Category: Scholarship

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New Year's Resolutions

Today’s the first day of classes here at EMU. Since I don’t teach today, my original plan was to actually not be at school today, but it turns out that I have a Faculty Council meeting I need to attend. Oh well; summer is over.

I’ve thought of the beginning of the school year as the beginning of “the year” pretty much my whole life and certainly since I started teaching 17 years ago. Jeesh, 17 years ago. I was a graduate assistant back then. I was 22 years old in an MFA creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University, teaching first year composition about three or four months after I finished my BA. Ah, memories….

Anyway, since I’m at the beginning of the new year, I thought it might be good to make some new year’s resolutions (and I also thought that if I made them here, I might stick to them, too). So here they are, more or less in this order:

  • Get into shape. This might seem like the sort of thing I would mention on my unofficial blog, but I mention it here because I have an academic schedule this term that allows me few excuses for getting exercise and I really do want to make losing some weight and being a bit more healthy my top priority this semester.
  • Figure out this online teaching stuff. So far, so good, though I haven’t seen any activity on my online class yet. It’s pretty early though. And one of the things I am going to have to figure out for sure this year for my online teaching is podcasting and (possibly) screencasting, too. I just found out my CCCCs proposal was accepted; it’s called (right now) “Broadcast Composition : Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and for the time-being, it’s going to be about using things like podcasting and other “lower-end” multimedia to supplement my online teaching. But that could change and evolve.
  • Read. I have mentioned this in the recent past on my blog, but basically, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) finished with my textbook project, I am (more or less and/or one way or the other) pretty much off of the job market, and I have therefore reached a point in my career where I don’t have to produce scholarship in order to participate in that “academic game.” So, for a while at least, I think I’m going to become mainly a consumer of scholarship and read, both current scholarship and some of the things before.
  • Blog. And despite what Ivan Tribble said again, I stand by what I said back in July: While he did have some valid points, I think blogging can help someone on the job market and I think it helps those of us who are more “established” in academic careers too. To read more about Tribble II, I’d suggest reading Collin’s entry about this. By the way: it occurs to me that it is a little– I don’t know, strange/funny/ironic — that Tribble in this article seems to think that blogging under one’s own name can be okay and yet he’s sticking to his pseduonym here. Hmmm…..
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Plagiarism: The Lawsuit/Web Site, The Building, The Movie

Here’s kind of a catch-up post on some stuff I’ve come across lately:

  • Bill H-D sent me this link to an article in Inside Higher Ed, “New Tack Against Term Paper Providers.” Here’s a quote:

    Lawyers for a graduate student named Blue Macellari filed a lawsuit in federal court in Illinois alleging that three Web sites that sell term papers made a manuscript she had written available without her permission. She is charging the owner of the sites (as well as the sites’ Internet service provider) with copyright infringement, consumer fraud and invasion of privacy, among other things.

    But it gets a bit more complicated than that.

    According to Macellari’s complaint, a friend doing a casual Google search of Macellari’s name last January came across references to a paper she had written during a year abroad at the University of Cape Town in 1998, which Macellari had posted in 1999 on a personal Web site at Mount Holyoke College, where she earned her degree.

    But the friend found links to the paper not on her Mount Holyoke page but on two Web sites, DoingMyHomework.com and FreeforEssays.com, that said the paper was in their databases. Macellari says she later found several hundred words of her paper on another site, FreeforTermPapers.com.

    In other words, Macellari’s essay got lifted from her web site by some online papermill. Great, just great. Those papermill/spam bastards ruin it for everyone.

    Stopping students from publishing their writing on their web sites obviously isn’t much of a solution. But it is probably not a bad idea for me to recommend to students that they slap a creative commons agreement on their work. It isn’t going to stop people from taking their work, but it might give them ammo for a legal remedy.

  • In the “building” department and via Johndan’s blog comes this article “Brothers From Another Mother,” by Clay Risen and published in a web periodical called “The Morning News.” Here’s a quote from the first paragraph:

    Plagiarism is usually associated with college term papers and the occasional historical bestseller. Recently, though, the big story in architecture circles has been a growing list of supposedly “copycat� designs—in other words, architectural plagiarism. The hot architecture gossip blog, The Gutter, has made a regular feature—called the Gutterland Police Blotter—out of tagging similarities between, say, Rem Koolhaas’s elevated subway sheath at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a train station in Santiago, Chile. In a groundbreaking ruling earlier this month, a federal judge allowed a suit against Freedom Tower architect David Childs to go forward; the suit, by a former architecture student, accuses Childs of stealing the tower’s design from one the student had presented in a class project. And a recent New York Times article noted three other high-profile clashes between purported plagiarizers and their alleged sources.

    Johndan talks more about this on his site as well; for me, it raises some interesting questions about what counts as a “text,” what’s the difference between “copying” and “imitating” (I guess, as they say, doing it well is part of it), and do the rules of “words in a row” literacy apply to things like architecture.

  • Finally, Plagiarism the Movie. Well, okay; just kind of a cool flash intro to Washington State University’s plagiarism site, which also has some good info.
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An "Intelligent Design" theory I am willing to support

On my official blog, I try to steer clear of direct and overt politics and such. I don’t agree with the right’s argument that academia is too liberal to be fair to conservative students and I’ve voiced my opinions about all that here, but generally, I save my expressions of my politics and religious beliefs for my unofficial blog.

But I want to come out here all in favor of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or, as it has also been called, Pastafarianism.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an August 29 New York Times article, “But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?” As the article reports, the Kansas State Board of Education is giving preliminary approval for the teaching of alternatives to evolution like “Intelligent Design” in science classes. Bobby Henderson, “a 25-year-old with a physics degree from Oregon State University,” has some problems with this, which he shared in an “Open Letter to the Kansas School Board” in which he explains that if they are not willing to include the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s teachings about the origins of life in their “Intellifent Design” curriculum, he would take legal action. To quote from the New York Times piece:

In perfect deadpan he wrote that although he agreed that science students should “hear multiple viewpoints” of how the universe came to be, he was worried that they would be hearing only one theory of intelligent design. After all, he noted, there are many such theories, including his own fervent belief that “the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.” He demanded equal time in the classroom and threatened a lawsuit.

Soon he was flooded with e-mail messages. Ninety-five percent of those who wrote to him, he said on his Web site, were “in favor of teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in schools.” Five percent suggested that he would be going to hell. Lawyers contacted him inquiring how serious he was about a lawsuit against the Kansas board. His answer: “Very.”

I think this is interesting for a whole variety of different reasons, but I will limit myself to two for the time-being:

  • The “Intelligent Design” movement is a fantastic example (maybe the best example ever) of how simply renaming something changes the values assigned to it by an audience. These folks were getting nowhere with the term “creationism,” largely because of the overt religious connotations. But “Intelligent Design:” well, who could be against that? It’s the same tactic we’ve seen with “The Death Tax” (which is a name that tested significantly better than what it really is, “The Estate Tax”), “Personal Savings Accounts” as they connect to Social Security, and so forth. But somehow, the language and approach of “Intelligent Design” seems unusually persuasive, perhaps beause the words “intelligent” and “design” so often have positive connotations.
  • The “Intelligent Design” movement is another example of what I see as a sort of re-emergence of religiosity into the public sphere. This is perhaps the most overt example, but I think that there are subtle ways in which the line that has traditionally separated “church” from “state” has become quite a bit more porous in recent years. Part of it is the Bush administration of course, but I also think a lot of it is a response to 9/11. Personally, I have nothing against religion per se, but a) I’m not a religious person and I don’t want to be compelled to be a religious person by the state, and b) we shouldn’t be teaching religious concepts of origin (or just about anything else, for that matter) as “science” or even as “scholarly,” and c) we shouldn’t be doing these things in publicly funded institutions.

Unless we do go down the Spaghetti Monster path. I’m all for that.

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That's done (sorta); now what do I need to do?

Monkey writer

I managed to meet the deadline that I had set up for myself with my textbook project just over a week ago– at least technically I met the deadline. This “on-again/off-again” project has been “on-again” in the past six or eight months, so I’m feeling confident about my progress and possibilities of finishing this project, or at least more confident than I have felt in the past. Of course, there’s still a fair amount of work that needs to be done, more revisions and such, it still has to be sent out to readers (yet again), if it’s approved it will take a year or more to actually publish, and even with all that, there is still no guarantee that this thing will ever actually appear as a textbook. Someday, when the dust for all this settles, I’d like to write something about the textbook writing experience. It’s been an education, no question about it.

Anyway, I worked on this a lot for the last 10 days or so, and this morning, the day after I emailed stuff to the editors, I have this odd “what now?” kind of feeling. Frankly, I know “what now”: I have to get ready for that pesky fall semester that is going to be starting here in about two weeks. I need to tidy-up my blogs and some other web projects. I should do at least a little thinking and reading about my longer-term project on the history or writing technologies before the computer (btw, thanks to Dennis Jerz to this link of Flickr picts of “writing machines,” mostly typewriters). And I am also interested in trying to focus some more time on actually trying to read the scholarship in my field and less time in trying to create more of it.

Not to mention I have a life, which includes a seriously neglected garden and a flabby body that needs to get to the gym. Immediately.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I know the answer to the question of this post. It’s just a matter of convincing myself that I need to go on to something else, I suppose. Okay contemplative monkey– get to work then!

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Academic Commons: Looks promising to me

I just found out about Academic Commons, “a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.” It looks like they are running both an on-going blog and a quarterly (the first edition, August 2005, is available here).

And it also looks like they are attracting some “big names” in the world of technology and education. Their first issue includes articles and interviews with Jerry Graff, Michael Joyce, and Richard Lanham. Something I’ll have to check out in more detail soon.

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What's wrong with Kansas?

Nick Carbone just posted this Inside Higher Ed story to various mailing lists, “University as Author?” which is about a pending case before the Kansas Supreme Court which might decide that the Kansas Board of Regents can declare that it “owns” all of the rights to the intellectual property of faculty teaching at public colleges.

Of course, what the Board of Regents is really going for is a piece of the action for technologies developed in the laboratories at Kansas universities. There’s not a lot of money to be made by most English professor-types. But there might be some implications to the Board’s/University’s grab at all this Intellectual property for the likes of me:

Ann Springer, associate counsel for the American Association of University Professors, which filed a brief on the dispute, said that if colleges own their professors’ works, then they are also responsible for the content. “They would have to review everything that is written,� she said, adding that if the university were considered responsible for content, it might seek to contain controversial content. “I don’t think [the University of] Colorado wants to be responsible for all of Ward Churchill’s writing, but they would be.� She added that faculty members would have far less incentive to innovate if the institution could claim full ownership of their work.

I do think that the Board/University is entitled to some portion of IP rights, especially for IP that is developed largely with the support of the University and IP that is developed by a faculty members as part of his or her job. But I don’t think they ought to get all of it. And if this decision were to be upheld, I think you would see a chilling of innovation, and/or some interesting wranglings by professors to protect their rights.

For example, if I write an academic book (or textbook or a novel or a musical or whatever), if I receive some sort of release from the institution to complete that book, and if that book “counts” in the process of tenure and review, then I am okay with the institution claiming at least a portion of that IP. Not all of it, but some of it, probably negotiated in some process (at EMU, that would probably be a union issue). On the other hand, if I write a book with no support from the institution and if it doesn’t count as “intellectual work” in the tenure and review process (btw, in my department, a textbook does indeed count as a “book”), then I don’t think I owe the institution a dime.

Maybe the smart thing for these professors in Kansas to do (and who knows, it might be the rest of us sooner than later) would be to carefully construct a very specific and legally defined “life” outside of the institution. As I understand it, there are plenty of academics (particularly in fields like business, law, medicine, but also in areas like education, journalism, and public relations) who maintain a “private practice” or a “consulting” business while being a professor. Framed as that sort of arrangement, perhaps faculty-types would have a better chance of holding on to the IP that is really theirs and theirs alone.

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Blogging and "academic branding"

I’ve read and read about the Chronicle of Higher Education article “Master (or Mistress) of Your Domain” by Michael J. Bugeja in a couple of different places, but I like the way John talks about the article here. I disagree with the presumption that Bugeja is making about what it takes to become an associate or full professor, to be “nationally recognized,” because the majority of colleges and universities are not tier 1 research facilities and thus have different standards for tenure.

But I do agree (obviously) that it’s a good idea for academics to have a web site and to even think about investing in your very own domain name. I’ve been darn happy with stevendkrause.com. Sure, I have to pay a little money out of pocket, but it’s much more reliable service than EMU’s servers and I can pretty much do whatever I want with it. Personally, I think it’s the best $40 or $50 a year I spend.

Slight update:

Oh yeah– Like Collin, I too think that Bugeja’s self-promotion is kinda creepy and slimy-sounding. I do think it’s important for academics to do self-promotion, something that I think many folks (including me) are kind of reluctant to do. On the other hand, Bugeja has probably gone a wee-bit too far here.