Here are the more interesting words from about 250 tweets with the words [“soc” + “paper”] in them from the last day or two. I removed some boring common words (such as research, test, done, due, page, writing):
Here are the emoticons from those tweets, scaled according to frequency:
I was also surprised to see a steady stream (a few per day) of students discussing various forms of cheating and plagiarism. Do they know this stuff is public? For these I covered the names, so the guilty wouldn’t come after me. Also, to show this isn’t just a sociology student phenomenon, I included a few from a [“psych” + “paper”] search:
Family Inequality 
One of my students offered $50 for class notes on the online course discussion board that I set up for the class.
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The HTML version of my 2010 SSQ paper on race and same sex marriage has over 1500 downloads, most of which have been LONG after it was published…..I expect at least 250 more this month……
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It is interesting how often it seems people will use public boards for illicit purposes — not limited to “education.” I may be a phenomenon worth investigating in itself. Perhaps something about the way “you can get anything” online leaves people in a state of forgetting that some things go too far.
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