Do go look at Dawn’s Etsy store, and her Flickr pages. There’s something for every taste, style, and budget, and it’s not too soon for your holiday shopping.

Here’s what moderators need to know:

• a) Sure, there’s freedom of speech. Anyone who wants it can go start their own blog. On Yog’s board, Yog’s whim is law.
• b) Yog is an ancient ghod of chaos and evil. And he doesn’t like people very much.
• c) Moderation is a subjective art, and the moderator is always right.
• d) The moderator may have minions. They need to have a private area where they keep the buckets of Thorazine and the cold-frosty bottles of cow snot.
• e) The minions speak with the voice of Yog. Yog backs his minions up.
• f) There is always someone awake, and in charge, when Yog isn’t around in person. The minions know who the Duty Yog is.
• g) If someone starts off as a spammer, troll, or flamer, he is a spammer, troll, or flamer forever and is liable to instant deletion/banning with no recourse and no appeal.
• h) If the moderator ever needs inspiration, he can re-read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and recall that the posters are sinners and he is Ghod.
• i) Rules? In a knife fight? Yog and his minions have standards, but they don’t need to tell the posters, lest some of them attempt to game the system. Attempting to game the system is, all on its own, a deletable offense.
• j) ALL CAPS posts are deleted on sight, unread. Mostly ALL CAPS POSTS are ALL CAPS.
• k) Anyone who doesn’t space after punctuation marks is insane, and can be deleted/banned on sight.
• l) Personal attacks against Yog and his minions are ignored. Personal attacks against anyone else are deletable on sight.

See the original post at Making Light and be sure to read the comments, too.

In the blog post Nielsen Hayden opens with this simple but elegant explanation of the core concept behind blogging and community content:

Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

Go read the rest of his post; it’s one of the best meditations on blogging and digital communication I’ve ever read.

It will come as no surprise to anyone here that the biggest challenge I face is not in finding excellent teachers who know their subject cold. Rather, it’s (you got it) finding people with all of that going for them who can write in the way that you have to in order to give of yourself, show yourself, online.

My big hiring mistakes have all had the same thing in common — they all glide around classrooms like they’ve spent a lifetime in the theater (i.e., they’re great “performers” and know their stuff so cold that they can hold students spellbound for three hours)… but ask them to commit that to paper, and it’s just no go. We’ve always given our own graduate faculty first crack at writing these courses… usually disastrous, because they’re as bad at writing what they do as they are good at doing it!

Asking for writing samples has been a waste of time… it’s just plain not the same genre, and there’s absolutely nothing to be gained from their last article in The Journal of American YouPickIts.

The same thing happens from time to time with the folks who tend the discussions in the class… they don’t know how to show or give themselves to students in their writing… and that’s what it takes when teaching and learning relationships have to happen and develop in print.

How can I “screen” those applicants with credentials and teaching success for their ability to function online, whose persona in print reflects an appreciation for the very specific art of being able to “talk” in black and white like they do in a classroom? Or am I doomed to a lifetime of having to endlessly edit the stuff of people who know something I need them to share, so that it doesn’t put my students into a coma?

What suggestions can we offer about finding applicants who will excel at online instruction?

Again.

I began this blog in January of 2002, using Radio Userland; I eventually moved to MovableType, and now, I’m using WordPress.

I’ve also changed the location; I was over here, at digitalmedievalist.com, but I’m finally realizing I need to distinguish the scholarly me from the geek me, because it’s awfully confusing to would-be employers.

Academic paper-writing services, or “paper mills,” will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the “sponsored links” sections of a Google search-results page.

You can read the article here, if you’re a subscriber, anyway. They know they’ll have to hand-check sites, but they do seem to have an idea of what a mill is, and does, and how they work, which means they might even spot the more clever ones.

If I see a Google press release, or a more public article about Google’s policy, I’ll link it here.

The core issues are neatly summarized by Ross Mayfield here:

• Being safe is something most everyone can agree is a right.
• Being anonymous on the web matters.
• Being open on the web matters. Transparency is good.
• Being free with speech is both what makes us great and makes us go too far.

Mayfield provides four assertions that pretty much anyone will agree with. There is, however, a need to juggle possibly conflicting goals—like preserving the right of anonymity, but not when anonymity is used to perpetuate hate speech, as it was in the attacks on Kathy Sierra. There’s potential conflict between speaking frankly, and the necessity of free speech, and not allowing hate speech.

We do have methods of controlling hate speech, methods that aren’t matters of censorship. There are the less than effective technical methods—banning, and moderating and deleting comments; even, disemvowelling the truly idiotic rabid hate-monger, but primarily, online communities need to enforce community standards. As MacAllister Stone puts it:

I think we have to self-police. I think, when someone says something that’s clearly horrible and inflammatory, we stuff ‘em in a box. Embarrass them. Shame them into either adhering to community standards, or exile them by deletion and/or blocking.

With that context extablished, I want to look at two short quotations from Chris Locke and Kathy Sierra regarding online attacks and hate speech specifically directed towards women.

Kathy Sierra asks:

But if we dismiss every cruel, vile, sexually threatening comment as simply the work of an anonymous troll, we will no longer be able to recognize a real threat. Are we willing to stake our mother/sister/daughter’s life on a sexually and physically threatening photo or comment, simply because it appeared on the internet and therefore must be harmless?

Chris Locke observes

Misogyny is real — and vile. Violence against women is wrong. It must not be tolerated. This issue should be explored and discussed, not swept under the rug, not rationalized away.

There’s something else going on here, besides ordinary hate speech and Internet trolls. Kathy Sierra was specifically and carefully targeted. She was attacked for no real reason—but the attacks, and the language and images used in the attacks are overtly sexualized and exceedingly misogynistic.
Like many other women with online presences, Sierra was attacked because she is female. There’s a culture of harassment online, directed towards women in general, over and above the usual ‘net obsessed trolls and nutters. It’s almost impossible to find a woman who blogs or participates in discussion forums who hasn’t been subjected to sexualized attacks and unwelcome sexually explicit comments, innuendos and email.

Bill Humphries linked to these posts from Min Jung Kim an Asian woman blogger, and Gin Mar, a woman and veteran of the Iraq war.
I think Liz Henry, like MacAllister Stone, has the right response:

I’d like to make a call to action. When this kind of shit happens, we’ll call it out and document it in public. Call it in the moment. Call it in front of your coworkers. Call it if it’s major or if it’s minor, it’s all part of the same spectrum of misogynist behavior. How about just saying, once in a while, right in the moment if you can, “That’s not funny,” when it’s really not. Say it crosses your boundaries. Say it’s not acceptable to you. This takes practice, but with time, we can all do it and find strength in numbers.

We need to be very clear that this kind of attack is not accepted, and that the community, and the ‘net as a whole, object to it. At the same time, I also want to acknowledge that there’s a rise in equally sexually-directed attacks against men on the net, and more often than not, overtly sexualized comments from women that very much qualify as hate speech; that’s not cool either, nor should it be acceptable.

In a subsequent post, I want to talk about the particular difficulties faced by women in technology, on and off the net; the underlying misogny in technology by a loud minority is very much part of the reason Kathy Sierra was attacked.

I’ve had problem with the concepts behind Turnitin right from the start; I blogged about my concerns regarding violating student’s rights some time ago. Now, students are suing Turnitin for copyright violation because their papers are databased and used for subsequent comparisons without their permission; I suspect we’ll see a privacy violation, particularly in the context of FERPA soon.

There are fairly well-known “A-list” bloggers skirting the outskirts of this. And there are certainly quite a few people who know who’s responsible.

They need to go to the police. This is absolutely not acceptable, ever.

Via Chuqui, here are some blogs that talk about Kathy’s sick, vicious, criminal attackers.

• Back in Skinny Jeans
• The Future of Communities
• Valleywag and here
• Accordion Guy
• Shelley
• Epeus’ Epigone
• Creating Passionate Users
• Brady Forrest
• Ross Mayfield
• Seth Godin
• Monkey in my Pants
• 2020 Hindsight
• Backup Brain
• Buzztracker
• Mathew Ingram
• Micro Persuasion
• Ongoing
• Whump.com

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