I decided to respond to Inside Higher Ed's "Video Killer the Faculty Star", not because it was shorter and easier to comprehend than "Recombitant Comedy" (though it undoubtedly was), but because I reacted most to this one. The article was a defensive one, for sure: it asked, at its base, "What will happen to academia?" What will happen to academia when students bring their technology into the classroom? When they record lectures? When they hold their professors accountable for problematic opinions?
The American Association of University Professors is quoted in the article as stating that the classroom should be a closed community as early as 1915. The article makes a good point in stating that in this era of technology such a privacy is not exactly a reality anymore- every student has on their person an audio and video recorder that they can, at any point in the lesson, activate. Which I don't really see as a bad thing: what's wrong with giving people the power to, if they please to, record things they deem important?
I find it interesting that one example that they use that includes a testimony from the recording side involves a video that had been selectively edited to produce its effects. Since it's the first example given any instance they show of recording faculty after this will have a tinge of dishonesty- has this video been tampered with, too? It's important to include this possibility in an article concerning the topic of recording, but to present it as your first argument can not be coincidence.
The writer's word choice shows a lot about his feelings on the issue, too- in the opening sentence, he uses phrases like "gotcha moments" and "The TMZ-ification of higher education" provide a very negative connotation to any who record. The TMZ-ification of higher education in particular is a telling metaphor: it brings to mind an image of an entire lecture hall staring down at the professor, two hundred cameras in hand, waiting for him or her to stumble. Which isn't what's happening at all- in fact, one of the defining conventions of the "gotcha" professor video genre is that the video usually starts in the middle of the conversation, as the student didn't think to record until the professor started doing something worthy of documentation.
