News in the Information Age

Jack Fuller, What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Experienced newspaperman Fuller provides an interesting analysis of the state of journalism, tying the fate of news coverage not to the fate of print and ink publishing but to the condition of our society and the need for honest, reliable reporting. Fuller covers the emergence of journalism as a profession, the development of its principles and methods, the challenges offered by television and then the Internet, and suggestions regarding its future. Fuller does not defend traditional journalism, but he, instead, shows where the field needs to accommodate new readers and technologies. While independence and verification must remain, Fuller suggests that other traditional notions, such as neutrality and disinterestedness, may be far less important or relevant.

Rethinking Public Education

Even though Diane Ravitch's new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010), concerns K-12 education, there is much in it that ought to be of interest to university faculty. Ravitch, an education professor and involved in a number of efforts to reform public education, recounts how the reform efforts ultimately became a fixation with testing, driven by a business model, with a focus only on a portion of such education (mostly reading and math skills, aspects lending themselves to testing). Ravitch worries about public education being given over to foundations, philantropists, and profit-making corporations and removing this education from the normal democratic safeguards. It is a depressing read, documenting billions of dollars in expenditures and multiple efforts with modest, or often no, success. Much of this is a confession by Ravitch that her support for national curriculum standards and school choice has been misguided. Unfortunately, her concluding chapter while considering a new commitment to a more well-rounded education and stronger support for teacher preparation (among other things) rings hollow; it seems to offer a direction no better than where we have been and suggests that perhaps all we have learned is what doesn't work.

Business Ethics

Max Anderson and Peter Escher, The MBA Oath: Setting a Higher Standard for Business Leaders (New York: Portfolio, 2010) is an effort to bring a new ethical component to business schools, wrestling with the wreckage of recent economic woes and corporate misconduct, and even redefining the very nature of the degree and the curriculum supporting it. Anderson and Escher are recent graduates of the Harvard Business School, where the MBA Oath originated, and they lace their book with many real-life and hypothetical examples that extend beyond the walls of such schools. Anyone interested in professional ethics will want to examine this interesting book.

Having trouble sleeping? Maybe it's your iPad

from the LISNEWS feed today http://lisnews.org/node/36824/ :

May 17, 2010 from CNN:

"Unlike paper books or e-book readers like the Amazon Kindle, which does not emit its own light, the iPad's screen shines light directly into the reader's eyes from a relatively close distance. That makes the iPad and laptops more likely to disrupt sleep patterns than, say, a television sitting across the bedroom or a lamp that illuminates a paper book, both of which shoot far less light straight into the eye, researchers said."

...Although you should read the rest of the story and see the video from CNN, because some people don't agree...go to http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/13/sleep.gadgets.ipad/

Yawn?

A Basic History of Privacy in the US

Frederick S. Lane's American Privacy: The 400-Year History of Our Most Contested Right (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009) is a basic historical overview of privacy debates and perspectives in the U.S. Lane reviews the evolving notions of privacy, considers the implications of the emergence of communication networks (the postal system, the telegraph and telephone, the Internet), political and social campaigns about the protection of privacy (including ample discussion about various federal statutes), the impact of certain documentary forms on the notion of privacy (postcards, photographs, and credit cards), and so forth. Lane's analysis demonstrates our proclivity to give up our privacy when it seems convenient to do so. This is a useful text.