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I encountered my first case of academic integrity as a third year graduate student teaching assistant. Although concentrating on U.S. history, I assisted Professor Thomas Africa, a beloved and noted historian of Ancient Rome, at Binghamton University. The year was 1983, fall semester. As I read through a paper on what exactly now I do not recall, I vividly remember the sense that came over me when I hit a paragraph in the middle of the term paper that instinctively struck me as odd. At the time, I was not even aware of what the problem was. I was not looking for plagiarism.

Let's begin with a hypothetical scenario*: When an individual Twitter account increases from having 3,000 followers to more than 20,000, one might think that that particular account was benefiting from some sort of notoriety. However, in this hypothetical situation, let's say that said Twitter account "magically" grows its following daily like clockwork.

My Twitter account got hacked yesterday, so if you follow my feed and got a sketchy-seeming DM from “me,” ignore it. In retrospect, I should have picked a less obvious password than “PaulRyanLooksLikeEddieMunster12.” Live and learn.

This afternoon I participated in an excellent demo from Groopex, a startup that provides seamless WebEx integration and value added features to Moodle (and hopefully soon Blackboard as well).

A change in status for yours truly.

When family members are afflicted with diseases for which there is no family history — e.g., a younger sister who had enough precancerous breast cells to justify a double mastectomy at age 40 — my siblings and I swallow our anger about our chemical-laden society and go into research mode.

OK, this is just a little thing. But sometimes, good thinks come in small packages.

Academia.edu has added an analytics dashboard so that scholars can see the "real time impact" of their scholarship.