Category: Technology

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Misc. Catch-Up on RSS Feed Reading, part 2

To continue what I started the other day (though it’s hopeless to pretend I’ll catch up on reading stuff in my feeds– there are over 700 unread entries today):

I think that’s about as caught up as I’m going to get. Time to mark all as read and move on….

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From the mailroom: Kevin "Asian Grade" Smith Responds

Last weekend, I had a blog entry about a New York Times article that mentioned a term paper service called “Asian Grade.” This morning, I received an email about this blog post from none other than Kevin “Asian Grade” Smith himself. At least as far as I can tell it is him.

Anyway, I asked him if I could publish the email message he sent me and he said yes. So, without further delay or comment, here’s what Smith had to say about his thoughts on the NYT article, his site, and his thoughts on plagarism:

Hi, I saw that you bloged about us (Asian Grade) and just wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you and to perhaps clear up a couple misunderstandings and out of contexts quotes that were in the NY Times article.

To start off: we are not racists, by any means. We believe that we are just a humorous form of parody similar to the style of a Carlos mencia or a Dave chapelle (two mega popular TV shows) we use this parody and humor to reach an audience that we would possibly otherwise miss. An example of this can be seen on our appearance on the mega hit website davesdaily.com this summer. Additionally since being in business (for almost a year now, we have not received ONE complaint on our parody style of our website. Not one. In fact our myspace page (which gained almost 7000 friends in 2 months) has roughly 4500 of those friends being of Asian decent. The simple fact is we’ve been embraced by the Asian community as well as generation “next” 18-24 year olds)

Secondly and this is something we feel the Times left out is that we are first and foremost a campaign to eliminate the term paper as a legitimate academic tool. It is our opinion, that term papers are mindless make work assigned by either lazy teachers or simply teachers who dont want to rock the boat and mess with the status quo. Students do not learn by writing term papers and are such being victims of fraud. (Believe it or not students pay colleges to learn) Additionally, we encourage and support alternative means of education, I’m not a teacher and I can come up with a short list of better, more productive alternatives to term papers: class presentations, class debates, speeches, PowerPoint’s presentations, multimedia and website development etc. Imagine how many more options a teacher could come up with.

As to the fee issue that we do have for each paper. Here’s the deal behind that and I told this to the Times and they choose to ignore this… we loose $$ on the site. Being recent college grads, losing $ is not a luxury we like to take. That feature was designed to at the very least make our monthly server fee. However this backfired: Since we have been in existence, this featured has not been used ONCE. 2 last points on this if I may: 1. Were thinking about removing it. 2. You idea on the way back machine does not work. For one, we have not been saved once by them. For two: papers are done on a download from our website via MS Word. This prevents the Way Back Machine from accessing them.

We are willing to lose money because we believe in our cause. We believe in bringing this issue out in the open and shed light on something that has otherwise been overlooked because of the shadiness other sites in our industry. This shadiness is something we actively seek to change. We know that people have pre set assumptions on our industry. That is why we are proud to put light onto the industry, that is why we realize we need to go above and beyond the “slacker student” misconception. That is why we actively every other month do community service to better our community, and the face of the industry. This is also why we are a proud member of the adopt a highway program as well as have a stated community service and responsibilities section on our website.

We love your comment in your blog “In other words, make an assignment that’s easy to plagiarize and you can be assured that someone will do just that.” but would like to add something to that…we ask teachers to make assignments that are IMPOSABLE to plagiarize, we want to stress unique essay assignments is NOT the answer, unique lesson plans are. This way not only will a teacher be doing their job, but (and more importantly) a student is actually learning the material.

Finally, one thing I would like to bring to your attention that was left out of the Times article was an important notice of hypocrisy on the teacher’s side. Of the 5% of the custom paper sites out there who actually speak English and deliver quality, unique writing, these assignments are done by PAID teachers. That’s right, The ones writing custom papers for 15-20-25 bucks a page are teachers usually looking to make a quick $200-$300. Every month in the spring and fall I get 2-3 emails from teachers with resumes attached asking for work. In the summer this number ranges from 8-12. And the funny part is I dont even offer custom papers, teachers simply take 5 seconds to look at my site, see the word “term paper” and send me their resume. Imagine what actually custom paper sites get in their email box?? This shows me 2 things: 1. Teacher’s are not being paid enough. 2. Teachers acknowledge term papers are nonsense make-work one emailed resume at a time.

The question I ask is why do teacher’s insist on assigning term papers while everyone (including the teachers) know that students do not nor ever will learn ANYTHING from these assignments. (Besides of course becoming experts in what fonts look bigger.)

I would love to get a reply back from you, the more this topic is brought out in the open forum the better. Understand one very important thing, we both want to improve the quality of education in this country. The only difference (I think anyway) is that I believe education can only improve once a term paper is removed from the classroom.

I apologize for the long email, I am passionate about this subject.

Kevin Smith
AsianGrade.com

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Misc. Catch-Up on RSS Feed Reading, Part 1

With the strike and school and everything, I haven’t had much time to read blogs the way I usually do, which is with an RSS reader– in my case, NetNewsWire Lite. But I’ve got a bit of catch-up to do; I have 790 or so unread posts in my feeds. Of course, I’m not going to read them all but I have to at least do a little browsing through them. So, in the order in which they appear in my feed, here’s some of what I came across:

  • “New Favorite New Apps of Two Mac Geeks,” which includes a pretty interesting looking video software/TV software called Democracy. I haven’t actually listened to the podcast yet though.
  • From jill/txt, this post “rituals of closure.” Lots of good stuff here; I like how she says “I wish Technorati would track the ending of blogs as it tracks their creation,” since how things end is often is as interesting as how they begin.
  • Also via jill/text, YouTubeX, which appears to be a very easy to use download tool for YouTube (I haven’t messed with it yet though).
  • Oh, and it appears that jill is working on a book about blogging. Someone else beats me to the punch, and there are undoubtably many others working on such books….
  • From Wired News, “Web 2.0 Winners and Losers,” which both a) basically explains what “Web 2.0” actually means (well, at least it offers examples), and b) has some good links to stuff to check out if you haven’t. I’m not a big fan of Writerly myself though.

I still have about 500 unread articles in my feed, so there will probably be more….

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"Term Paper II" Fun with plagiarism again

I did not see the “part one” in this series, but the NYT article “Term Paper Project, Part II” might be an interesting one to share with folks in English 516 this coming winter. One of the more interesting parts of the article for me was the talk with Kevin Smith, the webmaster of a site called “Asian Grade” that distributes term papers for free.

Needless to say, I don’t adhere to the not so subtle racism of a site predicated on the idea that it’s best to cheat off of Asian students– despite, as the NYTimes dutifully notes, that Mr. Smith “is half-Asian.” And there are some other features of the site that are problematic– like, for a fee, they will remove a paper that you copy from it so that your professor can’t find it as easily. (Note to professors: see The Wayback Machine). But I do think he has a point when he (and his site) say:

The site argues that a lot of term-paper assignments are mindless make-work, and that many teachers don’t even bother to grade them carefully.

“In fact, the biggest academic con is not plagiarism by students,â€� the site says, “it’s the fact that teachers pretend to read 25-30 papers on the same subject, semester after semester, year after year … come on, did you honestly think your teachers enjoy your opinion of Robert Frost’s poems.â€�

In other words, make an assignment that’s easy to plagiarize and you can be assured that someone will do just that.

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Creepy ETS Grading Services

Obviously, I’ve been distracted by this strike thing. But for my own purposes and to give people an idea about what is usually here when this is just a normal and boring blog: I was pretty creeped out by “The Criterion Service Review,” which is an electronic grading system done by everyone’s favorite company, ETS. If I ever teach again, this might be a good resource for English 516.

Two other quick thoughts for now. First, it does kind of have to do with the strike, in a way. Maybe this is an example of how technology allows for the outsourcing of faculty?

Second, given that the email that the ETS people sent me had a totally screwed up link on it, which raises some questions in my mind about how well their computerized scoring system really works.

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WordPress as a CMS

This looks pretty cool and promising: a series of posts/articles/ideas on how to use WordPress as a CMS, which is something I am particularly interested in doing as I figure out more ways to use WordPress in my teaching and with “publishing,” especially things like my soon to be available research writing textbook project. One could make the argument that if you want to use a CMS, you should use a CMS– like drupal or something. But the thing is I like and vaguely understand WordPress, and hey, why change now?

BTW, another cool thing about these tips/instructions: the web site bloghelper is written by a 20 year-old economics student in London.

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One Laptop Per Child to roll out this Fall

Via Kairosnews, this Linux news web site, this blurb at Arstechnica, and the One Laptop per Child homepage, here’s some pr-type info on the progress of the One Laptop Per Child initiative from MIT. The computer they’ve developed and are ready to test is called the CM1 (Children’s Machine 1), and it will cost about $140. The goal is to get them to kids in the developing world, but quite frankly, I think there are a lot of kids in places like Detroit who could use these things too.

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Catching up on blog reading

I did have relatively good Internet access while I was in Europe. It came at a price of between 2-4 Euros an hour, which isn’t too cheap, but it was everywhere. I didn’t take a computer with me, something I will reconsider on my next trip overseas– it would have been nice to do some writing and to watch some DVDs, though there was no WiFi access as far as I could tell. So I went to Internet cafes and I got online about four or five times, mostly to check my email for anything super important, to post to my unofficial blog about our travels, and to check the news.

It’s funny to think about; the last (and only other) time I was in Europe was on my/our honeymoon in 1994, quite a while before Internet cafes and news web sites and such. It was tough back then to even get newspapers and magazines in English, at least where we were. As a result, we found out about OJ and his infamous white Bronco ride a week after it happened while looking at a magazine on the way back home in the plane. This time, we had the ‘net, we had CNN Europe, we had access to USA Today. And as a result, I can tell you I think this John Karr guy is probably just a nut; I’d be very surprised if he did indeed kill JonBenet.

Anyway, even with this connectivity, I didn’t get a chance to read much in the way of blogs while I was away. So, in no real particular order, here are a few things I came across this morning via my RSS reader that might be helpfu to me later on and/or that I just thought were kinda interesting:

Okay, I know I missed a lot, but there you have it.

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Stolen Server (or, not such a nice "welcome back to work" omen)

So, I’m posting this first post after our European vacation (which was quite nice, by the way) at 3:30/4:30 in the morning because a) I’m all confused as to what time it actually should be (I think about 10 pm?), and, more importantly, b) I’m upset because, sometime between Friday (or so) and Monday, someone broke into my office, clipped the security cable on the Mac Mini that was on my desk, and walked away with our server. Apparently, there were some other computers stolen in the building, too.

Nice, huh?

Now, I am upset for all sorts of obvious reasons. We (meaning not just me but other folks in the writing program) had a chunk of teaching, scholarly, and administrative-type work on that computer. It was nothing I would describe as “irreplaceable,” but it was still a lot of work that we aren’t likely to ever get back. And I (“we,” if I count my other tech-geek colleagues who have been using ther server) hadn’t gotten around to backing the server up yet, in large part because we hadn’t gotten to the stage of things of figuring out just how and what to back up yet.

In the end, we will get a computer/server back in place to replace this one. This will ultimately be a blip on our use of a server in the department. But what bothers me most I think is how this exemplifies how completely piss-poor security is in the building where I work and how the institution seems unable/unwilling to do anything about it. The fact of the matter is this is not the first computer to go walking, nor is it the first one to go walking out of a locked faculty member’s office.

And what pisses me off about this is that the attitude around EMU seems to be “well, these things happen.” and doesn’t seem to do anything about it.

Now, I haven’t been to school yet to hear what the arguments/excuses are about all this, but I guess the first thing campus “security” would say is that there are lots of different people who have keys to these rooms: former employees, janitors, current employees, etc.. Fair enough, and I also understand that there are many somewhat random, “crimes of opportunity” that take place in Pray-Harrold. I know that laptops and wallets and other things have been stolen out of offices– which is why I never ever leave my office door unlocked or open, even when I go to get something from the main office, and why I would never ever leave my laptop in my office overnight.

So sure, with a building as big and as open as Pray-Harrold, things are going to occassionally turn up missing. But this was no random theft. Someone had to specifically know that in my office on that particular spot on my desk was a computer that they could tuck discreetly away in a bag. I mean, it’s a little computer; it’s not easy to notice. Further, the cable was (apparently– I’ll see it later today) cut, which suggests to me a high degree of planning. In other words, since I am guessing that the thief is not someone reading this blog or another faculty member in the English department, I would argue that someone knew exactly what they were doing, meaning that the person who took this computer had to be someone who had regular and easy access to my office at night.

(And btw, if the thief is reading this blog and steal this computer, please do me a favor and give it back. Just put it back in there the same way you got it out; no questions asked.)

To me, the obvious suspects are the janitors. I’m not saying that that’s who did it, but you’d think that’d be the first person to ask at least. If nothing else, it would give you some names of people who were in/had access to the room at the time the computer was stolen. That is, if campus “security” were to actually do any sort of investigation about this sort of thing. God forbid.

But what is potentially more problematic to me is if it really is was what would be called a random act, a just one of those shrug-of-the-shoulders kinds of things. If that’s the case, what can I “just leave” in my office and not worry about? My desktop computer was right next to the server that was stolen; what would have prevented them from taking two computers? I realize that most breaking-and-entering sorts of people are unlikely to be interested in my books on rhetorical theory or technology, let alone my extensive snowglobe collection and other miscellaneous items that give my office, er, “personality.” But what’s to stop someone from coming in there and just trashing the place on a lark?

In other words, if leaving official school property (e.g., a computer chained to a desk) in a locked faculty office isn’t safe, then what can I leave in there? And why the hell isn’t it safe?

Jeesh. I’ll try to go back to sleep for a while. And then once school gets going, I guess I’ll have to think/rethink what to leave at school and what to leave at home.

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A BOATLOAD of citations on Scholarship in Electronic Publishing

Wow, what a handy resource: the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, which I found by another handy resource, Digital Koans. A lot of this stuff is really about digital resources in academic libraries, but still a potentially very useful research resource.

Oh, and along these lines and also from the Digital Koans site I came across “Lessons for the Future Internet: Learning from the Past,” by Michael Roberts, in the July/August 2006 version of Educause. It’s a nice little history (more or less) of the Internet that might be useful in a class like English 516.