A couple of interesting meta-academic things today:
1. No Facebook = Academic Value? An Inside Higher Ed blurb about a philosophy professor who offers his students extra credit for abstaining from “social and traditional media” for the whole semester. “Out of a class of around 35 students, only about 12 will try for the extra credit and by the end of the semester only between 4 and 6 are still “media abstinent.” Longer article here.
Interesting idea, and I’d love to see what kinds of reactions he gets from his students (one of them is interviewed in the article linked above). I want to know how it’s policed, of course–Is it just a matter of trust? Can you tell the difference between a journal entry written by a genuine abstainer and one written by a faker? Also, I don’t want to overstate things, but for some students, such a move–abstaining from ALL social AND traditional media??–would prove socially costly, and for all of my students, it would prove *academically* costly. Perhaps the prof makes exceptions for email, or academically-related media use, but at least at Michigan, we *expect* that students will actively participate in several kinds of social media use. Email at the very least, but in many people’s classes, also online discussion boards, media sharing, blogs, Twitter, and yes, Facebook. Using media is *part* of their grades. So it seems like this would affect students at many levels; those journal entries must be full of conflict and anguish!
2. New Journal of Experimental Linguistics, announced by Mark Liberman (its EIC). I think this is a *great* idea, though I confess that it sounds like the content will mostly be out of the realm of methodologies that I am knowledgeable about, except for Praat or R scripts. (All the better for something like this to exist, then, for people like me to learn a thing or two about other software and methods!)
The comments to Mark’s announcement are worth a look-see. As I recently mentioned, I’m reading The Linguistics Wars again (slowly), and my reaction to a few of these few comments makes me think on how the “wars” are continuing but with (slightly) different issues at core. Namely, are we a hard science, a humanities field, a social science, or what? A couple of the commenters suggest that partly because more and more experimental (read: computational?) work is happening in linguistics, it’s time linguistics was considered a hard science. Of course, in some ways this is what biolinguistics argues for as well. But there are plenty of people left in linguistics–both in practice and in training–who won’t find much of interest in a journal focused on experimental work or replication, and/or who aren’t interested in replacing the “social” (or “cognitive”?) with “hard” in the “______ science” designation. I for one am happy about this, because part of what is so exciting to me about linguistics is its straddling of different fields, methodologies, epistemologies, etc. In many ways this puts us at a disadvantage administratively, but from where I sit right now, the intellectual benefits are immense.


