allmedia.com watch: Hyperlocal vs. Social Media

The debate is brewing about the financial stability of hyperlocal sites. When Gannett laid off people its New Jersey hyperlocal sites died with the layoffs.

The problems, however, seem to have been that the hyperlocal reporters had to file for the website and the Gannett newspaper, with no local advertising support from the company to generate revenue. See the story at http://bit.ly/jI2Tp7

Jack Shafer, the media critic at Slate, wrote two columns about hyperlocals–columns I missed before the holiday weekend. In the first, Shafer, who does a superb job at covering the media, argues that people tend to use social media to talk about local news. He sees interests as more important than geography. Therefore, he dismisses AOL’s Patch, for example, as a costly exercise in futility. See the first story at http://slate.me/iPUujb 

Shafer took some body shots from those who run successful hyperlocal sites, so he ran a second column at http://slate.me/mAO0ID, which includes comments from critics of the first column.

I run a hyperlocal site at philadelphianeighborhoods.com At the moment, I have the luxury of not having to worry about making money because students are the reporters. Tuition and lab fees pay the bills.

With dwindling state budgets, however, I expect that there will be a discussion of how to make more money from the site, which is relatively successful small site with about 800 unique users and 1,500 page views per day since we seriously launched the site two and one-half years ago.

I believe that people want information about their neighborhoods AND their interests. Facebook also tends to isolate many of us with our friends wherever they may be throughout the world without any public sphere to discuss the issues of our neighborhoods. I think that hyperlocal can deal with local issues and interesting people nearby without bogging down into village council meetings and other boring stuff.

allmedia.com watch: Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest

I just read three of the dumbest stories I have encountered in recent months.

No. 1: A story about how K-8 students should have less homework at http://nyti.ms/k0M42r We will call this one dumb.

No. 2: The New York Public Library buying Timothy Leary’s papers at http://nyti.ms/kgTwut We will this one dumber.

No. 3: And the winner is Eric Alterman’s idiotic analysis in the Daily Beast that Weiner’s resignation sets a dangerous precedent that will encourage right-wingers to engage in character assassination. See this wrinkled line of “reasoning” at http://bit.ly/lnwQBC

I guess it’s just all part of global warming. Errr…. I mean climate change.

allmedia.com watch: The Cost of Higher Education is Absurd

What I graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1973, my tuition bill was slightly less than $600. That would be slightly less than $3,000 today.

I teach at Temple University in Philadelphia, which with in-state tuition at just over $11,000 a year, is considered an incredibly good buy.

John Dunlap, who teaches classics at Santa Clara University, makes a variety of good observations in his article at http://bit.ly/iBVp2n

Professor Dunlap notes that since 1977 prices have increased by a factor of four. Tuition costs have increased by a factor of 11, or nearly three times the rate of inflation.

That inflation has been built on the backs on mainly middle- and lower-income people who have to take out an incredible array of loans to make it through college. The recent graduates carry the largest debt of any previous class, which will be eclipsed by next year’s graduates. As states have been tax revenues decline legislatures have cut funds to higher education, resulting in higher tuition.

Dunlap’s argument is particularly compelling about administrative costs.

“A new term in the lexicon of collegiate jargon is ‘academic support professional.’ The ASPs are non-teaching career bureaucrats and busybodies – auditors and counselors, systems analysts and affirmative action officers, institute directors and spin doctors and grant writers – plus their attendant herds of ‘administrative assistants’ (secretaries).

Between 1975 and 1985, when student enrollments expanded nationwide by 10 percent, non-teaching college support staffs increased by more than 60 percent. By the year 2000, administrative costs were eating up half the annual budgets of most colleges and universities, compared with 27 percent in 1950 and 19 percent in 1930. Today, just one decade into the new century, the administrative slice exceeds 60 percent of the pie charts.”

Harper back: That means that 40 percent of the people are actually teaching. But Dunlap finds a problem with that figure, too.

“A less widely acknowledged trouble is faculty corruption. There are more than half a million college and university professors nationwide. Many of them are dedicated teachers whom no one but their students will every know about. Most are neither great scholars nor original thinkers, yet a large portion (okay – roughly the noisiest 40 percent) behave as if they think they are, probably because they can’t stand the thought that no one else but their students will ever know about them.

These careerist academics are line-bred in graduate school to despise teaching and covet research; to curry favor and outmaneuver enemies; to politicize the personal and personalize the political. By the time they get their Ph.D.’s, they are less prepared to disseminate knowledge than to cultivate private agendas in the schools that hire them.”

Harper back: Pretty damning comments about what I do for a living, but there is a lot of truth in his argument.

“Forever hustling advancement, they make sufficient nuisances of themselves to wheedle full pay and benefits for teaching schedules that any working stiff would regard as half-time jobs.

The rest of the time goes into the travel and scribble of petty research projects, paid for by grants and by reduced teaching loads. So the schools, lusting after the prestige and name-recognition that supposedly come with a published faculty, must hire many more professors than would otherwise be needed to teach the same number of courses….”

Harper back. Tough stuff, but he lays it out well. Again, the article is at

http://bit.ly/iBVp2n

allmedia.com watch: Looking at Tenure and the High Cost of Education

Since I criticize journalists a lot, I thought I would turn the focus on a new book by Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former writer and deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Riley is a critic of tenure in colleges and universities. Her most recent book, The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For, argues that tenure simply costs too much and leaves in ossified old-timers to teach the students. Since I have tenure, I can state emphatically that she’s mostly right.

But the underlying assumption is that school administrators would then run institutions better and more inexpensively, which would lower tuition. Unfortunately, that assumption is wrong. I think the true problem exists in the administrators of colleges and universities. Nearly all of the top management were teachers, not business people. Therefore, I often find that they know virtually nothing about being administrators other than simply saying why you cannot do something.

The bureaucracy of academia is simply mind boggling. Not quite as bad as government, but pretty close. For example, I have been waiting for nearly one month to get approval to purchase a filing cabinet, which requires the nod of an assistant dean!

The university came up with a new formula for cost-sharing for summer classes. Simply put, it meant that the university got more money and the department less. At least 16 students have to register for a class of 20 in order for the course to go forward. As a result, only a few classes were taught, but no such formula exists for the fall and spring semesters. It was unclear to me whether the idea was to make money or eliminate classes.

The cost of education is astronomical and must be lowered. I do agree that tenure plays a role in the waste, but poor business decisions do too.

Here is the book at http://amzn.to/laFCxv

allmedia.com watch: I May Be Sued for Failing a Student

The father of a student has threatened to file legal action against my colleague and me for giving her a failing grade in our class.  The allegation is that we engaged in “improper, unfair or arbitrary” grading.

The syllabus for the class runs 13 pages, with numerous tutorials online and four adjuncts to help any student. More than 98 percent of the students over the past four years have passed the course on the first time around. Only two students out of nearly 400 have failed the course twice. This student has failed it twice. In fact, the student can try one more time to pass the course.

There was a suggestion that we waive the requirement for the class for this student so that the individual could graduate. My colleague and I declined that option. If a student cannot pass the capstone course for a degree, should academics simply give someone a pass because he or she cannot do it? I don’t think so.

There has been a lot of talk about grade inflation. What we are talking about here is providing a degree to someone who has not mastered the skills necessary to obtain the degree.

A college degree needs to mean something. The student needs to have mastered critical elements of a program. If he or she has not, then I believe that the student should not get the degree. Such an action cheapens the academic program.

Although the New York Times is not my favorite publication, it provides some insight about what happens on college campuses today. See http://nyti.ms/lZ3s2Z 

My colleague and I stand for excellence in education. Our class is difficult, but the people who make it through constantly tell us how important the experience was and how it shaped their lives.

In academia there is a term “helicopter parents,” which means that parents will come in to try to help their kids when they face academic or social problems. The notion that a parent plans to file a lawsuit against us for failing his kid is a bit much. I will file more as the legal process continues.

allmedia.com: Off to MIT to Present a Paper about philadelphianeighborhoods.com

I am going to Cambridge today to present a paper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about the program I co-direct at www.philadelphianeighborhoods.com, a hyperlocal site in Philadelphia.

The paper is at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/papers/Harper-MIT.pdf

The conference, which has a number of interesting topics, is at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/index.html

Have a great weekend!

allmedia.com watch: Black UPenn Student Urges Minorities to Stay Away

An African-American student at the University of Pennsylvania urges minorities to stay away from the Ivy League school. Pretty nasty stuff!
Read http://huff.to/fT01xv 

allmedia.com watch: College Grads Have the Most Debt Ever

Time has a story that the Class of 2011 has the highest debt upon graduation. I would suspect that might be eclipsed next year, too.

See the story at http://ti.me/iuOSK4

allmedia.com watch: Why Dick and Jane Can’t Write; It’s Not Fun

Salon has an excellent story that dissects the problem many of us face in higher education: Students cannot write. I teach journalism students. Many of them simply do not write well. I’m not talking dangling participles, pronoun-antecedent agreement or parallel construction. I am talking about the inability to write a simple sentence with a subject, a verb and a direct object. I have banned semicolons in all classes.  This story has discovered the true reason for the decline in writing: It’s not fun. Read a well-written piece at http://bit.ly/k2UPOG

allmedia.com watch: Journalism Tops Daily Beast’s List of Useless Majors

The Daily Beast, that rather useless piece of journalistic tripe, has come out with a list of useless college majors. The list is based on beginning salary, median salary, and job availability. Are these really the criteria upon which to judge learning and what one does with a college degree?

According to the Beast, a journalism major is the most useless. Gee, I think that most journalism students can write, which is something few other people in society today can do properly.

Nos.2 and 3: Horticulture and agriculture. I guess we don’t need to grow things anymore. We will just import them?

No. 4: Advertising. I guess the Beast plans on running its operation for free without pay!

No. 5: Fashion design. I guess we don’t need clothes because we won’t have enough to eat and no one will be trained in advertising.

No. 6: Child and family studies. F*** the kids and families. No problems there.

No. 7: Music. Don’t need culture.

No. 8: Mechanical engineering. We can just get an app for that.

No. 9: Chemistry. No one needs chemists to develop drugs to cure diseases.

No. 10: Nutrition. Nobody will be fat anymore because we won’t have people trained in producing food.

No. 11: Human resources. Everyone is happy at work!

No. 12: Theater. See No. 7. If we don’t need music, we don’t need plays.

No. 13: Art History. See Nos. 7 and 12. If we don’t need music and theater, we certainly don’t need people who know about art.

No. 14: Photography. Everyone can take good photos with an iPhone.

No. 15: Literature. Since we don’t need music, theater, and art, why do we need to read?

No. 16: Art. Since we won’t have anyone to talk about art, why have art?

No. 17: Fine Arts. And who needs this one after we crossed out every other endeavor known to the Greeks.

No. 18: Psychology. No one is having any problems these days. We all feel good!

No. 19: English. We don’t need to talk either.

No. 20: Animal science. We won’t need any future vets because we will have to eat our dogs and cats because no one will be producing food.

So what are the good majors? The Beast’s list might include accounting, business, finance, marketing. Maybe app creation, Facebook future, and any other way to make money rather than learn stuff. I look forward to the list.

You get to find the URL since I am too disgusted to link it. I really am happy to see who’s running the magazine I use to work for. Blather below: