What is the Pope doing in our picture? And other vexing quandaries concerning freshmen video-blogging

d
While I really get a kick out of some of Intro to 21st Century marketing Steven K. Duke's e-mails, it's hard not to find this morning's all-class bulletin about two video-blogging students grating. First off, if I had made this video, I wouldn't want to expose to other freshmen. I might even think twice before sending it home to Cincinnati or (really, Katy?) "the OC." That said, it wouldn't be altogether surprising if Duke spends his time away from the Baron scouring northbynorthwestern for freshmen-produced content.

But where's the deluge of e-mails about his other students' accomplishments? Dan Fletcher's written some good stuff in the Daily, as has Emily Glazer. Here's to a non-discriminatory Duke. Teaching for the 21st century doesn't mean ignoring newspapers. Much as the Levine ideology may have completely obfuscated their importance, they're still around. And by the looks of it, video-blogging isn't shaping up as too great a replacement.

Baron cancels sleepover; ethically justified maimings dispensed via handheld keypads

Today's 21st century marketing lecture was meant to be devoid of Steve Duke. It wasn't.

Perhaps the thought of skipping the ethics lecture to jet off to one-time guest-speaker Ed Baron's Key West abode struck Duke as a tad too ironic. From the confusion pervading the ensuing PowerPoint slides, ("real truth may not come from juxtaposing extremes; it may come in a gray area in between") we're betting it was just a bad breakup.

Didn't slow down Friday's lecture, though. The keypad clickers employed by ASG for voting and tested on Medill freshmen a few weeks ago were back for an ethics questionnaire culminating in a scintillating ethical dilemma. A bargain-bin video posed freshmen-cum-train-conductors an impossible choice: mow down five immobilized invalids on the tracks or flip a magic switch, derail the train, and avert their deaths but kill another innocent bystander waiting at the platform.

And the students vote to maim! Fully 66% (come to think of it, a suspect portion) of respondents said Fuck the invalids. Apparently the prevailing logic was that these people were on the tracks and should therefore die instead of the poor woman waiting at the platform. It evidently escaped freshmen that the five people on the tracks were undoubtedly unable to move for some reason -- perhaps tied to the tracks or deaf -- and just as innocent as the latte-sipping woman awaiting the next train. And, on that note, why is the train unable to stop if people are waiting for it at a nearby platform? Wouldn't it be stopping? Here's to the hope that Duke posts the video on YouTube for public perusal. Who knows -- it may just turn up on the final.

Punctuation out the door in wake of online midterm snafus

Check your inboxes, Medill freshmen. Steve Duke is coming to the rescue.

"All,Relax.Clearly, there has been a system problem with the midterm. I'll talk to Academic Technologies tosee what went wrong and we'll reschedule this whole thing.
Steve Duke. [sic]"

This, the first of two e-mails Duke sent out after students couldn't complete Friday's Blackboard-administered midterm, was dashed off in such a flash at 2:27:01 p.m. that the defective spacebar key on his BlackBerry clearly was no concern next to the need of his anxious students.

"Oh my God, I hate you, Steven Duke. Like, I stayed in last night to get an A, not a B!" wailed Medill freshmen after the e-mails arrived.

Some, it so happens, had successfully completed the online midterm and gotten good scores.

In his second e-mail, evidently one written with the use of a keyboard endowed with a spacebar, Duke says he isn't sure how he'll reconcile the wishes of students who scored well and don't want to retake the exam with those who couldn't take it at all.

Let's not even think about the inundation of e-mails deluging Duke's inbox. But the controversy is sure to touch off a battle royale among students dissatisfied with 94% scores who want to retake it and those who cakewalked their way to a perfect 100.

Hopefully all this will be resolved when next week's guest, or perhaps professor replacement, Dean John Lavine decides that since we're all really "Medill consumers," we should be satiated with perfect scores.

Daily roundup: Us, them and devo.

From Friday's editions:

• Are you visiting because you read this?

• A case study in The Boring Lede. Oh, Devo, when will you go quietly into the good night? Evidently not before we figure out how to develop pictures.

• Today's shocker: the housing bubble popped in Evanston, too.

• Wait, there's more: Editorial gives a "thumbs-down" to the Chicken Shack robbery. Don't mess with the men of Skokie, guys. That $600 bought more than poultry.

• The Letters to the Editor continue to offer the best critiques of the paper.

Enjoy Colbert, folks. I mean seeing him in the parade. It's not like he's going to, you know, speak.

Daily roundup: homosexuals, Jews, piñatas. Sounds like a PLAY day!

From Tuesday's playful editions:

• Now that it's hit Evanston hard, tea's no longer just dirty water.

• Turns out Searle's a real gyp. Kudos to Rebecca Huval for pitching this.

• Norris finally comes up with a cool mini-course. ¿Has tratado crear piñatas? ¡Debes!
• Forget CAs. Dorms will now have either University police officers on patrol or will be monitored by CCTV cameras. Say hi to big brother!

• Janessa Goldbeck continues to rock all the other Forum columnists.

• "Picture this: Guy meets girl at NU, three years later they marry and 27 years later they receive a Tony award." No, it's not a typo, it was 1969. But yes, we read guy meets guy, too.

• Mel, give us some more "sorry."
  

Daily roundup: Smorgasbord of the unsurprising

From Wednesday's editions:

• As long as Levine is "exploding the curriculum," cover the Medill shake-up as needed, says Public Ed David Spett. Guess we'll see no more of the oh-so-amusing public spats with the EIC.

• NUIT debuts a roving "laptop ER."

• Zinn blasts war, Bush, balding. The solution: Imperialists anonymous.

• The men of Skokie want their chicken. Badly.

Daily roundup: poking unleashed, pep unfulfilled and sleep unimaginable

Tuesday's apertifs:

• Behold the secrets of the poke.

• Get ready for the 47º water balloon fight. And we wonder why homecoming events routinely fail to attract attendees.

• Shocker: NU students find themselves sleep deprived.

• We're not just going organic. We're Go Go-ing organic.

• This week in Alec Davis: Evanston's the only town in America not to go for college football. That's nice, Alec, I'm just looking forward to the day we're washing dishes together in Kowloon.
  

Daily roundup: Play nice, drink Busch Light and, for the love of God, don't write Devo stories (or columns)

From Monday's editions:

• Because we really need another sorority.

• The Devo story list has grown thin.

• CTECs 1, Ratemyprofessor.com 0.

• Let's all "stand in a corner at the Deuce, Busch Light in one hand, free Philly's Best pizza in the other, rocking back and forth and chanting, 'I am having fun, I am having fun …' " like Forum columnist Dave Kucinskas.

• Today's Editorial: Don't take our parking lot, Evanston. It's "not nice."

• We're not the only ones who have issues with Daily columnists. Now why on Earth would Forum editors make the letter critiquing their section the last one published?
  

Dispatch from Medill: Lavine:Price::Duke:Baron?

"The world is our oyster," slick TV suit Hank Price told Intro to 21st Century Marketing students Friday with a twinkle in his glassy eyes.

Price, while reportedly no match for Steve Duke boytoy Ed Baron in bed, had quite a twinkle to his smooth speech. Decked out in head-to-toe black, he seemed to offer a Faustian bargain to his intrepid audience of young journalists: Adapt with the rest of the media and become adept across many platforms or you won't have a job.

Soon thereafter, however, he seemed to veer into the Lavinespeak students have been saturated with for weeks. "In the future," he said, "everyone's going to be a content producer or content seller."

He then proceeded to gush about the "ambitious" plans Lavine has layed out, saying that "Lavine is doing something for Medill that no other journalism school in the country is yet doing."

Price may yet be the Rachel to Lavine's Ross, or, if you will, the Baron to Lavine's Duke.

But reports were that Lavine's interest in Price was solely to ensure that parents, many of whom visited the class due to concurrent scheduling with Family Weekend, were not treated to another love-in between the Duke and the Baron that might jeopardize the Dean's monopoly on the future of journalism (or at least 180 kids' parents' $45k/year.)

The situation underscored the tension between Lavine and Duke for control of the new-fangled class. Though the Dean helmed its development and sees the class of 2010 as his group of highly-educated lab rats, Duke was given the reins while Lavine sat in the back of the Fisk lecture hall. Today, however, marked the first time one of his proxies has directly stepped in to right the ship.

Duke, left listless by the students' captivation with Price, wandered the aisles like a bald Vanna White, handing out mikes to students with questions.

A key indicator of who wins the battle for control of the class may be which guest speaker's words worm their way into the all multiple-choice midterm next week.

Price, whose return remains up in the air, left the freshmen amiably, saying "usually they don't let me talk to undergraduates because you have your whole careers ahead of you."

Anything to avoid another in-class reacharound sesh, we guess.

Daily roundup: NU vs. Evanston, ASG vs. Flicker, limbs vs. whiskers

Friday's odd-job throwdown edition:

• Try the harmonica.

• Tech moves on from regrowing human limbs to developing human whiskers.

• The Devo Duo ante up in the increasingly caustic Evanston-NU battle royale. Seems that the overzealous city may seize the NU-owned parking lot it may want to transform into a government hub. Constitutional whoop-ass. Woot.

• Forum gives the Flicker Film Festival folks a "guest column" to open fire on ASG for wrongly accusing them of bouncing checks and reducing their budget as a result. They call it a "capricious dispensation of discipline." Egregiously lenghty sentences ensue.

• Though its headline may be an embarrasment to journalism, the Schlossberg Friday roundup remains a lovely read.
  

Daily roundup: Today in boring man-made structures: CCS, Tech and parking lots.

From Thursday's snow-slickened editions:

• Tech is leaking gases again, but this time they're not exploding.

• ASG puts the slapdown on the Flicker Film Festival for forging signatures.

• EIC Ryan Wenzel "risk[s] sounding melodramatic" to tell public editor David Spett he was really, really mean to say the Daily's website could use an overhaul. Does anyone else think the better retort to this is to simply say, We don't devote twelve column-inches to the glaringly obvious?

• The good columnist says Kim Jong-Il looks "exactly like a thumbs-up with a smiley-face drawn on it." Other than that, it's pretty much a morbid exercise in international-relations-flavored black humor.

• More NU-owned parking lots are being built to accomodate the cars expelled when Evanston's government moves in to that other one. Or something.

• This just in: CCS is just as boring as you thought.
  

Daily roundup: Monday night mayhem, Scrabble goes Big Ten, Wikipedia explains all

From Tuesday's hot-off-the-presses, Aldermen-addled editions:

• The Devo duo report that the 14-year-old boy whose backyard buzzes with 12,000 bees will be allowed to keep the insects in his backyard. In a 5-4 decision, the Aldermen ignored residents who said their barefoot clover walks were now unsafe due to the possibility they might step on bees and voted to allow "hobbyist beekeeping."

• The duo also report that residents are freaking out over "secret negotiations" between the city and the university to move the seat of Evanston's government to a NU-owned parking lot. Um, guys, you reported on this last week.

• Junior campaigns to incorporate Scrabble into the fold of Big Ten sports. In other news, "completely not newsworthy" is worth 49 points. It's also a triple word score if you convince your eds to put it on the front page. (Sorry, Dan.)

• Today in Forum columnist Alec Davis: There's no need for textbooks; just "Wiki it." This does a lot to explain last week's screed about the impending downfall of American society. And, Alec, I can't tell you how glad I am that the internet did more for you as a 13-year-old than provide a free source of pornography.
  

Daily roundup: Badgered and buglarized campus moves onto Greco-Roman stage of post-collegiate job hunt

From Monday's editions:

• Sports offers us not one, not two, not three but four articles blasting (ok, analyzing) the Wildcats' 41-9 loss to Wisconsin Saturday. Tragically, students weren't able to take in the slaughterfest due to an unknown error between ESPN.com, which was supposed to broadcast the game, and NUIT. Why does none of this shock us?

• University Police release a report saying that burglaries are up 21 percent over last year. A spokesman also says students are safer than in recent years. That's right, folks, former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan is now working for NUPD.

• The senior job hunt is on. No word on whether it's so on.

• Someone at Tech is planning to regrow human arms. We're not kidding.
  

Daily roundup: Colbert, Piven and Hungarian chicken. You pick.

The psuedo-Hollywood edition:

• Jeremy Piven's been off the Hollywood scene ever since he smeared his parents with blood after cutting his chin slobbering his Emmy. What better comeback audience than the ladies of NU, who stood in line for hours outside Pick-Staiger in hopes of sitting within eyesight of TV's most famous asshole. How things have changed since his days in Mandy Moore vehicle Chasing Amy.
• In a brilliant tactical manuever worthy of recently departed "judicial affairs" "architect" Lupita Temiquel-McMillian, NU secures Stephen Colbert for its Hollywood-themed homecoming parade. Colbert, who works in New York covering Washington, probably thinks the theme is fine by his standard of "truthiness."
• Completing today's stories from the devo duo is a ditty from Vincent Bradshaw on a woman who is teaching seniors how to use the few pennies they have left after social security checks, daiquiris and medicaid engage in epic melee to make Hungarian chicken using "dirt cheap" ingredients.

• Lest we forget the ill-begotten Forum, today's column returns the section to the wholesome perfection we first beheld this week with "American Dishwasher in Hong Kong." Writer Dan Kramer tried his best to rescue this drivel with spicy rhetoric, but fails. Miserably.

Everyone greet Kashmir, the newest member of NU's nicest blog. Her first post is below.

Solo act: Guest-speaker-free and apologetic, Duke incites "fear and fright"... or boredom.

"You can't please all the people all the time," as Duke's recent grammatical gaffe demonstrated. Too bad he killed the truth-ridden cliche by using it three times in the opening moments of class. Better luck next time, buddy. Held hostage on a glorious Friday afternoon, Professor Duke's 21st Century Media class snoozed through a 30-minute tangent of a curiously high school nature, masquerading as "housekeeping." The highlight of the delay to Duke's first solo venture this quarter? An apology for the "your/you're" mishap. Or perhaps it was his finest analogy of the laborious two hours (but thankfully not three), involving a news spigot and journalistic bucket. At least the man has some imagination...

Covert texting and Star magazine consumption (brownie points if you can do both simultaneously) weren't really viable options during today's lecture as the Duke hovered, strolled, patrolled, and wove his way around the entire perimeter of Fisk 217. You'd think he was an anxious first-time student teacher corralling a bunch of rambunctious badasses or something. Speaking of being badass, the solo-reigning prof did manage to infuse some legit, sobering docu-journalism into the second segment of his schtick. The half-hour piece created by Medill seniors chronicled Chitown Housing Authority's controversial revamping of the notoriously ghetto South Side Cabrini-Green projects. C'mon now; that place is seriously fascinating. Not to mention seriously hood. Duke may well have inspired a couple repenting do-gooders after viewing "This Is Change." If only more of his lectures fixated on genuine journalism like that. Granted, the repartee between Duke and his marketing-minded guests of honor have a charm all their own.

Daily roundup: Chitown strikes back in cupcake wars, Evanston aldermen possibly cracked out, PLAY says drink and be mind-fucked by Freddie Kruger

From Thursday's PLAY-infused tab:

• Finally Forum produces a decent column. It has, you know, a feasible point and it's grounded in fact, unlike this week's uninspiringly concocted, mildly racist American Dishwasher in Hong Kong. This one's Goldbeck vs. Bienen, folks. Who wants to pick a winner?

• To the defense of pretension comes letter-writer and PLAY staffer Matt Weir, who says he just doesn't nod his head the same way y'all do to those recycled Timbaland beats. Sadly he avoids the obvious yet dazzling syntactical refutation to this week's anti-pretension screed: Pretension is so in, guys. It's so in.

• Evanston mulls moving its civic center to an NU-owned parking lot. Drive in your car, eat in your car, govern in your car.

• Go solar, so long as your conservative neighbors can't see it. Despite the fact that these two stories on bizarro decisions by city aldermen are written by dynamic devo duo Matt Presser and Vincent Bradshaw, no word yet on what's in the water over at city hall.

• PLAY says host your pre-Le Pasage party at Elm Street Liquors. I say that name's a fucking weird fusion of shady and mediocre horror film and if you're going to pay $185 for bottle service just head to Le Pasage instead.

• Chicago catches up (or cashes in, depending on your perspective) on the cupcake craze that swept the country in 2002. So, this is def. a prime reason the Windy City remains superior to cupcake-incapacitated cities like Dubuque and Hoboken. Yeah, o.k.
  

Daily roundup: labyrinths, wimps and roller-skates

Wednesday's appetizers:

• The Public Editor evidently wandered onto the Daily's online offerings (blaspheme!) and discovered that the labyrinthine layout is shit.

• Even Republicans want to lose power on November 7.

• Career services opens new office in the 9th ring of hell. That's Dante's own translation for the "core reserve" section of University Library.

• City eds hope for a return to the halycon days of west Evanston, when we could all don our roller-skates and head down to the Y for a study session. No word yet on possible homosexual overtones.

• Sports takes us on a psychoanalytic ride to the heart of Big 10 football. Amazingly this article is a good read.
  

Daily roundup: Caffeine new trans fat, America doomed, building longs for neighbors

From Tuesday's possibly-printed, rain-soaked editions:

• Not only is your caffeine pricier, it's also deadlier when canned. Devo writers apparently can't withstand the scalding calefaction of coffee, instead choosing to rinse down the age-old beverage with gallons of pus-colored, candy-flavored energy drinks.
  
  And watch out now -- their convenience can kill ("Energy drinks contain no more caffeine than a cup of coffee, but they are easier to overdose on because of their convenience," according to two Weinberg sophs.) We'll skip the caffeine in a can, but we wish we'd been told two weeks ago about Starbucks, lads, when we heard about it in the Trib and in RedEye. We may have to return to CCI for another nickel!

• In case you were in a mine cart beneath the surface of the Earth, we had hail last night.

• Deep, deep within this idiotic polemic is the idea that our grandchildren will be migrating to Asia to find decent work due to our lounging in complacent jobs as "stock traders, marketing specialists and efficiency consultants." Dude! Global warming will totally have knocked us all off by then.

• Somebody buy this Citywatch writer a dildo. Any more tantalizing screeds about the lonely phalluses -- excuse me, skyscrapers -- of downtown Evanston and we may gag ourselves.
  

Daily roundup: Zambia remains a figment of the collective Northside imagination, pretension is so out and Skype defies linguistic boundaries

From today's menu:

• The Daily remains reasonable sure Evanstonians' African geographical ineptitude is as big as the Ngorogoro crater.

• Faux gras introduction is definitely detering seitan-chomping South Side masses from schlepping to Evanston for their fattened goose liver pate fix.

• Devo writer Kathrin Hanek flaunts the syntactical verve of an exchange student ("Skype is recently finding favor among Northwestern students") to better explain the keyboard dialings of hundreds of foreign students phoning home. No, Kathrin, we haven't Skyped anyone yet. After reading your article, we don't think you have either.
  
• Reader brands Daily's music coverage pretentious ("Because pretension is out, guys. It's so out.") Her reaction to GossipDesk remains eagerly awaited.

• And, finally, because color commentary grinds EIC Ryan P. Wenzel the wrong way like Whoa, drunken football fans at the Globe Café calmly chant, "get them, get them" after touchdowns. And yes, friends, café has an accent.
  

Murdoch legal team crashes Duke/Baron sleepover

As if student outcry weren't enough cause for Intro to 21st Century Marketing lecturer Steve Duke to fix the grammatical errors his 9/29 PowerPoint was rife with, a legal team from conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch swooped in Sunday to force rectification of the errors. Duke related last Friday the story of a young Murdoch shopping his newest property, The New York Post, to potential advertisers, including Macy's. A sales rep there reportedly told him way back in 1971 that "Your readers are our shoplifters." Duke's slide, however, read "You're readers," and his words were drowned out by the simulcast voices of ten students reading the slide as it were.

The errors didn't escape the tentacles of Murdoch's vast organization, and now the mistake has been corrected. "We didn't really care about this crap between him and the Baron," a rep for Murdoch writes. "If he didn't correct this, thought, we'd have had to sic Billy on him," he said, referring to Fox News attack dog Bill O'Reilly. Word is Duke really feared that he himself might become Page Six slam material if he did not comply with the legal crew's grammarian's requests, as the group found him and 9/29 guest speaker Ed Baron shacked up Sunday in what a Medill rep referred to as a "holistic retreat where the two mulled future media integration, Nielsen ratings and an ad buyout of High Times." But reports indicate it was more like a reacharound sleepover. Murdoch's team nonetheless rolled Duke out of his four-poster early Sunday to force corrections to the material and a midday posting that all but the most hard-working students were bound to overlook. "Look," the Murdoch rep said with a wink, "it's a sticky situation, but Rupert prefers his history to be, at the very least, properly punctuated."