• I really like this post from Tenured Radical, which is largely about facebook, faculty meetings, and school starting. In particular, this line is spot-on:

If I can say I learned anything it was that faculty really ought not to complain about their students not listening properly and asking questions that have already been answered, because we are, as a genus, just as flawed in this respect as they are. Probably more so because we are more likely to ask questions at……great…….length.

• A new cafe, Snakes and Lattes, in Toronto has opened that is attempting to eschew laptops (no wireless there) and get people to actually interact with each other. The Torontoist covers it here.

• Inside Higher Ed has a great discussion about the textbook industry.

• Recently a man was prosecuted for videotaping a police officer and posting it online. The charges are that videotaping violates wiretapping laws, which seems flat out ridiculous. I’m reminded of David Brin’s The Transparent Society, in which he argues for reciprocal transparency. My major critique of his argument is that he doesn’t take seriously enough power relations. In an ideal world, sure we’d share information with powerful figures (law enforcement, corporations, etc.) if they shared the same information with us. But the world’s not ideal: crappy police actions can still be protected by crappy laws. The police have privacy in public that isn’t afforded others. (If I do something in public and it’s videotaped, the owner can post it online without a problem.)

• Profhacker has a new Teaching Carnival up! Lots of awesome blog posts to check out.

Starting Wednesday, I am teaching FYC as part of Penn State’s Learning Edge Academic Program, or LEAP. The program brings in first-year students early, and as a cohort, they take two courses that will spring-board them into college, generally gen-ed courses. My English 015 course is paired up with a Communications Arts and Sciences course, and I’m excited about this. My fellow teacher is awesome, and also a friend of mine, so it should be a fun time working together, teaching rhetoric, writing, and public speaking, and engaging with students.

So, I’ve got to finish a few things for the course, but first, I want to catch up on all that stuff I missed by being in a workshop and meeting so many awesome people over the weekend. Here’s a few interesting tidbits from the Internet.

• According to Daily Kos, a gay bar in Forth Worth was raided Saturday night (Sunday morning), on the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in NYC. It seems the story is unfolding. (h/t slewfoot at the Blogora.) Towleroad has more.

• Joseph Orosco shares his thoughts on Twitter, Iran, and revolutionary possibilities.

• CNN, in an article whose title is worthy of the Onion: yep, there is.

• XKCD today is awesome: “More harm has been done by people panicked over societal decline than societal decline ever did”

• Sweet! University of Kansas is going open-access for all journal articles written by their faculty.

• Chronicle Wired Campus: Tweeters are self-obsessed. What I found interesting:

“This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network,” the study said.

• MLB: Cardinals Coach Tony Larussa is suing Twitter over an impostor’s account using his name.

• Time Magazine: Steven Johnson weighs in on Twitter

• Chronicle Wired Campus: 10 University-Press Directors Back Free Access to Scholarly Articles. More support for more access to scholarly publications:

In a move that puts them at odds with the official stance of the Association of American University Presses, a group of university-press directors yesterday issued a position statement that endorses “the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication.”

• Inside Higher Ed: New study on sexual orientation and student experiences at college. Some findings:

* Gay male students have higher college grade point averages and perceive their academic work as more important.
* Gay and bisexual males are more likely to report the presence of a faculty member or administrator with whom they could discuss a problem.
* Gay and bisexual males place more importance on participating in student organizations, volunteer activities, the arts, and politics.
* Bisexual females are less satisfied with the education they are receiving and spend less time studying.
* Lesbian and bisexual females place more importance on participation in the arts and politics.

I’m assuming the comparisons imply a “than straight [males or females]” afterward. The study can be found here.

• Oregon Economics Blog: beer may be a better rehydrator than water!

• Boing Boing: A great graphic highlighting the text of Jacksonville State University President William Meehan’s dissertation, showing how much was plagiarized. Neither JSU nore Meehan’s alma mater, Alabama, plan to do anything about the issue.

• Open Education: “The Future of Books (and Authors) in the Digital Age.”

• Read/Write Web: The ereader and ebook market is read to grow?

• Read/Write Web: A history professor uses Twitter in his class.

• NY Times: Interesting piece on the definition of the potato chip and its relationship to judicial opinions and law interpretation. (via the philosophist)

• Via someone on Twitter: I LOVE these clowns, who confronted a KKK rally with their own responses and parodies of KKK chants. Fantastic!

• Howard Rheingold at SFGate discusses Twitter literacy. Pretty good read, and he doesn’t (thank god!) make up a neologism for Twitter literacy.

• I meant to post this awhile ago: Mark Simpson has an interesting discussion of the sexuality/gender play between Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Very very interesting! (Thanks, Lani, for the link!) Here’s one of the videos Simpson shares:

• In case you missed it, Danger Mouse might release a blank CD-R with cover art because of a copyright battle over the music with EMI. So, the point is, download the music somewhere and burn the CD. Interesting idea, since with free music downloads everywhere, you are often buying the packaging and artwork when you buy a CD.

• Slate’s new women’s website doesn’t seem very feminist according to Feministing—or perhaps downright anti- or post-feminist. UPDATE: Read Anne Friedman’s post at The American Prospect, which asks why sites like Slate don’t just offer more content for women rather an a whole new site.

• Inside Higher Ed on the new book New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion by Rich Ling. Looks interesting.

• Google Search gets cooler. Of course, this opens all sorts of information literacy potentials.

• Onward State: a judge punished a student for tweeting during the trial. Seems like an infringement on free speech to me.

• Here’s a great parody of Miss California USA Carrie Prejean’s press conference the other day. The original can be seen here. Also, I think Donald Trump is creepy.

• Oh, and in case you thought that perhaps politics wasn’t still a man’s club, read this.

• The MSM are discussing that meme going around Facebook: 25 “Random” Things… Time, WaPo, NY Times.

• It’s weird having a President who’s authoring opinions in newspapers again.

• Michael Bérubé retook the lit subject GRE. Pretty interesting.

• I guess some viewers of the Super Bowl were accidentally and briefly shown some porn.

• Salon: Where Have All The Drag Queens Gone?

• A federal court in Connecticut upheld a public school’s decision to not allow a student to run for student office because she called administrators douchebags on her blog. Stupid court. more here.

• Private schools in California can expel lesbians.

This week the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) reported the first rise in the number of adults reading literature since they began their survey in 1982. In fact, 16.6 million more adults reported reading literature (novels and short stories, plays, or poems) in 2008. And, the most rapid increase was in literature reading by young adults aged 18-24.

• Infodoodads reports in December that doodle, the great scheduling tool, is now on Facebook.

• Michael Bérubé discusses the Family Security Matters’ third annual America’s Most Dangerous College Courses. I hope one day I have a course on their list.

• PhD Comics: Abstract MadLibs!

• Crooked Timber has a post discussing how change.gov is working against Obama. Contributors are demanding an investigation into torturing practices by the Bush Administration, something that doesn’t match so well the Obama agenda. An excerpt:

This goes to the heart of the contradictions that the Obama people successfully managed to straddle during the campaign, but are (I think) going to have increasing difficulty in dealing with going forward. The Obama people combined very tight top-down message control and campaign coordination with a fair degree of openness at the bottom to independent initiatives by volunteers. As long as everyone agreed on the same underlying goal (beating the Republicans), this worked. But as that overwhelming imperative recedes, people are going to start pursuing their own objectives – and the ‘open’ architecture that the Obama people have constructed provides them with plenty of opportunities to do this.

• New York Magazine has a brief story on gay-related zines out of New York. Towleroad includes links to various zines. I might have to make a trip to NYC sometime soon to visit Printed Matter.

• Aaron Bady at The Valve has an interesting read/analysis of A Christmas Story, aired on repeat on TBS every December.

• In Other Words, the last remaining non-profit women’s bookstore in the country, is struggling to stay open. They have to raise more money by February, so consider helping out!

• Via Queers United, here’s the blog Community Psychology at Penn State Harrisburg, a blog about a woman doing graduate work at PSU Harrisburg who’s experienced discrimination for wanting to do queer studies work. In her words: “I am a graduate student who faced discrimination at Penn State Univ. of Harrisburg for creating a graduate project focused on Queer Studies. I was told my project had to be a ‘Women’s Studies’ project because ‘Penn State Univ. as an institution does not support Queer Studies.’ While at PSH I faced verbal abuse and sexual harassment due to my gender expression as a working-class lesbian.”

• Via Pam’s House Blend, Rex Wockner’s take on Stonewall 2.0, a phrase I am incredibly uncomfortable with. Wockner claims the movement “isn’t fizzling.” An excerpt:

Stonewall 2.0 may or may not be inextricably wed to Join The Impact, the viral entity that coordinated the massive, 300-city, 50-state demos on Nov. 15, but what happened from Nov. 5 to Nov. 15 in California and across the country indisputably fired up a new generation of activists and lit a fire under complacent, comfortable older generations. It was a 2.0 moment — different from the gay marches on Washington, the AB 101 protests, the White Night Riots and other post-Stonewall historical moments precisely because it took place from coast to coast and border to border, and because the method by which it was organized (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, e-mail, text-messaging) can be reactivated in minutes whenever the moment strikes.

• Nan Hunter at the Bilerico Project discusses the California Attorney General’s brief in the Prop8 legal battle. Pretty much, the AG argues that Prop8 should be invalidated on the grounds that marriage is a natural right. Interesting argument, but worrisome from the vantage point of someone who wants to disentangle marriage from the state.

• Anne-Marie offers some information literacy tools for synonyms

• Matt offers some tools for annotated websites

• Matt also shares some videos about Twitter. This one on ambient intimacy is especially interesting.

• Irene Monreo at Bilerico: Gay is NOT the new black

• Feministe on the Rolling Stone article that blames gay organizing for Prop 8′s passing

• The Valve: Kugelmass believes it’s a mistake for Composition to be merged with Rhetoric. I disagree, but don’t have time or energy to write something. Perhaps once I’m in Iowa.