Does Our Education System Overemphasize Literature at the Expense of Writing?

May 7, 2013 By 3 Comments

Let me start by saying that I’m posing this as a question based on my own experience. If there’s research that flies in the face of what I’m going to suggest, please post it in the comments.

Frequently I hear professors lament that students come to Baruch College with inadequate writing skills. This sentiment is not bound by discipline, as I’ve heard it from faculty members in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences as well as the Zicklin School of Business. The latter even felt compelled to create a pair of zero credit Business Communication courses that all MBA students are required to take. This is a Communication Across the Curriculum blog, so it seems as good a venue as any to consider what causes this issue.

The natural inclination is to blame it on Baruch’s high percentage of non-native English speakers. However, I’ve found that the bulk of students who were born and raised in the U.S. come into my classes without knowing the most basic rules of writing, like those found in Strunk & White’s Elements of Style.

Elements of Style

Was I supposed to read this?

The first time I taught Journalistic Writing, I was shocked to receive the first set of papers and find that I had to go over some of the most commonsense stylistic rules with junior and senior journalism majors. These are students who, presumably, decided they liked writing enough to pursue it as a career — or at least enough to occupy 24 credits of their undergraduate education. But as I prepared my lesson on what I thought were the most basic concepts, I realized something embarrassing: I had never formally learned the lessons taught in Elements of Style.

Oh, I owned a copy. I had to buy it along with an AP Stylebook for one of the first journalism classes I took as an undergrad. But we never actually did anything with it because it was assigned as a tool to brush up on concepts we should have learned long before. So as I thumbed through the book and scribbled down Strunk & White’s rules to then teach hours later as though I were an expert, I felt like a hypocrite. I was about to go preach the importance of writing rules when I had earned my own journalism degree simply by using one I made up for myself: If it sounds right, it probably is right. That’s not very scientific.

So why didn’t I ever get these lessons? Probably because my English classes in grades 7 through 12 were taught as literature classes with writing as a secondary focus, if that.

I understand the idea behind forming writing assignments around classic works of literature to kill two birds with one stone, but I always felt like I was graded much more on what themes and allusions I could pluck from a work and not on how well I could actually explain my reasoning. This totally ignores writing for daily life — the kind of writing that you’ll actually be judged upon outside of an academic sitting. Explain what your problem is. Explain why I need to know what you’re telling me. Convince me of something.

Clearly educators agree that this type of writing needs to be taught beyond elementary school, because we require college students to take composition classes. So why do students go from age 12 to 18 without having to do any of it? Instead, classes reward the use of big words and convoluted sentences, and reaching page minimums instead of working within page maximums.

It’s widely and rightly accepted now that you don’t teach writing by drilling students with grammar rules, and I’m not saying we should. I’m also not suggesting we scrap literature from the K-12 curriculum in favor of more practical forms of writing. But can’t we have both? Shouldn’t we have both?

Filed Under: Education, Journalism, literature, Pedagogy, Writing Instruction

Do Communication-Intensive Methods Improve Science Learning?

May 6, 2013 By 5 Comments

In January, I blogged about the collaboration between the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and Professor David Gruber, who is teaching Environmental Science 1020.  Both last semester and this semester, students in Professor Gruber’s class were assigned to lab groups and each group produced a Digital Lab Report for one lab.  The assignments we created were specific to the different learning goals of the labs; however, all required students to use at least one (often more) form of media and incorporate writing and critical reflection into the process.  Each group goes through a series of collaborative and creative steps.  These include: free-writing soon after the lab is complete; brainstorming; research to pull in other relevant material; posting raw footage, audio, and pictures on the class blog; and creating a rough draft of a Digital Lab Report (which might be a video, a podcast of a radio show, a timeline, or a Prezi depending on the assignment).  Then, groups present their rough drafts to the class and receive feedback on the communication, critical thinking, and content components of their DLRs.  Students have the opportunity to revise their Digital Lab Reports over the next couple of weeks before presenting their final versions.  For a timeline of this process for last semester’s Mutualism lab, click here.

There are many obvious benefits to having students create Digital Lab Reports.   They compel students to collaborate and converse more about their lab work.  They encourage critical thinking, as students are expected to articulate reflections on their work through the various stages.  They are fun – students often use humor.  They improve students’ media and communication skills because students get feedback on these aspects of their creations as well.  But the one main question at the back of my mind when we embarked on this project was whether communication intensive pedagogy actually helps students to learn science.

After almost a year of observation, I feel confident answering yes. In class last Wednesday students presented their drafts.  Their introductions to their Digital Lab Reports and the DLRs themselves gave us a great deal of insight into how they were understanding (or not understanding) scientific concepts in ways traditional lab reports might never reveal.  This is partially because the DLRs require students to consider their audience and speak to their audience.  This means re-phrasing scientific language to make it accessible.  To do this, students must take in information, analyze it, and reformulate it in their own way.  Furthermore, the accuracy or inaccuracy of the external information and images they brought in as examples gave Professor Gruber insight into how they had remembered and interpreted the concepts he had explicated, as well as what they were considering “real world” connections.  The collaborative aspects of the DLRs means that students have to hash out these ideas and arrive at a shared understanding.  After each draft presentation, groups were asked questions and received feedback from their peers, Professor Gruber, and me.   Through the process of revising their labs, they will have to address the inaccuracies or gaps in their understanding of scientific concepts.  Their next round of presentation drafts will let us know if and how their scientific thinking has changed.

For me, this reveals that communication and technology-intensive methods are particularly beneficial for science courses and have great potential to enhance student learning.

Filed Under: BLSCI, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), CUNY, EdTech, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Science, Teaching, Technology

Publicly Sponsored Hate Speech

May 1, 2013 By 3 Comments

I hadn’t intended to write another post about the virulent hatred of fat, fatness, and fat people that is currently shaping our culture. My previous post on the topic led to some interesting and intense conversation, but there are many other topics to discuss and many other dangerous political trends to analyze. Besides, this is a communications blog.

But when I came across this astonishing campaign image on the subway recently, I realized that it deserves its own post.

"Cut the Junk" NYC Campaign

“Cut the Junk” NYC Campaign

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Health, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Science

Teaching in the “Post-Plagiarism” Era

April 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

“How do we instill the ethics of citation and attribution, when the real world doesn’t seem to care about such paltry details?”

Christopher’s excellent post on “post-plagiarism” articulated the anxiety produced by the the mixed signals we all receive about originality and appropriation. I recall a class discussion regarding Shakespeare’s frequent borrowing from previously existing sources. This class happened to come shortly after a thorough review of the college’s academic integrity policies. “So, Shakespeare was a plagiarizer?” a student asked. Translation: “Shakespeare has been regarded as a genius of the English language for doing something you just told us was unethical and a punishable offense. What gives?”

Christopher’s increasing disinclination to report student plagiarism reminded me of Rebecca Moore Howard’s November 26, 2001 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, ”Forget About Policing Plagiarism. Just Teach.”  Howard, a professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University, warns that by obsessing about students who plagiarize “we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police relationship.” This increases anxiety for both professor and students alike and hinders learning.

Howard points out the various types and levels of severity of plagiarism, including whole cloth plagiarism, patchwriting, failure to attribute, and omitting quotation marks. But she emphasizes pedagogical reform including scaffolding assignments, not backloading the course with a single looming paper due at the end of the semester, the problem of grades without comments, and/or comments that focus on the mechanics of grammar rather than student learning goals. Howard ends noting that educational institutions need to be structured to support this level of pedagogical engagement.

Over ten years later, with even larger classrooms, more contingent faculty, and more digitally accessible information, the dilemmas Howard articulates have proliferated.

I have chosen a number of strategies to curb plagiarism, some more effective than others. When I first began teaching dramatic literature, I became a structural zealot and eschewed discussion of broad themes because I was convinced students were just parroting what they had read on Wikipedia or SparkNotes. I gave a lot of quizzes with questions designed to be unanswerable by a cursory review of a plot summary. Those were the most reactionary approaches, coming from what Mark Mullen calls a “pedagogy of suspicion.” 

The perfect desks for pedagogy of suspicion.

The perfect desks for pedagogy of suspicion.

Now that I have been a writing fellow and am teaching speech communication, my (hopefully) more fruitful approaches are to:

1. Scaffold assignments so that the chosen topic for the assignment, article research, outline draft, and final assignment are each due on a different day.

2.Facilitate problem solving workshops in which each student shares a roadblock s/he has encountered in the topic research or design and classmates offer suggestions.

3. Organize peer critique sessions in which students, aided with a template, read, evaluate, and discuss each others’ outlines before they are turned in.

4. Require revision.

5. Use plagiarism detection software as a teaching tool that shows students when they are over-relying on others’ words or when they have forgotten to add quotation marks or to attribute. (More on the ethics and effectiveness of that later.)

It is all a lot of work. Tonight I arrived home from an hour-long subway commute beleaguered by an eleven-pound backpack full of research methods worksheets, uncorrected final outlines stapled to their drafts, and speech rubrics held together in a rainbow of binder clips. Still, I prefer this situation to the anger and desperation of discovering a swath of cut-and-pasted copy.

Filed Under: Academic Integrity, Grading, Pedagogy, Plagiarism, Teaching, Writing Instruction

Grad School Year’s End Blues

April 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Like everyone, I am looking forward to the end of the semester. After the last two weeks packed with teaching, oral presentation rehearsals, meetings–let alone my own writing deadlines and classwork–I’m right there with everyone else hailing the approaching summer. As much as I love the work I do, I know that in a mere month I’ll get the rare privilege to sleep in on a Saturday without anxiety. For those of us who are lucky enough to get to slack a bit in the summer, it’s sometimes all we can use to keep us going. Administrators right on down to students–we’re all singing the same poppy song. It’s about sunshine and sleep and freedom.

Photo ©Bahman Farzad / lotusflowerimages.com

Photo ©Bahman Farzad / lotusflowerimages.com

However, I’ve also been feeling something unique this year as the last weeks of the term arrive: I’m calling it the Grad School Year’s End Blues. You may be familiar with it. The Grad School Year’s End Blues comes sliding in with the deadlines pulsing just in the distance. It floats around as that residual senior-itis brushes off the folks who are actually leaving. It comes (to me at least) along with the swelling acknowledgement that “my summer off” will be a write-a-thon punctuated by expensive conferences and exams.

But it’s not all about disappointment or anxiety, these blues. That’s the chorus, to be sure–the hook. I want to sing one particular verse, one that I’m just learning for the first time this year: the verse about the end of a one-of-a-kind teaching experience.

I tend to surround myself with teachers who love to teach, and I’ve heard them each hum a line of this one in their time: about the honors capstone course they got to teach that once, or the totally blog-based integrated learning environment they’d finally perfected after years of tweaking. The last lyrics always end, “but who knows when I’ll ever get to do that again!”

That’s my situation this year. I ended up getting a repeat gig as a first-year composition instructor for the honors engineering program at City College. Two falls in a row now, I’ve taught honors engineers with a curriculum I adapted from the department’s template. I’ve experimented wildly, and received decent support and encouragement from my supervisors. I gave it a few injections of comp/rhet methodology (process work, freewriting, revision, collaboration) and technology (wikis, blogs, multimodal assignments). The really special thing is that this year I got to teach only these students: the two sections of the honors English 110 course from the fall followed me almost wholesale to the 210 course I’m teaching this spring. For the first time in my teaching career, I got to see how a writer develops over more than 15 weeks. It’s been tremendously instructive.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel a hokey kind of pride for how far these particular students have developed. They’ve grown tremendously in their understanding of writing, both as a practice and as a discipline of study. But that’s not the feeling in this song. This is Nina Simone, not Sarah Vaughan. There’s a snarl behind those tears.

The reality is, as an adjunct teacher who studies composition pedagogy, I benefit professionally from the chance to experiment on a wide variety of writing curricula, student demographics, and physical spaces (this year in a computer lab for the first and probably last time). I know that this was probably my only chance to study this kind of pedagogical situation, at least until I’m in a full-time job. The truth is, I got lucky just to get this kind of experience the first time: most people get very little freedom in the courses they teach. And I might get lucky enough to get another go at it, to see if the successes I had here are actually repeatable. But I probably won’t.

Experience working in diverse teaching spaces matters.
Photo by Mike1024 via Wikimedia Commons.

For me, and a lot of pedagogy folks out there I know, access to a free range of courses to teach is like access to lab space. The reality for most of us who adjunct at CUNY is that it’s usually the luck of the draw whether we land in departments that give us access to a variety of teaching opportunities, or those that reserve the more challenging courses for full-time faculty. If we want to push our scholarship as compositionists, to produce innovative work that will lead to publication, or to ensure a wide and impressive teaching portfolio for when we enter the job market, we need access to new and challenging teaching experiences. From my experience in English departments, at least, the keys to that lab space are guarded pretty tightly (tell me in the comments if it’s different elsewhere).

So, I’m sure I’ll enjoy my summer when it gets here. I bet I’ll have a great time at that conference, and I’ll learn Spanish, and I’ll write a ton and still somehow have fun in the sun. But for now, I’m still here reading student papers, trying to enjoy the last good bits of the term, and singing these Grad School Year’s End Blues.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Pedagogy, Scholarship, Teaching, To Ponder, Writing Instruction

Shopping at Whole Foods: Class, Business and Yuppiedom at Baruch College

April 23, 2013 By 2 Comments
IMG_1142

Whole Foods: enter at your own risk.

At the beginning of every semester, students in my speech class interview each other about their life ambitions to collect material for their first mini-speeches of the semester.  And every semester I hear more-or-less the same thing: they want to make a lot of money.  Of course there are anomalies, but money is the dominant goal, at least within what students are willing to share with a room full of strangers.

At the same time, though, I notice a trend of judgment toward certain consumer practices deemed to be evidence of bourgeois privilege.  While I was leading a workshop in a Business Policy course a few weeks ago, a discussion of the business strategies of Whole Foods triggered a set of interesting responses.

A group of students studying the company suggested that Whole Foods sold not only natural foods and nutritional products but also an image of health, purity and affluence. Students were quick to disassociate themselves from the consumer body of Whole Foods shoppers.  Claims of “I don’t shop there” rang out around the room.  A student shared an anecdote about a relative who shops at the dreaded natural food store only for her baby.  Exorbitantly expensive organic bananas received their due share of ridicule.  I kept my dirty little secret to myself: I have been known to walk well out of my way to have lunch at the Whole Foods salad bar.

IMG_1147

Organic bananas for the baby.

I wondered: what does “shopping at Whole Foods” connote in the context of Baruch College?  Is it a useful metaphor for understanding something about the interplay of class aspirations, education and business in this particular academic community?

As readers will know, the CUNY system at large has historically been held to the standard (and has sometimes been seen as falling short) of enabling class mobility for New York City’s working, middle class and immigrant populations.  Dusana’s post back in February asked us to consider why so many students’ Business Policy presentations seem to advocate business strategies “rooted in exploitation and inequalities” when Baruch’s student body represents so many class, ethnic and immigrant groups who have born the brunt of these same inequalities.  At the same time, though, I think my anecdote conveys a strain of Baruch undergraduate culture that pushes back against the idea that success in business fields must go hand in hand with the assumption of lifestyle and consumption habits associated with affluence.

Baruch is an environment in which outer trappings of professionalism are valued.  Students are often required, for example, to dress professionally for class presentations.  For many students this is not an exercise or performance; they are professionals, coming to class after a day at the office, or heading off to an internship for the afternoon.  Of course, these outward signifiers are not neutral in their cultural connotations any more so than is shopping at an expensive organic grocery chain.

If we choose to read “shopping at Whole Foods” as a metaphor for a set of eschewed behaviors within the milieu of Baruch undergraduates, what specifically does it signify?  Perhaps it is a sign of being duped by a marketing coup that self-respecting business students pride themselves in detecting?  In the student’s anecdote, it was, tellingly, the baby only who ate organic products.  Maybe “shopping at Whole Foods” can be read as a sign of being born into privilege, rather than wealth and comfort achieved through education, work, and entrepreneurship.

These anecdotes encouraged me to consider the difference between professionalism and economic success on the one hand, and performance of affluence in culturally specific ways on the other.  Or at least they attuned me to the inevitable particularity of whatever the approved ways of spending one’s wealth are in a given social context.

But I’ll end this here, because I can no longer ignore my craving for organic gluten cubes and $12 local cashew juice.

IMG_1149

Cashew juice: an investment to be taken seriously.

Filed Under: Baruch College, Business, Culture, CUNY, Health, Uncategorized

Just the Entrée, No Garnish Please

April 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

So far working as a Communication Fellow this semester has provided me with a lot of new insights.  As a cultural anthropologist working with accounting students who are about to graduate I think about the best way I can inform their experience as graduating seniors.  Some students are currently working in accounting departments at various financial firms in New York City, while others have jobs in other fields/sectors and will apply to enter their professional fields after graduation.

One day (early in the semester) as I videotaped groups rehearsing their oral presentations, I was left feeling hungry and not quite satisfied.  By hungry I mean that some presentations were lacking substance and I didn’t quite understand what the their focus was because the content outlined and the explanation of said content was insufficient.  Not only did I want more clarity on the subject matter, but I couldn’t comprehend the purpose of the presentation.  I reflected on my experience teaching Cultural Anthropology and Black Studies courses and wondered why do some students insist on serving garnish?  As a self-professed “foodie,” I came up with the analogy of a plate of food to describe some students’ work.  I find providing students with analogies that they can relate to is often the best way to express my feedback, because unless you’re a Breatharian, everybody has to eat.  I often begin with a story about going to a restaurant and depending on the caliber of the restaurant one may receive garnish on one’s plate.  The entrée may consist of a protein, a carbohydrate (in the form of some starch, usually rice or potatoes), and vegetables.  If the chef is feeling creative that day one might get some garnish that consists of ornately carved radish, tomato, carrot, or sprigs of parsley.  Now if one were to consume just the garnish and not eat the protein, starch, or vegetables, one would be very hungry.  I then tell students that usually they serve up a big pile of garnish but no meat, no potatoes.  Meaning, what is at the heart of what they are trying to convey and will their audience be satisfied?

photo by Finn

photo by Finn

Sometimes as an instructor I get a ton of garnish from students who haven’t done the work or more often than not, they have done the work but are lacking confidence.  This lack of confidence prevents them from writing assertively or expressing their ideas in a confident manner.  When I press students further about what is underlying their insecurities, I often get: “Well if I say what I want to say, it isn’t going to sound right.”  What exactly does “sounding right” mean?  Many students feel that if they can’t sound like their professors and write using the same language that is in their course readings, then their views are not valid, and they’re not going to be accepted by their classmates or their professors.  So a paper or assignment that had really “good bones” ends up being just that, “good bones” without the substance to build their work into a body that’s actually saying something.

This semester, the groups that performed well were groups that knew the material but needed minor adjustments in performance strategies.  In those instances, a sprig or two of parsley would give their presentations some personality and much needed lively energy.  In a case where they either don’t know the material (and it’s not for a lack of trying) what are they to do?  Since I’m just learning the basics on IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) as accounting principles I couldn’t offer them much on content so I told them to fake it, ’til they make it!  Faking it won’t work all the time but speaking with an air of confidence even though one has no clue what s/he is talking about, can work in a pinch, but as the adage goes “you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.”  One group I worked with had very little understanding of a particular accounting principle they were assigned to present.  To make up for this deficit one member said she searched YouTube for tutorials and they helped her.  Now I won’t be sending all of the groups to YouTube but her effort to understand the principle showed me that she wasn’t comfortable giving an oral presentation full of garnish, she wanted the audience to understand.  However in order for that to happen, this student realized that she had to understand and be satisfied with her knowledge too.  As graduating seniors I encouraged them to be proactive in their learning process and ask questions and seek guidance from their professors and other people that might be able to help them.

When speaking to my sister, a librarian,  about the accounting groups and some of the principles, she suggested that I tell the groups to look at some major accounting firms because some of these firms have online presentations and papers.  She also suggested that I encourage them to do research in online periodicals and professional organizations because it’s also a good way for them to begin getting acclimated to engaging the accounting profession as a professional.  I told the groups I work with that I don’t know anything about accounting but leading and consulting on these rehearsals and sitting in the classes, I’m learning a few things.

There are initiatives occurring throughout CUNY that are focused on ensuring students are as proficient as possible in communicating in their intended profession.  During rehearsals I provide students with support by letting them know that it’s okay to trust the body of knowledge they have accrued over the years.  Being able to explain challenging accounting principles to someone outside of the field using language that’s accessible to non-experts is a great start.  Then making the necessary adjustments to present material before an audience of experts demonstrates a command of the material.  It’s providing the audience with an entrée they will be satisfied with after the final product is delivered, and using the garnish to enhance the main elements of the dish/presentation.  While college isn’t an episode of Top Chef, where someone is getting eliminated, these students are graduating and moving onto the next phase of their careers.  Many of them have given dozens of presentations without thinking about the content and delivery of the material and if there are better ways to present the content.

I have found that supporting and encouraging the students while giving them honest and constructive feedback helps them to think about creating a presentation that they are proud of.  When we watch the video of their rehearsal together, I stress that students should think about producing a final product that they would not mind observing if they were audience members, and I ask them: were they successful in achieving the goal of the assignment?  Did they convey the content in a manner that was clear, concise, and understandable to their audience?  Often the responses are mixed, with students focusing on their appearance or the how their voices sound on tape.  I take a moment to emphasize the content-the meat and potatoes portion of the entrée-and ask groups if they were satisfied.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, they say “No.”  However, that “No” becomes a launchpad from which they can assess their content and performance and move forward to improving the final product.  So far, by the time I observe most of the final presentations, students who focused on the content and made minor adjustments in performance skills deliver pretty good presentations.  They deliver something that’s worth listening to and being engaged in as an audience member.  The final presentation is often one that I may not fully understand, but it is still a dish worth having.

Filed Under: Audience, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Oral Communication, Powerpoint and Presentations, Process, Uncategorized

Post-Plagiarism?

April 18, 2013 By 1 Comment

We tell our students “don’t plagiarize,” “cite your sources,” “attribute.” Often it is easier just to scare them. “You will fail the assignment” or “You will fail the class.” If we are feeling particularly threatening, we include the college or university honesty code and imply that they could be kicked out of school for plagiarism. I’ve never known a disciplinary committee to actually follow through with the policy, but we are supposed to report incidents, anyway.

If we have the time in a semester, then we get to the underlying reasons for proper attribution. Crediting other people’s academic work. Listing your sources so your readers can find out more. Building the network of research on which the academy is founded.

But part of the reason that we as academics cite our sources is the morality of it. We give credit, not because of legalities, nor threats, nor the larger picture, but because it is the right thing to do. Perhaps our students don’t feel that deeper moral imperative to credit sources, but it gets more difficult when highly visible media personalities see no problem with plagiarizing.

When a high-profile cable news reporter or a famous academic gets caught plagiarizing, they insist that it was a mistake and not plagiarism, are forgiven, and generally see no negative effects.

Recently, however, questions of copyright and plagiarism came into conflict in a more popular culture arena. The major players in this recent example are Glee–FOX’s television show about a high school glee club–and Jonathan Coulton–a singer-songwriter and geek-culture icon.

The entire premise of Glee is that a high school choir performs new arrangements of musical theatre and popular music–often drastically rearranged in order to fit the four-part harmonies of teenage show choirs.

However, in this case, the “new” arrangement was (allegedly) lifted directly from Jonathan Coulton’s own drastic rearrangement. When Coulton covered Sir Mix-a-Lot’s pop/hip-hop “Baby Got Back” in 2005, Coulton explained that “in the proud tradition of many white Americans who came before me I hereby steal and white-ify this thick and juicy piece of black culture.”

Another White American (not Jonathan Coulton) who whitified black culture

Another White American (not Jonathan Coulton) who whitified black culture

Of course, given Coulton’s self-conscious and irony-dripping view of the history of jazz, rock and roll, disco, hip-hop, etc., he did not actually “steal” Sir Mix-a-Lot’s song, but paid for a license to cover and record the song. In his version, Coulton wrote an entirely new tune using traditional bluegrass instrumentation. In effect, Coulton’s song is using Sir Mix-a-Lot’s lyrics and phrasing, but the music is Coulton’s. Nonetheless, Coulton still paid for the rights to record Sir Mix-a-Lot’s song.

Enter FOX and Glee.

They used a cover of “Baby Got Back” that sounds exactly like Coulton’s. Even to the extent that a character named Adam sings the lyric referring to himself as “Jonny C.”

Paul Lemere at the music tech blog, Music Machinery, even wrote a script to alternate between the “two” versions of the cover. The resulting remix sounds like it has an unbroken backing track. Which might imply that the instrumentation actually is Coulton’s performance.

Coulton was never contacted by FOX or Glee about using his version of “Baby Got Back.” After Coulton’s legions of tech-savvy fans stirred up Twitter over the lack of attribution, FOX officially responded. According to Coulton, FOX told him: “they’re within their legal rights to do this, and that I should be happy for the exposure (even though they do not credit me, and have not even publicly acknowledged that it’s my version – so you know, it’s kind of SECRET exposure).”

Shhhh! SECRET exposure!

Shhhh! SECRET exposure! [photo by left-hand]

 Even that bastion of free marketplace commercialism, Forbes, reported on the Coulton-Glee debacle. Forbes blogger Michele Catalano writes, “Coulton may not have any legal recourse here, but there is an ethical question at issue that FOX must answer.” It is an ethical question that Glee has avoided before.

While Coulton is still supposedly investigating his legal options, he did find some ethical restitution. Coulton released a “cover” of Glee‘s cover of his version of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” He called the song, “Baby Got Back (in the style of Glee)”, which was just renaming his original version. People who bought this file were buying the exact same file that he released in 2005, just renamed. This “cover” was then sold on iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon, with proceeds going to Save the Music and It Gets Better, two charities that deal with social issues raised on Glee.

The month after airing a short segment on the Coulton-Glee kerfuffle, NPR’s On the Media dedicated an entire show to the problem of contemporary plagiarism. Included in this episode is an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, who teaches a class at Princeton and requires his students to download a paper from a paper-mill and defend it in class. Drawing on the ready-mades of Duchamp and remix culture, Goldsmith argues that creativity is not in the originality of text. In a roundabout way, Goldsmith is emphasizing process over content.

A Duchamp ready-made. Where attribution is headed?

A Duchamp ready-made. Where attribution is headed?

Which brings me back to our students. How do we instill the ethics of citation and attribution, when the real world doesn’t seem to care about such paltry details? When even our own Academic Integrity policies in practice are not enforced? Besides, punishment of plagiarism doesn’t get to the root cause. I’ve tried to create “plagiarism-proof” assignments. Write from a character’s perspective. Analyze a specific school performance of a play, rather than the script. Keep logs of your own rehearsals. And yet, somehow, students find ways to copy without attribution.

I don’t want to give up, but I find myself less and less likely to bring these issues to the department, knowing that they will not do anything. Instead, I end up asking students to rewrite assignments (which only teaches them to copy ideas rather than easily searchable words) or giving the assignment an F (which doesn’t really teach anything, since it is usually end of the semester assignments where I catch this).

Are we approaching a post-plagiarism society?

Paper-writing Machine of the Future? [Photo by Plus903]

Paper-writing Machine of the Future? [Photo by Plus903]

Filed Under: Academic Integrity, Copyright, Culture, Media, Music, Plagiarism

Be Interested?

April 16, 2013 By 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, at the SUNY Council on Writing Conference, I heard Richard E. Miller give a fascinating keynote called “Who’s this for?: Audience in the Classroom without Walls.” What I found most exciting about his remarks was his description of an assignment he gave a creative nonfiction class: Be Interested. My understanding of what this means is that Miller  asked his students to “produce a research project that others would read willingly.” My first reaction was of the “I want to steal that assignment” variety.  But as I thought more about the prompt, I began to wonder if a student would be as excited as I was. Miller mentioned that he had students who grappled with questions like “How do you become interested in anything?” and struggled with finding a way to experience curiosity in a moment when information is “superabundant.”

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The more I toyed with this kind of assignment, the more I found myself wondering more about what I’d actually be asking students to do, what it actually means to genuinely be interested in something, and what that might look like in writing. A cursory glance at the OED shows that the word “interest” is defined using terms like “concern,” “curiosity,” and “sympathy.” But, interestingly, one definition also lists “to share in something.”

The idea of “sharing” seems central to composing, at least to me. But, often, I think it is this component–that of engaging and collaborating with an audience outside of the “teacher”–that I think might be lacking for many students (and here I’m thinking specifically of the freshmen I work with). To return to Miller’s prompt–I suppose the “assignment” is really to be interested and to be interesting. And, I also suppose that in an environment where students are perpetually in some kind of rubric quest, this probably feels very very scary.

But, on the flip side, this kind of opportunity is one that we should hope students encounter more and more. As Gardner Campbell points out:

We might begin with a curriculum that brings students into creative, challenging contact with the history and dreams of the digital age, perhaps in a first-year experience that asks them to reflect critically on their own digital lives as well as begin to shape and share their own digital creations, both intramurally and publicly. Research into the neurobiology of learning, building on decades of educational research, has shown that students learn deeply when they are asked to narrate their learning, curate their creations within the learning environment, and share what they have curated with a wide and, when appropriate, a public audience. As students understand that they are not simply completing an assignment at a professor’s behest, but in fact beginning their life’s work, they will necessarily become more engaged and produce more authentic work reflective of their own growing interests.

This excerpt is from part 4 of Gardner Campbell’s excellent series of posts on “The Road to Digital Citizenship,” this one subtitled, “Fluency, Curriculum, Development.” Campbell connects student investment in their own work with developing a pedagogy that allows for rigorous reflection on what it means to live a digital life. Campbell also makes the important connection between “sharing” and “publicness,” an important link where the truly interesting might occur through the kinds of conversation digital compositions enable.

Asking students to approach this kind of inquiry marks an important shift in the definition of what it means to write an “academic essay.” I wonder if what is actually happening is a return to Montaigne’s sense of the essay as a “series of attempts,” or Francis Bacon’s “dispersed meditations.” By encouraging students to “be interested” and “curate their creations,” the usual chore of the “paper” becomes more of an experiment in invention or “making.”

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It is no coincidence that “Composition as Explanation,” Gertrude Stein’s sonic exploration of what it means to “create a composition,” employs the verb “to make” as one of its central repeated words. For example: “This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.” This work is also the first time that Stein refers to her sense of a “continuous present” which was crucial to how she thought of her own process.

steintokEducation writer Audrey Watters lists “The Maker Movement” as one of the “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012″ and describes the importance of this kind of pedagogical approach as, “we need more learning by making, through projects and inquiry and hands-on experimentation.” When we actually ask students to physically invent something, to take objects and turn them into something that did not exist ten minutes earlier, this is a very different kind of learning from writing a 3-5 page paper. It marks a return to the kind of “learning by doing” that John Dewey advocated for–“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” In other words, when we are engaged in the act of “making” or “doing,” that is when real learning occurs, and that is also when I think the sensation of “being interested” is rediscovered.

In many ways this post feels like its own experiment in what Stein might describe as “beginning again and again is a natural thing…”–I wanted to think about this idea of “being interested,” which consequently was so interesting to me that only now have I realized what the connection is to my own recent experiences in the classroom. Meechal recently wrote about one of my latest forays into technology in the classroom, one that I am still processing. When given the chance to use the MaKey MaKey with my 2 composition 2 sections (thanks to Mikhail & BLSCI), I jumped at the chance, trusting a gut feeling that “making” something physically might teach us something about what happens when we “make” academic essays.

Picture1In small groups, the students were given MaKey MaKeys, a number of different materials that conducted electricity, and access to a laptop and told to “make” and “invent.” As a teacher, what was interesting to me was to watch the groups’ progress–many began by seeming a little confused, admittedly not knowing what to “invent,” and feeling at a loss for ideas (or “interest”). But, I also got to watch each group work collaboratively and experientially and ultimate discover the spectrum of things they  might do.

And, after the class session, students blogged about what they experienced through “making.” A few sample responses:

  • “If we just looked at the surface of today’s session, we would see that we were just playing around with the Makey Makey and doing things that are totally unrelated to our English class. However, if we think more deeply, we will see many similarities, especially with the process of writing. At first, we need some ideas to invent something amazing with Makey Makey; if not, we will just be playing and there will not be any creation. It is like writing our essays; we need a specific thesis to write a good essay based on the thesis.”
  • “Making something with the Makey Makeys very musch resembled the writing process. In class on Monday we were supposed to “outline” our plans and ideas for what we wanted to make today in class. An outline plays an important role in essay writing so that the writer has their thoughts and ideas organized and ready to be written down and explained. Each invention also required several “revisions” and “rewrites” in order for it to reach its “final draft” stage. I know that my group changed plans, inventions, and strategies a few times throughout the class period.”
  • “For a good portion of our time we were bouncing back and forth between these questions and sitting there thinking about what we should do. I felt frustrated at the fact that with all these tools we were just stuck, it was like our creativity was at a standstill. However after revisiting the objectives of using the Makey Makey and playing around with it, things made a turn for the better. With developing a greater understanding and applying that understanding to ideas we had, we were able to center on one idea and go with it…Relating to writing, when have that moment where you know the message you want to communicate and gather all your information; everything comes together and flows. Centralizing your idea and making attempts towards it can assist in your creativity. Whether is be the next groundbreaking IT program or your final paper, the initial beginning may prove to be the most difficult; but after you overcome that, you will have your masterpiece.”
Filed Under: Audience, EdTech, Education, Higher Education, Internet, Liberal Arts, Literacy, Media, Pedagogy, Process, Reading, Social Media, Social Networking, Style, Teaching, Technology, Writing, Writing Instruction

What’s in a Name?

April 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Vegan.

What do you think of when you hear that word? Don’t sugarcoat it, everyone is probably thinking the same thing.

Weirdo. Crazy. Doesn’t wear deodorant. Smells funny. Hairy legs. Preachy. Cow-hugger. Hippie.

You may have also rolled your eyes when you read the word vegan. This seems to be a typical reaction, along with the above perceptions. What is it about this word that leads to so many negative connotations? In today’s society, knowledge of the dangers of factory farming for both our health and the environment is widespread. The prevalence of non-meat and non-dairy food options is larger than it ever has been and is continuing to grow, yet the stereotypical view of someone who lives a vegan lifestyle remains far from the norm.

I’ll just come out and say it. I follow a vegan diet. I’m a vegan.


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I know what you’re thinking, that now I’m going to try to convince you to become one too. I’m going to ridicule your food choices and tell you you are a murderer and are going to die of some awful disease because you don’t eat like me. Right? Wrong. Yes, there are the crazy, cow-hugging, hippie types that give us all a bad name, but that’s not everyone. In fact, I probably have less interest in what anyone else eats than they do in what I eat.

suicidal-cowsSee, things on this side of the fence are not so much greener for the vegans that are not preachy crazies. When people find out that you are a vegan, you become a table-side circus attraction who people want to convince to “cheat” on your diet, as if you’re on Weight Watchers and might slip up given enough peer pressure. Are you suuuure you don’t want a bite of my steak? The cow left a note, he was suicidal, can you eat it now?

I sometimes find myself telling the server at a restaurant or new acquaintances that I don’t eat meat and have a dairy allergy. I never know what someone will perceive of me if I say I’m vegan. Vegan is a loaded synonym with “crazy” that comes with many perceptions and stereotypes. So, for social purposes I am a vegetarian with a dairy allergy; this doesn’t leave me in fear that someone will spit in my food for being the difficult diner.

At the end of the day, we are all just people and we all need to eat. I might be a vegan, non-vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, caveman dieter, I might have a dairy allergy, a gluten intolerance, or I might just like what I like. Can’t we all just eat what we like? I promise to wear deodorant, shave my legs, and get plenty of protein.

Filed Under: Asides, Culture, Interpersonal Communication
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