Opinion

This week the Senate Judiciary Committee will work on amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, commonly referred to as "ECPA." When passed in 1986 it updated the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first "wiretap" federal law. This law codified procedures for the rule the Supreme Court established in the landmark Katz v. U.S. case that created a Fourth Amendment privacy right in electronic communications, telephony principally in that day. In my cheat sheet on different kinds of privacy law outlined in the last couple of previous blogs, this would be type 2 privacy law.

The tasks you are doing well may be holding you back from excelling in the tasks at which you need to do well, writes Kerry Ann Rockquemore.

If you’re in academia, chances are you’ve spent some time thinking about and discussing student writing. You may have found yourself enraged at something, or laughing out loud, running to share the hilarity with the nearest living being. Maybe you scribbled it down somewhere, or perhaps it seared itself into your brain and never needed to be written down.

I enjoyed this story. Apparently, Ozarks Technical Community College has decided to take out ads showing how its tuition levels stack up against its local for-profit competitors. The idea is to provide some much-needed counterpoint to the marketing barrage that for-profits routinely generate, and to warn students away from programs that might saddle them with heavy debt burdens and non-transferable credits.

I'm inclined to leave the technical aspects of online pedagogy and teaching tools to those who, like Zellner and Katherine O'Flaherty (whose piece on Blackboard you can read here), have greater experience and expertise than I. What I want to talk about here is whether or not online teaching makes sense for you as you strategize your trajectory through graduate school and into whatever professional future compels you. So this is not about how to do it better, this is about whether, as a graduate student, to do it at all. As with most questions you encounter in this business, there is no definitive answer—merely a disjointed collection of more questions and things to think about.

Don't even bother buying a PowerBall ticket for tonight's $425 million drawing. I've already purchased the winning ticket.

As of today we’ve lived in our new home, in our new city, for 85 days. (You can follow our move in my earlier blogs.) Our first month here flew by - everything was new, we tried different things. The second month also went fairly smoothly, as we started to live the new life with a bit more routine. But the third month has been a month of struggles.