Monthly Archive for February, 2007

Plagiarism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Published
by
Jenny
on February 26, 2007
in Acacademic Integrity, Pedagogy and Plagiarism
. 5 Comments

I used to take plagiarism seriously; even worse, I used to take it personally. If you are the type of instructor who makes it a business to track down the source of a plagiarized text in order to prove that a student is a plagiarist, then you’re probably finding, in the age of Google and Turn It In, that catching a plagiarist can be a pretty easy job.

The same tools that make it easy to locate sources of plagiarized texts, however, are the same tools that are making it easier for students to plagiarize. Some papers are even constructed by cutting and pasting information from internet sites, and in extreme cases, the student will keep the original html formatting in their papers, not bothering to change the font, color, or line spacing of the lifted material. The internet is also a host to companies that will offer to write or sell papers to students.

In my discussions with faculty members, I try not to spend too much time discussing plagiarism for two reasons. First, plagiarism is not going to go away, and I would rather that faculty walk away from my sessions with ideas of how to make their classroom and teaching more innovative. Second, I think that how we deal with plagiarism is oftentimes touchy and personal–there’s a taboo surrounding the measures that one could take and the measures that one actually takes when confronting or not confronting a student who is inadequate in the area of attribution.

I feel strongly, however, that not confronting a plagiarist will ultimately thwart the student’s ability to develop crucial communication and critical thinking skills.

My method of dealing with plagiarism isn’t the best, I’m sure, and it’s certainly not fool-proof; however, I’ve so often been asked how I go about confronting inadequate attribution that I feel compelled to list my steps here.

1.) Don’t take it personally. The student is not throwing your teaching back in your face, as it were. The student might be suffering from feelings of inadequacy, fear of writing, fear of English, or other feelings that we, in our capacity of instructors, aren’t able to relate to. Of course, the student might also just be trying to get an easy way out of an assignment or just waited until the last minute, only to discover that the work involved in the assignment was too much for one all-nighter.

2.) Don’t spend your time commenting or marking up a paper that you suspect is plagiarized. It’s a good idea to hand back the plagiarized paper with the rest of the class’s papers with a little note. What you want to say is up to you, but I find it best not to use the “P” word.

3.) Always give the student the benefit of the doubt. I always tell myself to assume that the student just didn’t know better, even if the paper is an article on the internet. I ask the student to talk to me after class or during office hours, and I go over citation and attribution with them personally. Some of us might feel that we don’t want to deal with the situation, that sending the student to the Writing Center for a lesson in attribution would be less awkward, but having this lesson straight from the instructor is really the best way to let to student know about the seriousness of the issue. Besides, the student has already been caught, as it were, and probably doesn’t want to face someone else–it’s embarrassing and shameful.

4.) In some cases, when I am able to find the source of the plagiarism on-line, and depending on the case, I will staple the print-outs to the student’s paper with a note that says, “Sally, could you please go through your paper and properly attribute what you’ve written here and then resubmit it? I’ve printed out the sources to make it easier for you to cite the websites in your paper and the web addresses in your Works Cited page. I think you’ve chosen a good topic, but I’m interesting in seeing what YOU think here.”

5.) If a student does it twice, well, then I might consider the measures that I could take, but students, I find, generally don’t do it again.

Autonomy, Coherence, and Rigor in the Academy, part 1

Published
by
Anthony
on February 24, 2007
in Administration, Baruch College, Liberal Arts, Pedagogy and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

What is the place of the Humanities in the real world? This question haunts me as I reflect on an altogether mundane conversation I had recently with a colleague at my other (non-CUNY) job, where I teach writing. Here’s a synopsis of the exchange:

A (that’s me): “Hi! What are you teaching this semester?”
C (colleague): “Nothing. I finally have some time to work on my own stuff. What are you teaching?”
A: “A business writing course.”
C: “Oh, that’s really great! You don’t have to deal with . . . you know, the ideology.”

The ideology my colleague was referring to is the theoretical framework behind the program’s basic composition and expository writing courses. Instructors teaching these classes have to adopt a fairly prescriptive approach, both in terms of assignment sequencing and instructional methodology. Such requirements are understandable and perhaps inevitable, given the large number of instructors, most of whom are adjuncts. There has to be pedagogical coherence if thousands of students are to be held to the same rigorous standards.

The business writing course, on the other hand, allows instructors a greater degree of autonomy. There certainly is coherence and rigor in the curriculum, yet there is also a refreshing freedom. I suspect that there is more to this than the fact that a smaller pool of instructors (in business writing) requires less directorial oversight. The requirements and standards of the business writing course result from, and represent, goals that are more non-academic in nature. The ideology behind the more traditional writing courses (basic composition and expository writing) is connected to their “background” in the Humanities, while the “idea” behind the business writing course is to prepare students for success in the “real world.”

Yet the Humanities, it seems, cannot serve purely academic interests. In an environment of assessment and academic accountability, the Humanities, struggling to survive in a largely business-driven world, have little room for failure. They must produce results at once satisfactory to the academy and, in some way, relevant to the “outside” world. Administrators of courses like basic composition and expository writing thus have all the greater need for top-down quality control. The relative autonomy of the business writing instructor, in this view, corresponds to the entrepreneurial freedom of the real-life business person, who may create (to an extent, of course) his own means to a purely practical end.

The issues raised by all of this are particularly interesting to me in my work at Baruch, a business school with traditional Humanities requirements. In the upcoming installments I’ll explore how the different institutions I’m associated with are reinventing the traditional liberal arts education, specifically with regard to writing and communication.

ESL challenges

Published
by
Yana
on February 24, 2007
in ESL, Language and literature
. 3 Comments

This semester I am working with a world literature class that is composed solely of ESL students. It is the first time such a section is offered, so it is sort of an experiment. The content is the same as for a native-speaker class, but the class is smaller, so students get an opportunity to participate in class discussions more often, and they are not in the “ESL-minority”, so they don’t feel shy about leading conversations in English. They also have an additional 1,5 hour tutorial, where they learn about writing techniques, some ESL-specific writing issues and get an opportunity to practice writing. I believe this format is beneficial for many ESL students, but it seems that it still does not alleviate all of their problems.

After a recent discussion of thesis statements in general and potential thesis statements for their paper, their instructor came up to me and said she was shocked at how little they had understood of the texts. This was surprising for her since she knew that these are smart students. I started pondering about it, and about the comments the students made about the text. I think that now I see what might be the problem. When you are learning a second language and have not mastered it yet, there is a period when you feel that you are using it as a child, which is very frustrating, because you know and understand much more than you can express. And when you are reading in your second language, the amount of unknown words bogs you down so much that you can hardly appreciate the depth of the argument or the style of the author, even if you would have grasped it in your native language. It seems to me that this is what might be happening. The amount of reading in that class is quite substantial. A native reader probably does not need as much extra time to go from the ’surface reading’ to the full picture, with cultural allusions, undercurrents, etc. But for many ESL students it is long and exhausting enough to trudge through the plot, so they have no time or energy to go back and deconstruct the text. I don’t know if there is a perfect solution for this, but maybe it would be better to reduce the amount of reading in such classes, and spend more time during class on going from the ’surface’ of the text to the possible deeper readings. Would you agree?

What’s in a thesis statement?

Published
by
Nida
on February 21, 2007
in Faculty Development
. 2 Comments

Diana and I are preparing our first faculty workshop of the semester. Our topic is “Helping students construct a thesis statement”. We are thinking about ways of getting students to understand the concept, identify thesis statements in assigned readings, and generate theses themselves. We wonder if faculty (all social scientists) will be interested. What if they think that it is not their job to teach writing, hence don’t show up? We need to emphasize that what we mean by a thesis statement is actually the answer to questions in their assignments: It is the research question (and the answer) in ethnography; the stance taken in an argumentative essay; or the explanation of a phenomenon in expository writing. Teaching to construct a thesis statement is more about teaching how to think than it is about teaching how to write. Maybe we should call it something other than “thesis statement”, something that doesn’t sound in the realm of composition studies?

I would like to hear from other fellows who have done similar workshops as well as faculty who participated in them. How can we stress the relevance of such a workshop for the work of faculty members? How can we make it more interesting and helpful?

A Collection of ‘Real’ English

Published
by
Yukiko
on February 15, 2007
in ESL, Language and Literacy
. 2 Comments

In my spare time (well, in my spare *work* time), I am working as a writer for a Japanese-English dictionary. I have been involved with this series of ESL dictionary projects for a number of years now, and although I have done two English-Japanese learners’ dictionaries, it is my first time to work on a Japanese-English dictionary. The work can be tedious sometimes, but it is an interesting experience.

The writing of ESL dictionaries is significantly different from the writing of the English dictionaries that most of the readers here may be familiar with (OED, etc.) in the sense that it involves a lot of cross-linguistic (mental) activities. Especially, for this Japanese-English dictionary, the editors keep emphasizing to us how we must provide real-life expressions, those that people actually use, rather than the literal translation of the given word that traditional Japanese-English dictionaries have been criticised for listing uselessly. In this sense, this work is aiming to shape up as an organized collection of expressions, not a list of words or grammatical explanations about the words.

To give you a very simple example, for the entry that typically stands for ’stomach’, I am to first come up with expressions in JAPANESE that we actually use, including ’stomach is empty’. Of course, no one says ‘my stomach is empty’ in English. Then, I provide the equivalent expressions that we actually use in ENGLISH, ‘I am hungry’. Furthermore, when you want to say you are very hungry, in Japanese you say something like ’stomach is very empty’, which should be expressed in English as something like ‘I am very hungry’, ‘I am really hungry’, or ‘I am starving’, which might be more ‘real’.

Also, you might have noticed that in the Japanese that I provided above, ’stomach is empty’, there is no determiner. It is absent in Japansese. In Japanese, you tend do omit personal pronouns, whereas English requires one; when you say ‘I went to school’ in English, they say ‘went to school’, which is usually enough for the hearer to know that the person who went to school is the speaker. Using of a personal pronoun is always possible but, when you used it redundantly, the sentence becomes less natural. Hence, in the dictionary I work on, I am expected to omit the personal pronouns in the Japanese sentences wherever I can, to make it more ‘real’.

Working on these things makes me remember the old days when I studied English at school. In the translation exercises, which were a lot, we always had to translate everything in full: when there is an ‘I’, you have to always spell out the ‘I’. As a result, all the Japanese sentences translated from English were really weird. I think it was part of the reason why, in our mind, ‘School English’ was never real English and no matter how well you know School English, you never feel like actually knowing the real English.

I hope this new dictionary, a collection of ‘real’ English expressions that I deliver from my experience using the real English here, will help the students a bit with their long endeavor to acquire communication skills in the ‘real’ English.

Where We’ve Been, and Where Are We Going?

Published
by
Luke
on February 14, 2007
in Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Literacy, Pedagogy and Technology
. 7 Comments

I saw a couple of interesting videos on YouTube in the past day. The first–”Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us”–was produced by Prof. Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography working group he leads at Kansas State. This video tells the history of how we got to Web 2.0, and what it means for the way we communicate and think.

The second–”Epic 2014″–was produced by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson while they were fellows at the Poynter Institute in 2004, and is described as a “future history of the media.” This piece gives a brief history of the corporatization of the web, and projects forward to a time when new media has brushed traditional media, such as the New York Times, into the dustbin of history.

These videos have a lot in common, most of all that they place us in the middle of a revolution that has changed the rules of communication. The first video revels in the promise of this evolution towards connectedness, while the second provacatively envisions a Philip K. Dickian (or Dickensian) future where every human is his/her own editor and where machines write news stories; it argues we may be overconnected in the future. Still, a central truth runs through these pieces; that is, Web 2.0 challenges and threatens to upend traditional notions of authority.

Has what it means to “read critically” changed, or is it just the texts that have changed? We’ve devoted much energy here to discussing how these new rules have affected the academy. If the future as envisioned in the second video is plausible, should colleges be responsible for explicitly integrating some form of media studies into their core curricula?

I think that we need fundamental changes in primary education (and I’m hardly the only one!). New generations of students approach this world organically, and not often in a critical or discerning matter. By the time they get to college, their stance towards media is already developed. How should society educate them into this environment? And what implications for nation, community, and citizenship does this new connectedness have? A crucial starting point, I believe, is to find ways to level the digital divide in K-12 education. Any new education policy that emphasizes equality of opportunity must begin with that. I’m not particularly hopeful on that front, for historical reasons.

These videos taken together remind us that technological progress, especially as it relates to connectedness, is distinct from social progress. We should welcome Web 2.0, but we should also realize and respond to the implications of its ascendency. We should use the tools to teach, but we should also teach about what it means to use the tools.

Inventing the Critical “I”

Published
by
Jenny
on February 12, 2007
in Feedback, Liberal Arts, Pedagogy, Process, Revision and literature
. 1 Comment

In the Uses of Literature, Italo Calvino writes that “[t]he preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work.” Literature classrooms present an interesting paradox: although the work under discussion is literature, students are asked to produce critical works, not literature. Yet, when asked to discuss or write about a work of literature, students are often happier, indeed more comfortable, with relating the work to their lives (in a sense creating a type of literature?) instead of looking at the work with a critical eye.

I think that we can apply Calvino’s “preliminary condition” in the classroom. It may be easier to think of Calvino’s “preliminary condition” alongside something that Nancy Sommers writes about in “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” She writes that “experienced writers imagine a reader (reading their product) whose existence and whose expectations influence their revision process. They have abstracted the standards of a reader and this reader seems to be partially a reflection of themselves and functions as a critical and productive collaborator–a collaborator who has yet to love their work.” Just as a writer of literature must first invent an “I” who is, according to Calvino, the author of the work, a successful writer, according to Sommers, imagines (or invents) a critical “I” to shape the work into an effective piece of writing.

Students in literature courses will inevitably encounter religious texts and be asked to write on them or do some comparative work. They are often hesitant to engage in this work, so close are they to their personal selves, the personal “I.”

I once had a student in an out-of-class workshop say that she couldn’t write on religious texts; she was afraid that her writing might be deemed offensive, that she might say “the wrong thing.” One student in an in-class workshop said that he hoped he wouldn’t have to do a presentation on a piece of writing as controversial as a 17th-century sermon. His impulses were to blame the sermon for outcomes in history rather than reading the sermon as a piece of literature.

Instead of having our students write unimaginative and often weak theses, I’m wondering if we should instead be trying to help them invent an “I,” a critical collaborator with which to think through and write, an “I” that can help them to author critical essays without the personal “I” impressing itself needlessly into the work. Perhaps the “preliminary condition” of any literature course should be the invention of this “I.”

Continuing the Visual Communication Conversation

Published
by
Deborah
on February 6, 2007
in Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Powerpoint and Presentations, Style and Symposium
. 2 Comments

Jim Drogan initiated a conversation here, and because my response is long and I think including some links would be helpful I’m posting rather than adding another comment. I enjoyed reading through your ideas on visual communication Professor Drogan. It encouraged me to read a little about pattern recognition in various places online, and to try and connect these thoughts with what we do at BLSCI.

My understanding of pattern recognition (which is pretty limited) is that it involves using statistical models to classify or categorize large amounts of information. I think the interesting thing about it is that the ‘meaning’ then comes from the pattern itself, not the individual pieces of information that are being communicated. Which seems like a useful way to deal with such massive amounts of information but also leads me to ask if we are then required to change our ideas of what effective communication is.

I think to some degree, yes. On the one hand, things like accuracy and clarity are still important. But effective visual communication probably can’t stop there, because more ‘affective’ qualities are what catch people’s attention amidst information overload. Of course, many times in our work with students, we are addressing pretty basic ways to improve communication. But many of them are still very affective and visual. Stand up straight, don’t swing your arm like that, use natural gestures. Or, don’t use yellow and red together in a Powerpoint slide–it hurts the viewers eyes! All these things serve to keep the audience’s attention.

If these more qualitative elements of communication have become increasingly important, I also think it suggests that talking about ethics is important. For instance, in your document, you use the image that BLSCI has incorporated into the invitation for the Symposium this Spring. When Mikhail first showed that image to us at the institute, we had a conversation about the fact that it was an image from the 1950s of all white men in suits standing around a desk. My first thought was ‘yikes!’ That is not particularly representative of the world these days, especially not Baruch and CUNY. But that was exactly his point, to use an image of ‘the old’ to raise the question of whether there might be “New Rules” and thus the need to debate “Convention and Change in Communication.”

Grammar Girl

Published
by
Mikhail
on February 5, 2007
in Language and Podcasts and Podcasting
. 0 Comments

For a few months now, Grammar Girl, a.k.a. Mignon Fogarty, has been podcasting away on grammar issues and other writing concerns. Her weekly “Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing,” according to a recent CNN.com article about Grammar Girl, have been downloaded over 1.3 million times since she started producing the podcasts in July. Her tips are entertaining and useful as well — take a listen — the latest podcast is on the age old question of when to use “further” rather than “farther.” You can also download or subscribe to these free podcasts (there are 39 to date) through the iTunes music store if you are so inclined.