This is a little off the usual topic here, but I found this pretty entertaining and this is a project of a student of mine in English 596, John Biando, along with several other grad students in various programs in our department. John is in the creative writing program, and as you can tell from this project, Existential Emergency, he’s very interested in alternative forms of story-telling. Cool and amusing stuff.
"Steps toward a successful classroom blog"
Also from jill/txt (yep, I’m behind with schoolwork and thus behind on my blog reading and my own blogging again) comes this article, “Steps toward a successful classroom blog.” This reminds me that I really REALLY need to start getting my act together in terms of both planning English 516 (“Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice”) online for the Winter 2007 term and getting a proposal together for an online version of English 444 (“Writing for the World Wide Web”…).
The Internet Versus The Research Paper
Via boing-boing:
"Our Story" (or, can online scrapbooking catch on?)
A former student/current friend of mine sent me a link to this article a couple weeks ago, “True Story: Online expression evolves from blogging to multimedia storytelling–and it’s not just for bedtime.” The service this article is about is called OurStory.com, which, as far as I can tell by looking at it for about 3 minutes, is a kind of web-based and interactive scrapbook, one that you can also export to a DVD.
Kinda interesting, and worth talking about in either Writing for the World Wide Web or my grad class on computers and writing. But on my computer, the concept of electronic scrapbooking is called iLife.
Wish I was there– or there (maybe)
I stumbled across the web site for “Internet Research 7.0: Internet Convergences,” which is sponsored by a group I had not heard of before this, the Association of Internet Researchers. It’s going on in Australia.
“Stumbled” is perhaps the wrong word. I came across this because Alex Halavais is blogging about it, along with his travel experiences.
Or, perhaps, I should be here, at BlogTalk Reloaded, which is happening in (I think) Vienna. Jill Walker has been blogging about this one lots and lots.
Of course, the fact that these conferences are on different continents than mine does present a bit of a challenge on my modest travel budget. Besides, both of these conferences, given their topics, have lots of stuff available about them via their web sites, which is why these might be good sites to return to when I start planning my winter 2007 version of English 516. And it’s also why maybe I don’t actually need to be there.
Some interesting NPR links
I’ve been pretty swamped the last couple days with this pesky school stuff. For one thing, my schedule this term is already starting to present problems. Mondays, which are the one day of the week I am teaching this semester, are also the most popular days around EMU for meetings. And a big part of my job as “Emperor of Writing” is to go to meetings. In other words, Mondays are pretty nuts.
Second, there’s been some stuff going on lately that is, um, problematic at best.
Anyway, a couple of interesting links that might come in handy for teaching and other things via NPR “Morning Edition:”
- “Higher Ed Panel Calls for College Databases.” This is about the Spelling reprort stuff, which is its own interesting thing.
- Perhaps more interesting for most of my teaching, “Facebook.com Expands Amid Rumors of Buyout.”
Getting into college in the first place…
See this Wired News article, “Websites Help Sort College Entry.” Basically, it highlights some of the clearinghouses for information on applying for college: admission standards, student reviews, tips, costs, etc., etc.
It’s interesting because, despite the fact that I am a college professor, I really don’t have much of a clue about how much it costs to attend, about applying to schools, etc., etc. I suppose I’ll figure that stuff out in the next 8 or 9 years with my son though….
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):
- Dan’s “Where I’m At” movie is pretty cool. (Large though– 10 MB).
- What’s wrong with Turnitin.com, you ask? I think Charlie Lowe at cyberdash has a good post that outlines the problems: “Issues Raised by Use of Turnitin Plagiarism Detection Software.”
- Speaking of Turnitin and plagiarism in general: Kairosnews has this post, this post, this one, this one, and this one, which is a post from the powers that be at Turnitin and that has a ton of comments. I don’t generally care that much about plagarism one way or the other, but some interesting reading here. And personally, my biggest problem with Turnitin is it just doesn’t work that well.
- The ALA Primer is described as an introduction of new readers of the web development site “A List Apart,” but what I think it really is a sort of “best of” list. Handy reading for a web design class.
- More and more and MORE academic publishing goes electronic; from the always useful site, DigitalKoans.
- A couple of interesting links about reading and re-reading: there’s this one from Rice, which build off of this post and this post, which are both at the blog dissoi logoi. I just skimmed these for now (kind of ironic, I suppose), but what interests me most about this is this is something I’m talking about with the grad students teaching first year composition this term.
- Dr. B. wonders if technology is making her a bad teacher. I relate to this because I pretty much dropped everything from Wednesday on because my new office computer, a 17 inch iMac, arrived. And I figured out how to hook up another monitor to it. Pictures coming soon, I am sure.
I think that’s about as caught up as I’m going to get. Time to mark all as read and move on….
"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.