Sociology, history, gender studies, political science classes, and the freshman honors program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell spent several weeks learning about the 1912 Lawrence, Mass., textile strike.

Mic Check! Ohio Students Interrupt Gas Industry (by jklimas88)

The gas industry convened a panel discussion and job-focused networking event at Ohio State University, intending to promote shale development and horizontal hydro-fracking across Ohio. Here’s a student response to the gas industry presentation.

The costs of the dirty deal (done dirt cheap) must be patiently explained by the people whom it affects. These are our children.

thenationmagazine:

Losers from the Debt Deal: Students

Graduate students would be the hardest hit, as the bill proposes an elimination of the interest subsidy on federal student loans for “almost all” of them. This means that beginning July 1, 2012, grad students will be responsible for the interest on their loans while in school and during any subsequent deferment period.

Credit: AP Images

[NSFW Trigger Warning: Language]

“The The Impotence of Proofreading,” by TAYLOR MALI (by taylormali)

I teach Gene Sharp’s work to my class in The Sociology of War and Peace. I show them the film on Otpor, “Bringing Down a Dictator.” I met Sharp as a student at Manhattan College. When Egyptian demonstrators were exhorting each other “Peaceful, peaceful,” they were evoking this understanding of social change. Tip ‘o’ the hat to my best friend for sending this article along.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: February 16, 2011

BOSTON — Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.

Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

Gene Sharp, 83, is known for writing about nonviolence.

But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and nowTunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.

Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

read more

We just got a whole lot closer to the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash.

Behold the Hövding, a discreet airbag that, while not actually invisible, is understated and cool-looking, and which can be worn by cyclists around their necks instead of a helmet. Created by two Swedish university students, the airbag inflates around the cyclist’s head in the instances of collision or a fall, protecting them from injuries.…

via Good

Students who tell professors what they want to say command more respect than those students who tell them what they think professors want to hear. This is refreshing to see. How can we make this more clear?

There is some pretty serious stuff going on here, and it’s not even being covered by our nation’s “paper of record.” It’s kind of astounding considering how connected we think we are.

icancstructures:

Two weeks ago, my post, the 40th Anniversary of Kent State: a gap in our historical knowledge?, addressed the reasons why we remember certain events and not others. As a current example…

We can’t forget Jackson State either.

40 Years Ago: Police Kill Two Students at Jackson State in Mississippi, Ten Days After Kent State Killings

Four decades ago, on May 4, 1970, four students were killed at Kent State University when National Guardsmen opened fire on hundreds of unarmed students at an on-campus antiwar rally. The killings received national media attention and are still remembered forty years later across the country. But the media has largely forgotten what happened just ten days after the Kent State shootings. On May 14, 1970, local and state police opened fire on a group of students at the predominantly black Jackson State College in Mississippi. In a twenty-eight-second barrage of gunfire, police fired hundreds of rounds into the crowd. Two were killed and a dozen injured. We speak with Gene Young, a former student at Jackson State who witnessed the shooting. [includes rush transcript]

watch

Most professors I know very rarely have to vent about a student or students. It makes sense, even to propellerheads, that social media is a poor tool for such things. Nevertheless, something seems more than a little disproportionate in this response, recent events notwithstanding.

February 26, 2010, 03:39 PM ET

By Mary Helen Miller

Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, was escorted off the campus on Wednesday because of jokes she had made on her Facebook page about wanting to kill students.

On Monday the professor posted this update: “Had a good day today, didn’t want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story …” In another comment, on January 21, she wrote: “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman, it’s been that kind of day.”

Consider the history and use of the “smiley” as recalled on the 25th anniversary of the emoticon:

Online bulletin boards became popular among Carnegie Mellon’s computer science community in the early 1980s. Faculty, staff and students used them as a social mechanism, discussing everything from the serious issues of the day to campus parking to the occasional lost-and-found item.

“Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous, or at least attempted humor,” explained Fahlman. “The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response.”

Fahlman said that would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. So, a discussion of ideas for joke markers ensued, during which Fahlman suggested the sideways smiley face. (Read the original thread.)

And the rest is history.