Please send me a note.

Jim

Most of them did not email me back. Two people emailed me to say that they had endorsed the Center for Internet Studies, but did not have involvement in the conference. Presidents of two of the organizations listed as sponsors indicated that they did not know about the conference or give permission to have their logo used.

Dr. Barbara L. McCombs emailed to say that it “is indeed a legitimate conference.”

Dr. Cornwell emailed me two times, and was polite and not rude each time. He even offered to me free registration! I do not know, now, what to think. Some people who are listed supporters say it is a “scam conference” and others say it is “legitimate.” I will choose to go to more popular conferences, I think.

I’ve been working and studying in the education sector in the UK for the last 20 years on and off. Never heard of Oaklands. List of UK universities here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom

You can always drop UCAS (Universities & Colleges Admissions Service) a line:
http://www.ucas.com/

There is an Oaklands college which is a further education college – looks like it mainly does courses for 14-19 year olds with vocational courses and access to higher education, and a limited number of higher education courses. But its not in London, and its not a university. http://www.oaklands.ac.uk/

I should note that he has also contacted me suggesting that he will be pursuing a libel suit. The above was not intended to slander his character, merely to make that character clearer. In the US, truth is a defense against libel, and a number of things (e.g., he claims a degree from Oaklands University in the UK, apparently a known diploma mill, etc.) suggest that if anything I have been generous in my account.

That’s my last word on the topic. Obviously, under threat of a lawsuit, I’m disinclined to engage in further discussion.

I would be interested in your enlightened view.

The ball is in your court.

Reid

This posting is filled with factual errors.

1. I offered to resign from AOIR and the offer was accepted by its president Matt Allen. However, I was not informed of the acceptance as would be expected.
2. I call myself Reid Cornwell because that is the name that appears on my birth certificate.
3. Every person on my board was invited to participate and they generally did so in writing. I.E. the board is not virtual as he alleges. The people that reside in Colorado have participated in face to face meetings.
4. Most trolling is done so anonymously, my 900+ listings on Google argue against this definition. Hardly anonymous as he alleges.
5. While I attempted a pseudonym it was rejected by Alex as the listserv manager. All of my posts were under my own name.
6. I made no suggestion that I should be given “due process”. I did not want it. I did address the rules as draconian.
7. I did not post anyones comments that were offered as private. I did post emails that contained crude, insulting or inappropriate comments made by other listserv members.
8. I was a paid AOIR member. This distinction is important because as such I was one of the owners of the listserv not a non-member participant.
9. Alex refers to some issue of credentials (which I see as academic credentialism), they are available to any person of good will. My credential have been available online for decades. In addition they have been vetted by all of the institutions I relate.
10. I have never claimed to be anthing but a person who has been involved with the internet and other networked systems for 3 decades.
11. Most of my work has been in the industril secor and have had no need for publications accept as a hobby interest. Despite that, my publications have appeared in national and international publications for ove 3 decades.

I view Alex’s writing with sadness because he has exposed a vindictive nature that say’s more about him than me.

Finally, I just discovered this article so I have not had the opportunity to respond before now.

Below the fold are blogs with titles that start with the letter ‘A’. Any glaring omissions? Anything worthy checking out? Is YOUR blog starting with this letter?……

On the other hand, when something like this happens, your first instinct is to go and see whether this person does this in other venues, and that helps to decide how best to proceed. I thought it was important for people trying to figure out who he is to have a pointer to the discussion on AIR-L. He has indicated that he stands by his interactions there, and so, I think it’s worth indicating those. I know some people who think everything he wrote was beyond the pale. I actually was more sympathetic (and you can see that I tried to make some of those threads productive), but in any event, I think that this shouldn’t be buried.

Given that he is presenting himself as being pretty important in our field, I just want to remind people to be skeptical. That applies equally to anyone. Heck, I am one of the least published people I know, so, it’s a good idea to take much of what I say with a lump of salt as well. But I’m also not pretending to be more than the sum of my contributions.

I really don’t think you can troll a blog. While people can set up blacklists and kill-files for email, it’s naturally a much more intrusive medium, and so people begin to get annoyed when they feel–as it was often put–the signal-to-noise ratio has dropped considerably. I think there is already so much noise on blogs, and so little signal, that there is much less worry of that happening!

i appreciated your post on gather and i assume that you knew you wouldn’t get a straight response from reid.

trolls are like fire, but instead of oxygen to grow they require responses. so if no one responded to reid’s posts – or lachlan’s, or sam tilden’s, for that matter – they would eventually go away. trolling on a list like air-l, where so many list members know exactly what is going on but can’t help themselves from getting involved, just makes the whole thing that much more meta, eh?

A nice way of distinguishing between benign and nefarious trolling. But as you say, although intent is everything, true intent also happens to be potentially inscrutable. Even to the actor.

Everywhere we look (the Association of Internet Researchers’ listserve, for example—or Wikipedia, to name another), the same problem turns up: We simply have no alternative but to confront the kind of mendacity at which humans are the master species.

There is no way to avoid this problem, it would appear.

David Peterson
Chicago

Particularly the act of feigning ignorance, or asking questions about what many people consider settled issues, can easily be seen by some in a community as trolling. Mind you, what it means to troll is not entirely clear. In its original usage, it was a more humorous way of harassing new members of a group. But more generally, it is now considered an attempt to draw attention to yourself and engage people who would otherwise ignore you. The better way to do that is to be original and brilliant, but for those of us who have already spent our brilliance at an early age, playing dumb or being intentionally controversial can work as well.

To riff on what the Dalai Lama said in Buffalo at the law conference last month: it has a lot to do with intentions. I don’t consider what I do as really trolling, because the intent is not personal aggrandizement but encouraging discussion and understanding within the group. Of course, it is deeply difficult to read intent, and misunderstandings are usually not about meanings, but the perceived intent behind the meanings. Luckily, such misunderstandings about intent can be largely abrogated by engaging others in respectful manner. It’s the whole Habermas thing: conversation only works when people come to the table with some shared ground rules.