briefs

(U-WIRE) NORMAL, Ill. – Receiving college credit for watching YouTube seems more like a… (U-WIRE) NORMAL, Ill. – Receiving college credit for watching YouTube seems more like a scenario from a movie than real life.

Pitzer College, a small liberal arts school in California, has pioneered mass communication education by offering a class on and about YouTube.

U.S. News ranked Pitzer College among the nation’s top 50 liberal arts colleges.

YouTube, recently acquired by Google, allows users from all over the world to post and watch millions of videos in the largest virtual media library ever compiled.

Alexandra Juhasz, media studies professor at Pitzer, is teaching the course this fall.

“Learning from YouTube” explores the role of the site as a mass media outlet.

“I would like (the students) to be more self-aware consumers and producers within the media culture that they’ve inherited,” Juhasz said.

Students control most of the class material and are encouraged to post videos of their own. Juhasz will lecture on YouTube as a form of “corporate-sponsored democratic media expression.”

Each and every class session will be posted on YouTube.

Not to be outdone, Stanford University’s computer science department recently announced it will be offering a class about Facebook.

The class is entitled “Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook” and will focus on the development and use of Facebook applications.

Class members will work in small groups to develop education-based applications for the social network.

Dr. B.J. Fogg is teaching the class with instructor Dr. David McClure.

“Students will be evaluated on how well their applications engage users,” Fogg said.

“At the end of the course, we’re having a public exposition,” Fogg continued. “We want to give students experience in presenting and discussing their work with the public.”

Students will be learning product management, product marketing and application development throughout the semester-long course.

Andrew Cross, The Daily Vidette (Illinois State U.)

U-WIRE) NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Rutgers University students gathered Thursday to protest research that they decried as racist, paranoid and undemocratic.

The protest was directed at Rutgers’ Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, which along with three other schools, is conducting research to develop software in a joint project with the Department of Homeland Security.

According to a handout distributed to students, the software is being developed to track the content of political speech in Internet blogs and on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, with the stated intention of identifying ‘anti-American’ sentiment and rooting out ‘terrorists.’

“If you look at history, the same thing happened during the Red Scare with McCarthy when there were communists,” Rutgers junior Tiffany Cheng said. “The people that were punished and jailed never harmed anyone. Many were artists, musicians and academics who disagreed with the way our government was run, and, in this case, terrorism has replaced communism.”

“Homeland security requires that we draw inferences about activities from massive flows of data arriving continuously over time,” Fred Roberts, director of DIMACS and of the Center for Dynamic Data Analysis, said in an e-mail. “DyDAn researchers will develop novel technologies to find patterns and relationships in dynamic, non-stationary, sometimes massive data sets.”

Despite the protest’s focus on the tracking of Internet activity, Roberts lists other uses for the software.

“DyDAn research is expected to be useful to get an early warning of disease ‘events’ such as avian flu and to find cost-effective schemes for locating sensors to check for nuclear or biological weapons,” Roberts said.

The program also aids in developing strategies for carrying out inspection for weapons of mass destruction at ports of entry, and searching through massive amounts of text or financial data, including blogs and social networking sites, to find early warning of terrorist plots, he said.

“The work at Rutgers the students are concerned about is not aimed at identifying anti-American sentiments, nor do I believe it can be useful for that,” Roberts said. “It is aimed at picking up ‘chatter’ about potential terrorist plots, not at picking up opposition to the War in Iraq or opposition to government spying on private conversations. The methods for doing these two things are very different.”

Nasreen Hussain, Daily Targum (Rutgers)