I've been meaning to rant about risk perception in pregnancy, but after what Beaver Girl and Jo sparked off, I just don't have to.
MJ's comment raises some excellent points about the evolution of online communities; the arrival of rule-imposers as a mechanism is particularly interesting. Back in the day, I was on some mailing lists that had very predictable cycles of flamage (much like the Resolve boards, which I wish I could stop reading but I just can't), and I think the year-rounders mostly could see the outbursts coming but knew they'd blow over.
Soper, meanwhile, has gone and asked the infertile blogger-and-commenter masses what they think about all this "community" stuff, and the answers are fascinating. I ended up feeling like a sort of a cold bitch, just 'cause of how little I usually follow up any two-way communication, but maybe this is just a different sort of a blog. (And I'm really bad at maintaining weak ties in real life, too.)
Jody (whose blog I didn't used to read because of misplaced multiple envy! forgive me!) is taking on Judith Warner and much of the blogosphere's commentary on her. You go, girl!
Meanwhile, Dr. B and P.Z. look at student evaluations. Dr. B, in particular, raises the question of whether such a large fraction of the evaluation of teaching should be based on the opinions of careless 19-year-olds. But, but, but: doing anything else requires more work from the faculty! My college, and my department, both claim to really, really care about teaching. But even when there's a tenure case coming up, we can barely bestir ourselves to visit classes. When people add course materials to a portfolio, we cringe. It's more to read—and generally comprehensible enough that we'll to feel guilty if we don't (unlike the scholarship). The dean explicitly demands that we use student evaluations (and numerical averages in particular), but doesn't explicitly demand anything else. So guess what we use.
I'm not being totally fair in that discussion. We use a form customized for our department, and, since everyone's read everyone's evaluations for at least a few semesters, we're pretty good at interpreting trends in student comments. But every time we try to add more measurements to the process, ones that require effort from the faculty, the endeavor quietly dies.
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