business understands how one "does journalism" through writing or photography. But how does one "do journalism" through computer programming?
Holovaty: The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:
1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It's reporting.
2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.
3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.
"Doing journalism through computer programming" is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible.
While the layout still needs some work, I've finally returned the "Recent Comments" feature to the blogs.setonhill.edu portal page.
