Blog, Blog, Blog
My Introduction to Electronic Media class was cancelled this afternoon because only three people had registered.
This figures because I had just finished the syllabus and announced its availability earlier today.
The class was cancelled on August 23, due to low enrollment.
The syllabus for Introduction to Electronic Media, at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, is now available on my professional website.
From the course description:
The course surveys the development of radio, television, cable/satellite, and digital media, including the Internet. In it, we will focus on how technology and industrial control of the electronic media shape their content.
One of the reasons I liked this course is because we draw very close connections between the hardware and software of electronic media. It is also one of the few courses where we examine closely the history of each electronic medium and trace the evolution to how contemporary media industries use them.
Today, many of us at Fordham University received this email.
From: Gerald Hines <g.hines@fordham.edu>
Thank you, for a job well done!
We’ve had some remarkable successes at Fordham over the past year and we want to thank all of the people who made that possible.
To show our appreciation for all of your hard work, we are providing lunch for all employees.
To order your lunch, please click here and log in to the web site by May 24th, 2013. Make sure that you complete the form in its entirety to ensure your lunch is delivered to you. You will be able to choose from a collection of sandwiches and salads as well as your choice of sides and dessert. You can even choose the time of day to have your lunch brought to you!
Again, thank you for all of your hard work!
Gerald Hines
Employee Benefits Specialist
When you follow the link, you’ll find that it asks you to enter your Fordham ID credentials, username and password. I checked the email header, and I found that the message originates from the domain phishme.com. It’s another phishing test. There is no free lunch.
I’m not amused by this tease. After going six weeks without pay this semester and not receiving a single word of apology, I’m not surprised that Fordham wouldn’t offer us a free lunch after benefitting from our hard work.
This phishing test is like a school in the summer: there is no class.
In this morning’s Introduction to Electronic Media class, which one member of the university staff referred to as my “volunteer job” without even the slightest sense of irony, we covered American network television. The topics involved the networks’ competition and a bit of its style over the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. It’s a lot to cram into a one-hundred fifty minute section, but I like to make sure students can see a bit of what television looked like some decades ago.
One of my favorite programs to screen from the 1960s is an episode of Dragnet from 1968. In this episode Joe Friday and Bill Gannon stumble upon an epidemic: youngsters taking LSD. In the clip I screened in class, Joe and Bill go to an abandoned house only to find several youngsters tripping on acid. The representation of the hallucinating kids is a bit over the top. One guy holds a paintbrush and proceeds to put it in his mouth. A woman takes to climbing a wall, although her feet never leave the ground.
As a way to disorient the viewer when entering this mind-altering den, the cinematography establishes the room in an unconventional way, at least for the television medium. We see a very wide-angle shot with several planes of action. The most string element is the placement of the colored lightbulbs throughout the room. There is even one in the front and center of the frame. The framing does not last very long. The subsequent shots are of the officers’ bewildered expressions and then of the kids tripping. It’s not the most innovative message: kids taking drugs is bad. It does however take advantage of the visual form to make the audience trip a little without resorting to unnecessary effects.
It’s hard to say anything new about Miami Vice that hasn’t been said, especially concerning its form. But I wanted to share a very different shot than the Dragnet example. While the shot of the kids tripping on LSD is a wide shot, this is the opposite: a telephoto lens that collapses the planes into one flattened image.
In this shot, we see Crocket call his estranged wife before heading out on a potentially fatal mission to take down a Miami drug lord. As he and Tubbs speed to their mission, Crocket stops the car and pulls it over at a phone booth. (Yes, this is slightly before “car phones”.) The shot shows this neon sign, which we see earlier in the episode, the phone booth, and the marina. Because of the telephoto lens, it makes Crocket seem very distant. Moreover, it is also disorienting because of the unconventional use of the flattened space. Subsequent shots show close-ups of Crocket and of his wife and reestablishes the conventional focal length to revert the television style back to “normal.” Normal focal length…normal television style…normal action-packed episode.
One of the schools where I teach has yet to pay my wages, for one of the two classes I teach there, over the last three biweekly cycles. To put it another way, I started teaching this particular class on January 16, but as of February 22, I have yet to receive a single dime for six weeks of instruction.
I raised the issue with our department secretary, who investigated the matter on February 1. The university should have first paid me on January 25, but I did not get paid for either my first or my second class. I did however get paid for the second class, including a retroactive payment for the first missed payment, on February 8.
When I did not receive payment for the first class on February 8, I presumed that the paperwork was still in processing and that I would be made whole on February 22. I was wrong,
When I checked my online pay stub and my bank account, I found that i had only been paid for one class. I began calling an array of bureaucrats in trying to figure out why I hadn’t been paid. I began calling Human Resources at 10:00 AM, and just before 5:00, I finally received a response from an administrator who coordinates the adjunct instructors.
The message merely validated what I had told each of them: that I had not been paid in three biweekly cycles. She said that she was aware of the "issues" and someone was "looking into it". But her message did have one juicy nugget of information: "I apologize for this inconvenience and I’m am endeavoring to find out why this has occurred, not only to you, but to many adjuncts." Clearly, there are some issues with processing payroll on time, and it is likely causing some financial hardship.
I requested that I receive a check for my work by no later than Monday, February 25, a full month later than I was supposed to be first paid.
If you are an adjunct instructor in a similar position, you may consider having the New York State Department of Labor help you collect your wages. From what I understand, you just need to complete Form LS-233 and submit it to the nearest Division of Labor Standards office.
The College Republicans at Fordham University have invited Ann Coulter to speak to their club, on campus. I first learned of Coulter speaking at Fordham via the light-hearted and amusing @FordhamPains Twitter.
@AnnCoulter coming to Fordham? Sorry, but that's a serious #FordhamPains moment. http://t.co/QJa5G5OV
— Fordham Pains (@FordhamPains) November 8, 2012
The FordahmPains Twitter also points to a petition on change.org asking the university to disinvite Coulter from speaking. As of 3:00 PM on Friday, the petition had gathered 1,840 signatures. The petition suggests that the university had invited her, which personally bugged me because Coulter is one of the most hateful conservative pundits today. However, the university has not invited her. Instead, it was a student group that invited her and will be sponsoring the event, albeit with student activity fees, that will take place on campus.
The President of the university issued an official statement, indicating that the administration will not stop Coulter from speaking on campus but expressed its chagrin in no uncertain terms.
To say that I am disappointed with the judgment and maturity of the College Republicans, however, would be a tremendous understatement. There are many people who can speak to the conservative point of view with integrity and conviction, but Ms. Coulter is not among them. Her rhetoric is often hateful and needlessly provocative—more heat than light—and her message is aimed squarely at the darker side of our nature.
A university should refrain from policing student speech, as it can have a chilling effect on the academic and personal development of its students. I applaud the university for not taking any actions against the College Republicans or the students editors of the The Ram newspaper, who published a silly story in its April Fool’s issue about Fordham turning Jewish. However, it’s quite disturbing to know that there exists on campus an environment that makes immature jokes that traffic in Jewish stereotypes or that invites someone who regularly makes racist and homophobic statements. It embarrasses the university and the rest of its community. I applaud the university for publicly censuring the College Republicans for inviting Coulter to speak on campus.
Update: The College Republicans have cancelled their Ann Coulter event. I’m somewhat satisfied to know that Coulter is cheaper than George Will. I also find it amusing to learn that Herman Cain has a reputation for being too unreliable on the lecture circuit.
After Superstorm Sandy cancelled a week’s worth of classes, there was no indication from any of the colleges where I teach that we would be making up classes. But over the last two days, CUNY and Fordham have quietly announced that they will be extending the semester in order to make up the loss days of instruction.
This is the right thing to do. If it is possible to add a few days of classes at the expense of an already long final exam period, then so be it. My Electronic Media class at Fordham was already short enough. Due to some puzzling scheduling, we ended up with only thirteen scheduled weeks of instruction, instead of the customary fourteen, and we would have been down to twelve with last weeks’ cancellation. This will give us the opportunity to cover digital media over two weeks instead of one, as I had to consolidate the two weeks’ worth of material after Sandy wreaked its havoc.
At CUNY, my New Technologies class has been interrupted throughout the entire semester. Although we started in late August, we have met on consecutive Mondays only once: September 24 and October 1. The interruptions have been due to Labor Day (September 3), Rosh Hashanah (September 17), Columbus Day (October 8), and now Superstorm Sandy (October 29). If we add another week at the end of the semester, I can cover the book I dropped from our schedule: Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion, a book students have already bought and can learn a great deal about critizing techno-humanitarianism.
My only peeve about the recent decision to make up the cancelled courses is that they came a little late. I had already condensed my syllabi last week when it became clear that we would not start classes until the Monday after the storm. With the delayed decisions and announcements, I will have revised each of my syllabi three times in the past week. And each time announced to my students of the revisions.
There has been a lot of back-and-forth decisions over the last week over how to handle the unprecedented cancellations. For example, Fordham had announced that classes would resume on Thursday, November 1, but then quickly rescinded that decision and postponed the reopening of its New York City campuses to Monday, November 5. I presume that it did so after fully considering the challenges students, staff and faculty would have with transportation. Similarly, Pratt had cancelled today’s midterm break but then reinstated it after considering the importance of the presidential election.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
By now, the string of emergency alerts from my work sites have been trickling in and are beginning to have a pretty predictable pattern.
Here’s the order of the announcements.
Oh well, back to getting some board games.
On Tuesday, after much anticipation, Fordham University migrated its staff and faculty from Lotus Notes to Gmail. Although I am not thrilled about having to depend on yet another Google product, I welcome this transition as Lotus Notes was simply unusable if you used a Mac or an iOS device:
It appears that migrations such as these trigger scam attempts. Today, one day after we migrated to Gmail, we find a password phishing attempt disguised as a password protection service. Here’s the message:
Subject: Password Review
IMPORTANT SECURITY NOTICE
Due to a recent rise in security breaches in our industry, Congress has mandated higher information security standards. As passwords are the primary mechanism of defense against unauthorized access, we are being required to check the complexity of all employees’ passwords and recommend changes if they fall short of the standards.
Please assist us in being compliant and visit https://www.Fordham.edu/PasswordCheck to test the strength of your passwords.
Thank you for your co-operation,
Corporate Security
Fordham Information Security
The link above takes you to a legitimate-looking page on a verifytoken.com site. It is clearly a site designed to fool Fordham users to enter their usernames and passwords and to steal their security credentials.
When I visited the site and shorted the URL to http://fordham.edu.verifytoken.com/passupload/6715ed/, which is where the link in the email took me, I saw that this was a simulated phishing attempt. I entered my actual username and some password consisting of pounding on keystrokes. It gave me a “fooled ya” message, indicating that this was merely a test and that no passwords were collected.
Well played, @FordhamSecureIT. Well played.
Having students locate articles in media trade press publications, such as Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, Broadcasting and Cable, and others, is a exercise I like to assign my students, especially when teaching classes on contemporary media industries. It not only introduces them to what members of the media industries read about their industry, but it also exposes students to online research resources beyond simple web searches.
In this video, I demonstrate how to find trade press articles using ProQuest and LexisNexis, two popular research databases available to members of Fordham University and most post-secondary educational institutions.
