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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, August 06, 2007

April 16


Although she understands why the idea's controversial, UD thinks it's a good thing for the students at Virginia Tech who covered the attack while it was going on to publish what they wrote:

'When the shooting began at Virginia Tech — which was to become the scene of the worst massacre in modern U.S. history — a handful of students in one locked-down media writing class hurried to their computers.

The students in professor Roland Lazenby's class grabbed their phones and began reporting from their desks on the shootings April in nearby Norris Hall for planetblacksburg.com, the student-run news Web site.

Lazenby and seven student journalists eventually decided to publish the results of their reporting, and their book, "April 16th: Virginia Tech Remembers," is to be released Aug. 28.

... Their book does not investigate the events leading up to that day, nor does it assign blame. Instead, in a series of narratives submitted by students, faculty and community members, it tells the story of April 16 and its aftermath through the eyes of those who experienced it first-hand.'



UD wrote, in her Liberal Education essay, "The Online Amplification Effect," about a wired world at universities in which whoever happens to be near a computer will report major events, and this is the example of what she has in mind (UC Santa Cruz students instantly reporting their responses to the suicide of their chancellor is another). This is authentic, and we should be grateful for it.