1964

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     DURING the last few summers, I've spent a fair amount of time digitizing and archiving my parents' old photos and home movies. This summer is no different. 

     There are thousands of photos. I had to Photoshop most of 'em. It seems to be an endless project, but, in truth, it's almost finished. 

     Today, I worked through some old family photographs from 1964, taken on a family vacation to the Central Valley (Fresno!), the Sacramento River (mosquitoes!), Mt. Lassen (a volcano), Lake Tahoe (cold!), and portions of the Sierra Nevada (spectacular!). (I modified these pics to be shown on a blog. To see the raw and unfiltered photos, go here.) 

     For reasons unknown, my dad decided to bring his father, Otto, along for the trip. And so the six of us—my parents, my sister Annie, my brother Ray, "Opa," and I—headed north in our crummy six-cylinder "green Ford," hauling a trailer. The trailer, it turns out, was just for Opa.

     The pic above was taken along Highway 395, probably north of Bridgeport.

     Above: at a campfire, somewhere in Northern California. A ranger told us the story of "Falling Rocks." I believed it.

     Atop Mt. Lassen, the volcano. That's Mt. Shasta in the distance. I kept asking my dad, "What if the mountain erupts?"

     At the time, my dad was a smoker. He gave it up a few months after the trip because he didn't want any of his kids to become smokers.
     That's my late brother Ray riding on my dad's shoulders. The kid never stopped squirming.
     We became American citizens a year or two after this trip.

     The family in Yosemite Valley, of course. In those days, you could drive right in.

It's (almost) official: Wagner wins

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     The OC Reg’s Total Buzz blog reported this morning that our own Don Wagner has “wrapped up” his victory in the 70th AD primary election:

     It’s all over in the 70th Assembly District. Community colleges trustee Don Wagner has defeated Irvine councilman Steve Choi in the Republican primary.
    As of 5 p.m. Wednesday, the Orange County Registrar of Voters reported that Wagner had a 1,310 vote lead over Choi with just 115 more Republican ballots to count. At this point, it’s a statistical impossibility for Choi to make up the difference. As Registrar Neal Kelley said, “It’s pretty much a done deal.”
     Wagner now becomes the favorite against Democrat Melissa Foxin the November general, as Republican voters outnumber Democrats in the 70th A.D. 43 percent to 30 percent.
     Here’s the latest numbers on the 70th from the Registrar:

     Don Wagner — 15,643 votes, 32.8 percent
     Steve Choi — 14,333 votes, 30.0 percent
     Jerry Amante — 11,528, 24.2 percent
     Jay Ferguson — 6,224, 13.0 percent

     Ballots remaining to be counted: 92 Democrat, 115 Republican, 40 Other

A Hammurabi Code for plagiarism?

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The Plagiarism Tariff (Inside Higher Ed)

     Academics in the United Kingdom have drawn up a national tariff covering penalties for student plagiarism, which could be adopted as a worldwide system for dealing with offenders.
     Studies in this area have found high levels of inconsistency in the penalties universities employ to punish students who are found guilty of copying, with wide variations between, and even within, institutions.
     Now researchers from the advisory service plagiarismadvice.org have created a points-based system designed to act as a sector-wide “benchmark.” Setting out a range of penalties from informal warnings to expulsion, it allows staff to calculate a score for the seriousness of the offense and use this to select an appropriate penalty.
     Universities will be able to compare the tariff against their own systems, which researchers hope will lead to greater consistency in the penalties applied across the sector.
. . .
     Example…:
 A second-year student has cut and pasted two paragraphs of material taken from 
the internet and used without attribution in the main body of a 2,000-word essay. 
The student’s record shows a formal warning for a similar incident in a previous formative assignment. … The recommended penalty options are:

• Assignment awarded 0 percent: resubmission required, with the mark capped or reduced
• Assignment awarded 0 percent: no oppor­tunity to resubmit.

     Example…:
 A final-year student has submitted work obtained from a ghostwriting service 
as a dissertation. The student’s record indicates plagiarism on two previous occasions. … The guidance’s recommended penalty options are:

• Module awarded 0 percent: no opportunity to resit and credit lost
• Award classification reduced
• Qualification reduced
• Expelled from institution, but with credits retained
• Expelled from institution with credits withdrawn.

     In 2006, Baroness Deech, the former independent adjudicator for higher education in the U.K., warned that universities were leaving themselves vulnerable to legal action as a result of their inconsistent hand­ling of plagiarism cases….

Bad and Pawlenty: iPad U as shiny silver bullet

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A Political Online Push (Inside Higher Ed)

     When Jon Stewart asked Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty last week for some examples of how he intended to administer “limited and effective” government, the Republican governor … took square aim at traditional higher education.
     “Do you really think in 20 years somebody’s going to put on their backpack, drive a half hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keister across campus, and sit and listen to some boring person drone on about econ 101 or Spanish 101?” Pawlenty asked Stewart, host of "The Daily Show."
     “Can’t I just pull that down on my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it, from wherever I feel like it?” he said. “And instead of paying thousands of dollars, can I pay $199 for iCollege instead of 99 cents for iTunes?”
     …[I]n 2008, [Pawlenty] challenged the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) to more than double the percentage of credits it awards for online courses, setting a goal of 25 percent by 2015.
     But Pawlenty’s reprise of this overture last week on "The Daily Show" and several other news outlets marked the first signs that Pawlenty, a presidential hopeful, could make online education one of his talking points….
     This makes his portrayal of traditional higher education as an anathema to government efficiency, and of mobile-based online education as the cure, a potentially controversial flashpoint for the national conversation about distance learning. Indeed, Pawlenty's mainstage advocacy of online education comes at a time when several other state higher education systems, notably in Pennsylvania and Indiana, have sought to leverage online technologies to cut costs….
. . .
     Some faculty members have found Pawlenty’s push distressing. Rod Henry, president of the Inter Faculty Organization, a MnSCU faculty union, says professors are concerned that Pawlenty’s drive toward online education might unduly increase their workload and compromise quality.
     Henry cited the widely acknowledged fact that online courses are more work-intensive to teach than face-to-face ones….
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     The University of Minnesota, as the state flagship, tends to have more independence than MnSCU. But when Pawlenty promulgated his plan for MnSCU in 2008, he did encourage a similar push on the University of Minnesota campuses. And with the governor now on the national stage, J.B. Shank, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, is concerned. And he says a lot of his colleagues are, too.
     Specifically, Shank says he is troubled by Pawlenty’s framing of the issue as a battle between pro-efficiency, pro-technology students of the “iPod generation” and stodgy, ivory-tower luddites who care more about self-preservation than lowering barriers to higher education.
     “Technophilic talk is a pernicious distraction,” he says, “because it allows for a certain kind of justification for not giving the university the money it needs to provide the kind of education it wants to provide.”….