Poor acts to follow online

University students in the US are posting videos of their professors delivering lectures without asking for permission from the lecturers. One such victim is Judith Thorpe, whose lecture at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh was posted on the website YouTube.

Other academics have been spared identification but have been held up to ridicule nonetheless. One budding film director captured a non-native English-speaker mispronouncing the word "glucocorticoids" repeatedly.

Alex Reid, an associate professor at the State University of New York College in Cortland, writes in his blog that this "does not represent a change in the way that students feel about teachers, but rather a change in the available means of expression". There's a comforting thought...