I was looking through my notes on Bourdieu just now and came across this beauty of a sentence from Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction : a social critique of the judgement of taste. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 172:

As a system of practice-generating schemes which expresses systematically the necessity and freedom inherent in its class condition and the difference constituting that position, the habitus apprehends differences between conditions, which it grasps in the form of differences between classified, classifying practices (products of other habitus), in accordance with principles of differentiation which, being themselves the product of these differences, are objectively attuned to them and therefore tend to perceive them as natural.

Might it have been clearer in the original French? Thankfully Goffman who has replaced Bourdieu as one of the central theorists in my thesis is insightful while remaining one of the more readable sociologists…

Humour magazine The Onion imagines peer review extended to fifth grade students.

This clip from the television version of one of my favourite radio programmes, This American Life illustrates dramatically how the existence of the media can affect everyday behaviour.

David Brake

She shared this overheard conversation snippet in this blog post:

Are you a teacher?
Yes.
What subject?
I am a sociologist.
Then you must be good at making friends.

I only wish that my doctorate (when it comes) would give me that power

I’ve been listening to an interesting BBC radio history series The Idea of a University and just heard about a satirical book (not seemingly still in print) “Redbrick and these Vital Days” by a Liverpool academic, E Allison Peers. It includes this marvellous descriptive passage about a typical day in the life of ‘Professor Deadwood’ (based apparently on the author’s view of Alan Dorward).

He has a leisurely breakfast at half-past-eight, followed by pipe and paper; reaches the University between ten and half-past; reads his letters and perhaps writes one; saunters into the Common Room for a cup of coffee; calls on a colleague, or the Bursar, or the Clerk to the Senate; returns to his room, glances through the latest issue of a learned review, has a few words with a pupil - and lo, it’s lunch-time. After lunch in the refectory, followed by a chat about the day’s news in the Common Room, he gives a lecture at half-past-two, and immediately afterwards hurries home lest he should be late for tea. After tea comes the day’s exercise (unless it happens to be a day when he has no lecture, in which case he plays golf in the afternoon) and after dinner he spends a couple of hours with a new book on his special subject (or a book from the circulating library on something else), after which, the paper again, a nightcap, and bed at eleven after a somewhat tiring but thoroughly well-spent day.

They don’t make jobs like that any more - do they?

P.S. It seems I am not alone in thinking that what I will be doing in part when I teach is what the founder of Keele University, Lord Lindsay, saw as the purpose of university education: “to enable everyone to read the Times intelligently”.

David Brake

Blog scholar Alex Halavais recently wrote an entertaining blog post about his experience of cheaters - how to cheat good - culminating in this gem:

When you copy things from the web into Word… don’t just ‘Edit > Paste’ it into your document. When I am reading a document in black, Times New Roman, 12pt, and it suddenly changes to blue, Helvetica, 10pt (yes, really), I’m going to guess that something odd may be going on.

By an odd coincidence the New York Times has an article on the increasing use of technology by students to enable in-class cheating. I hope that it is no. 6 on the most emailed list because of appalled professors not because students are looking for new cheating ideas!

This weblog posting by Lilia Efimova about the difficulty of categorising data during analysis tickled me since I am experiencing some of the same difficulties at this point in my own research, particularly as she refers in her post to Borges’ own musings on the subject. I am half tempted to group my bloggers using the ‘ancient Chinese’ method including:

• Bloggers that are included in this classification
• Innumerable ones
• Others
• Those that resemble flies from a distance

I bring your attention to a piece on Slate about browsing the net when you should be listening to your prof.

There are about 100 students in the Columbia University lecture I’m currently attending, and about 10 have laptops. (The lecture consists mostly of grad students in their late 20s, so the ratio is a bit low.) I can see four screens from here; only one person is actually taking notes. Another is looking at the registrar’s Web site. The other two keep checking their e-mail.

The LSE has wireless connections to many but by no means all classrooms and to my surprise even now laptops are fairly rare in the lecture halls here though certainly a higher ratio than one in ten - one professor I remember three years ago told off a student for typing on one!

The Chronicle alerts me to the work of Joseph R Ferrari, who has co-written a volume, “Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings“. To my astonishment our library doesn’t have it yet (but I’ve put in a request). If you are interested there’s an online discussion with Ferrari starting 14:30 EST today.

I can’t resist a quote from near the bottom of the Chronicle’s article:

Karem Diaz, a professor of psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, has studied the behavior among Peruvians, whose expectations of timeliness tend to differ from those of Americans.

"In Peru we talk about the ‘Peruvian time,’" Ms. Diaz writes in an e-mail message. "If we are invited to a party at 7 p.m., it is rude to show on time. … It is even socially punished. Therefore, not presenting a paper on time is expected and forgiven."

Few Peruvians are familiar with the Spanish word "procrastinaci?n," which complicates discussions of the subject. "Some people think it is some sexual behavior when they hear the word," Ms. Diaz says.

How did I come across this? Well, I’m meeting my supervisor this afternoon so naturally I had to check the weblogs I normally read first (in this case Arts and Letters Daily).

George Toft has produced an entertaining presentation
in the form of a dialogue between a pizza buyer and a delivery agent that highlights some of the possible issues around privacy in the database age. Note that most of what he suggests would be technically possible even without a “National ID”. But rather than over-analysing it think of it as a bit of fun…