A few concerns about open access, and especially about the predatory journals that swim in them.
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School/Work
Phishing in Open Access Waters
Dear Search Committees,
It’s almost job season again, which means that it’s almost advice season again. Though grad students and job seekers are inundated with advice, search committees need advice too.
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The Google+ Assignment—Evaluation
Using Google+ for student assignments in a TV genre class would, ideally, link learning with social technologies students are already using, and spur students to consume social media more critically. As with all experiments there was some success and some failure.
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Ready to Chat?
To minimize the impact of the distance between us when we left graduate school, we committed to a weekly one-hour appointment. Though our weekly chats began as a way to maintain our friendship, they quickly became a way for us to continue to reap the benefits of our supportive work relationship and to navigate...
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How to be an Independent Scholar
Being an independent scholar means that research and academic writing must be redefined as pleasure: I research instead of watching TV or reading a book; I write instead of meeting with friends or going shopping; I edit and do professional activities at the cost of my family time.
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Moving
Academic life requires that one be able to move on command. But how does one do that?
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Dual Academic Couples and Long Distance Living
Commuting is no way to work. It’s also no way to live. And yet I’m surprised by how many of us there are. Probably every professor knows at least one couple in a similar situation.
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Single Motherhood and the Faculty Life
Motherhood and academia are in many ways an uneasy mix. And even more so when it comes to single motherhood.
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All the Single Academics
This piece attempts to challenge the stereotypes that single academics can write all the time (or any time we want), are free from family responsibility, and somehow have it “easier” than other academics.
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A Step Toward Fixing Peer Reviews: Sign Them
There are many proposals to transform institutions of peer review, and perhaps in time some will come to fruition. But there is a simple step that every concerned reviewer could take, right now, to make the process better, fairer, more useful and more human.
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Thoughts on the Intersection of Communication Research and Policy
It’s in the long-term best interests of the field on a variety of fronts that we work to play a more prominent role in the policy arena. But how do we do so?
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Flexibility for Faculty Fathers
My wife and I had the first of our three children during my first year as a faculty member, so I've never really known what it is to be a professor or a father without simultaneously wearing the other hat.
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Advice, Feedback, and Where to Get It
With all the bad advice being given about academia, or simply the lack of advice, where do we get good advice and how do we establish a better system for giving it?
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Balancing between “Academy” and “Industry”
A discussion of academic media studies work outside the university.
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On academic collaboration
Collaborations are frowned upon in the humanities: monographs are still the prime currency in tenure and promotion, and our training doesn’t prepare or encourage us for the give and take that collaborative writing demands. For me that’s a shame, because I love writing with others.
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