stevendkrause.com

Actually, it is boing-boing’s:

All I know is I was trying to find a place to do some reading and writing yesterday in downtown Ann Arbor and the place was a freakin’ zoo, in part because there was some kind of “fun run” kind of event, and also in part because I think a bunch of people were taking the Pope’s advice about celebrating before the holy week. Though I have a feeling some of those folks might sneak in a beer today.

Anyway, I might not even wear green. That’ll show ‘em.

The UK’s Guardian/Observer has a list I came across via waiterrant (he’s #44) of “The world’s 50 most powerful blogs,” and once again, yours truly is not included. Figures.

Actually, it’s an interesting list and will serve as fodder for blogs to invite to my survey, though I haven’t had a lot of luck in getting “big time” bloggers to participate as of yet. And it’s a list to take with a grain of salt. It’s kind of UK-centric, and it doesn’t include a bunch of different blogs you think it would include– the Daily KOS, for example.

This is the problem of YouTube: one thing leads to another, and pretty soon, you get to the video about making orange crayons:

Good night.

Here is the Ypsi Township native singing “Ray of Light:”

I think that MTV or VH1 is going to broadcast the show next weekend or something, but as the YouTube site tells it, Madonna apparently wanted Iggy and the Stooges to perform her songs instead of singing them herself, maybe because she thinks that Iggy and company have been snubbed by the Hall of Fame for too long, maybe she just wanted to do something different. The audience seems a little confused.

This one goes out to all the Harry Potter fans:

It’s a trailer for a documentary about HP fandom to come out (apparently, it premiered at the SXSW fest down in Austin a couple weeks ago) called We Are Wizards. It looks quite promising.

From the NPR News Blog comes this, “Obama Campaign Skewers Clinton E-Mail Statement.” It’s kinda funny stuff and I certainly agree with the Obama camp’s points here, but jeez, I just want this to wrap-up already….

I went to a spiel/mini-symposium/keynote speech deal over at the University of Michigan on Friday that was kind of a recap of a conference they had there about plagiarism last year, and also a celebration for the book Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age. An interesting afternoon, and as an aside, it is one of those things that makes me think about living in the long shadow cast by the University of Michigan. Most people (including some of the out-of-towners who were at this thing) are surprised to learn that EMU is only about 10 miles away from U of M, though, as my visit to the pristine and beautiful Angell Hall reminded me for the millionth time, U of M and EMU are worlds apart. But the upside of living right next to U of M is events like this come up every once in a while, not to mention all the other cool stuff in Ann Arbor and on campus, the libraries, etc., etc.

Anyway, the speeches were from Linda “on the home team” Adler-Kassner, Rebecca Moore Howard, and Chris Anson. The three of them have a chapter is in this book, too. Linda AK’s talk was about Turnitin.com and she pointed out something that I guess is kind of obvious once you start looking but something I had not thought of before: just about everything you see about plagiarism in the popular press seems to come from these people at Turnitin.com. That’s kind of like everything about the overblown dangers of drinking and driving coming out from Budweiser or something. It’s a nasty business to be sure, but you’ve got to hand it to John Barrie and these other people: they’ve been incredibly able to convince folks that a) plagiarism is this horrific plague on the educational process, and b)Turnitin.com is the solution. And they’ve done all this with essentially no expertise on the matter.

Rebecca Howard’s talk was mostly about a research project she’s working on called “The Engaged Reading Project,” which is a fairly complicated and detailed analysis of how students are using/misusing sources. One of the things she pointed out as part of her talk was some of the ways in which Turnitin.com doesn’t work when it comes to “catching” things less than 40-some-odd characters, and what Turnitin really is is a “copy detection” system, which is not the same thing as plagiarism. I appreciated this because while all of the ethical and other problems with plagiarism detection schemes are of course important, it frankly annoys me to no end that these people are making millions of dollars off of a product that fosters bad teaching and, just to top it off, it doesn’t really work that well.

Anyway, most of what Howard did was talk about how her research is trying to approach the problem from the opposite direction, to find out what it is that students are doing with their sources, etc. I think a lot of what she was talking about is that students who are misusing sources and doing a sort of “patch writing” are just not that engaged in the reading and the assignment. So in that sense, plagiarism (but not really plagiarism, more like not using sources well and/or not according to the rules) really is a learning problem and not a policing problem.

Chris Anson talked about a couple of examples of plagiarism– or not really plagiarism so much as “borrowed writing”– that occur all the time in the “real world.” One was in the Army, where it is (apparently) common for officers to copy each others’ memos without attribution in order to relay a message to the troops. Mike at vitia had a series of posts which start here about this in November that sort of address this kind of thing. But for me the more interesting example was when he was talking about how there’s all this language on the web that people “borrow” from each other all the time. The example Anson had that stuck with me was the kind of language that a number of different web sites use about how to drive in the snow and ice. For example, if you do a Google search for these two sentences–

Use your brakes cautiously. Abrupt braking can cause brake lock-up and cause you to lose steering control.

– (as I did if you follow the link), you’ll see lots of web sites use either the exact language or something pretty close to it in describing icy driving. Now, is this plagiarism? Hell if I know. I mean, it seems to me there are only so many ways you can uniquely word something like “use your brakes cautiously,” which maybe gets into some territory about what counts as “common knowledge” of something that doesn’t need to be cited, or some kind of language that cannot be copyrighted or owned per se, like most recipes.

At the end of the day, and I think this was Linda’s main point, “plagiarism” is a problem that really is a stand-in for lots of other problems and fears we have about the (mis)education of youth. Plagiarism is a hot topic again as a result of technology, but is it actually a “problem” because students can so easily just “copy and paste” stuff from the web, or is it really a problem because this technology throws such an enormous wrench into concepts of ownership, knowledge, access, collaboration, connections, etc. It’d be interesting to find out if there were previous plagiarism scares with the development of previous technologies, like the dangers of the typewriter making writing so much easier to copy.

Anyway, great and thoughtful stuff. I bought the book and I hope to use it a bit next year when I teach about plagiarism again in 516.

Via my friend Chris and via boing-boing comes this “Sweded” version of Star Wars:

Oh, where to begin?

First off, this is why I want to very much see the here and gone almost immediately movie, Be Kind Rewind. As the wikipedia entry suggests, the plot of the movie involves the characters remaking the videos in a rental store, and, when customers complain about the remakes, which are like the one above, the excuse offered is that the videos are from Sweden. Or something like that– I have yet to see the movie.

Second, I think this would be a fun way to spend the afternoon with Will and some of his friends. Not this particular afternoon, but I can see the film maker in me yet….

And third, I actually think this might be a kind of cool assignment for some of the writing classes I teach, particularly English 328. I am imagining something like asking students, working in small groups, to make a 2 minute or less “sweded” version of something. It could be a pop movie, or, if I wanted it to fit more in the theme of the class, maybe it could be of a style and/or grammar rule, maybe a writing “tip” of some sort. We have the cheap cameras and (I think?) things like iMovie to make this work. Then students would have to write about the experience in terms of the process, what this different kind of “writing” says about more conventional “words in a row” writing, etc.

I don’t know, I think this is just crazy enough to work.

I’ve seen these sorts of stories/videos about the offices that Google has around the world before:

They are inviting and cool and groovy and everything, and believe me, I’d rather work in a space like this than the shit-hole that is Pray-Harrold Hall. (BTW, if you the time, do follow that link to the “EMU Historic Tour” entry on Pray-Harrold. I think its pretty darn funny. Notice the “earlier”– presumably when they building opened in 1969– picture is not a whole lot different than the “today” picture, except that it looked a little more shiny in ‘69. It’s like that on the inside– once shiny and new, and now kind of overcast and harshly lit. And the architecture style described as “International;” is that code for “Orwellian?”) Education at all levels might work better if it was a bit more playground-like, though frankly, I’d settle for just a window, a reasonable heating/cooling system, and a space that didn’t smell like old building.

But as inviting and cool and groovy and everything that this Google office actually is, I have to wonder if it would actually be a good place to work in the long-run. I am sure that someone has done some kind of study or analysis of this, how spaces in these “don’t be evil” corporations like Google actually are kind of, potentially at least, evil. One obvious draw-back of this design is that it’s set up this way so you never have to or want to leave– all the toys to play with, the slides, the exercise facilities, the free food, etc. Besides the fact that this is also the premise behind prison– though prison is obviously a lot less comfy and a lot less voluntary– isn’t this a problem for people who have families and lives outside of work? And don’t companies like Google want workers who have some kind of outside of work lives? Or if they don’t want those kinds of workers, isn’t that kind of a problem?

I have to wonder if I could get anything done in there. If I had to work there, I’d be the old man yelling “hey, turn down you damn X-box and stop playing ping-pong– I’m trying to freakin’ WORK here!” Damn kids…. And thank you, but stairs and elevators work better for me than poles or slides in going from floor 2 to floor 1.

Woman sits on boyfriend’s toilet for two years. I can’t really add to this.