Author: Steve Krause

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Perhaps we’ll need a new reason to hate Turnitin

From today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “Federal Judge Rules That Plagiarism-Detection Tool Does Not Violate Students’ Copyrights.” I have yet to read the whole things and absorb it, but here’s a quote:

Judge Claude M. Hilton, of the U. S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., found that scanning the student papers for the purpose of detecting plagiarism is a “highly transformative” use that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. He ruled that the company “makes no use of any work’s particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works,” and that the new use “provides a substantial public benefit.”

But this isn’t over yet– appeals from the students who brought the case in the first place are certainly forthcoming.

But hey, the way I look at it, there are lots of other reason other than the copyright issues to not like Turnitin. Like it’s just unethical and criminalizes students and doesn’t work well.

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On hypertextopia (maybe something for Writing for the WWW or even 516?)

I haven’t had time to read this yet, but it looks like it might be something pretty cool to play around with this spring in ENGL 444, or maybe even next week in ENGL 516: hypertextopia, which I came across via Grand Text Auto and if:book. I have to say that personally I agree with the if:book folks: as a reader, I am not really a fan of hypertext fiction. As a writer though, I think it’s a fun form to play with. Maybe it’s the “writerly-ness” of the form, a way of reading and writing that would have pleased Barthes to no end. Interesting and intellectually stimulating, but not exactly a page turner on the beach.

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Golden oldie and my own less golden and previous Happy Academic/grad school advice

Alex Halavais has a post I can’t link to right now (there’s some issue on his blog I am sure he will fix) where he has an excellent quote about scholarship and graduate study from Norbert Wiener. Here’s a link to Alex’s blog; I am sure he will make the link work to this entry soon enough.

Alex offers his own solid advice on going on for a PhD in communication studies, and that got me to thinking about my own previous bits of advice on the matter. I do occasionally get these kinds of questions from students, and I figured since I wrote this up before, what the heck, I’ll link to it now.

So, blasts from the past in this order:

  • Steve the Happy Academic, Part I, from 2003. This was back in the day when I was responding to a couple of different academic bloggers who were lamenting their sorry state. I still agree that working in academia is still a pretty good job, even with all of the stupid stuff that comes up.
  • “Should I get a Masters degree?”, also from 2003. I never know if that’s “Masters” or “Master’s” degree, but you get the idea. The short answer is “yes.”
  • “Should I get a PhD? (an answer in three parts),” which is from early 2004 but which is also only from web archives. This is when I was trying to run a blog off of the computer in my office, which was way more trouble than it was worth.
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Krause birthday week wraps up

Loyal readers already know that today is my actual birthday, but one day is frankly not enough for anyone. While Bill HD claims that no one older 8 ought to be allowed to have such a perversion as a “birthday week,” I am of the opinion that it is exactly the opposite: the older you get, the longer you should be allowed to celebrate. Ultimately, most retirees are simply celebrating their birthdays year-round.

In any event, there were a few family snags with my usual birthday plans I won’t go into now, but all in all, a good time. I have received many fine wishes on Facebook, some family cards, I’ve had some cake (albeit a low-fat/low-calorie one), I’ve been able to goof off a little, I’ve enjoyed my new iPod Touch quite a bit, etc.

One kind of weird thing over the weekend though. This is a picture of the birthday card (and its contents) I received from my parents:

Torn Card

The black parts are my sloppy ways of blocking out address and other info; the problem here is that the envelope and enclosed card had about the bottom third of it sheared off. The whole thing came in a plastic bag from the post office that basically said “we’re really sorry, but this was damaged.” It does make you wonder why this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often– this is the first piece of mail I’ve ever received that was damaged like this– and my bank still cashed the check, so all is well.