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…..

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.

My Freshman Day (sorta…)

I participated in a freshman orientation session yesterday morning at EMU. Basically, the session I lead was about “life in the classroom,” and my job was to give them a sense about what classroom life was like in 50 minutes or less. Needless to say, I didn’t manage to accomplish that; I think they’ll actually have to start going to class before they can figure out for themselves what it means to be a “college student.”

I was able to work through an explanation of the handout they give to students, which has sections about things like the need to attend class, reading the syllabus, appropriate class conduct, not cheating, where to get tutoring help, etc. I guess it was useful for them. I mean, all of this stuff strikes me as common sense, but of course, what counts as “common sense” depends on the community that you are in. For example, a couple of students asked about this thing called a “syllabus” and about books (“How am I supposed to know what books to get for my classes?”). Questions that definitely mark these kids as “new.”

And I should point out that they were “kids.” We have a lot of “non-traditional” students at EMU, but as far as I could tell, all of these students were right out of high school and getting ready to live in the dorms, away from home for the first time ever. Most of these students were born around 1987, and this makes me feel quite old. Given that I was in my junior year in college back in ’87, it is no longer a stretch to say that I’m old enough to be the father of these kids. Yikes.

Anyway, while a lot of the questions these future students had about the classroom struck me as simplistic and obvious, I was also struck by how little I knew about the part of EMU that they inhabit on a day-to-day basis. Maybe I’m thinking about this now because I am reading the excellent book My Freshman Year by Rebekah “not her real name” Nathan, which is about an anthropology professor who enrolls as a freshman to research the life of college students the same way that studied other “distant and foreign” cultures. I haven’t come close to finishing reading it yet, but early on, Nathan talks about how different the university looks to her as a student than it did as a college professor. Among other things, she means this in a basic geographic sense: Nathan talks about how as a faculty member, she was able to park and thus enter the buildings where she worked from a particular vantage point. But as a student, especially living in the dorms, the university had a completely different geography, one that she found disorienting and confusing.

I experienced a little bit of that confusion myself on Sunday. While most of the orientation session I led was on “my turf” of the classroom, the students also asked about things having to do with meal plans, some dorm life issues, and registering for classes. There were two “student leaders” in my group, college juniors and seniors who were hired to usher around the new freshman, and I’m glad they were there. I had no clue about the questions these students were asking, and I found some of the answers surprising– the meal plan that students buy works everywhere except Wendy’s in the union, for example.

I could go on, and I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised that what the university looks like is different based on one’s point of view. But I guess I was just struck by how very different this place seems to look to students than it looks to me. Something worth thinking about as I get ready to actually teach….

I am NOT even CLOSE to ready

Because I’ve been awfully busy with “life in general” and my textbook project in particular this summer, and also because I’m doing quite a number of new things in my teaching this fall, I am unusually ill-prepared for the upcoming term.

How ill-prepared, you ask? Here’s an embarassaing example:

I emailed my classes just the other day to tell them that while I didn’t have a syllabus and class schedule ready and available online, I could tell them what books they needed to order. Increasingly, I find that my students are doing what I consider to be the smart thing and buying their books online instead of dealing with the local textbook stores, which (IMO) are inefficient and over-priced.

I’m teaching two sections of a class I teach all the time here at EMU, “Writing, Style, and Technology:” one that is online (and that has represented its own preparation “challenges”) and one that I thought was on Tuesday nights. In fact, I was so certain I was teaching on Tuesday nights that I made all my plans around Tuesdays, I had told everyone I was teaching on Tuesdays, and, as I said in my email to my students in this section, “I’ll see you on Tuesday night in a couple weeks.” This wasn’t even a question in my mind.

One of my near-future students emailed me back and said something along the lines of “gee, I have this class down for Thursday nights; did they change the day of the class?” At first, I was going to email this student right back to correct this student. But I decided to double-check the class schedule online and what-do-ya-know, I was wrong. And had this student not emailed me, I wouldn’t have showed up to class for the first meeting and I would have arrived on Tuesday and said “gosh, where is everyone?”

Jeesh. Quite the bumpy start here….

More K-12 teaching jobs in the future? I wouldn't bet on it…

I haven’t been posting this week (and I won’t post much now) because I’ve been pretty busy with life things lately. But I have been meaning to post at least something about this article that was linked to the NCTE Inbox service, “40% of teachers plan to quit by 2010,” which was in the Chicago Sun-Times. Here’s a quote:

Forty percent of public school teachers plan to leave the profession within five years, the highest rate since at least 1990, according to a study being released Thursday.

The rate is expected to be even greater among high school teachers, half of whom plan to be out of teaching by 2010, according to the National Center for Education Information.

Retirement is the dominant factor, as the public teaching corps is aging fast, say surveys of teachers in kindergarten through grade 12.

Two quick thoughts:

  • I know this isn’t really the job of this article, but I have to assume that these retirement rates vary from region to region, and they might vary quite a bit. In Michigan right now, getting a job teaching English at the secondary level is kind of tricky, and I always tell prospective secondary school teachers that they might need to move to get a job.
  • You know, this is kind of what they used to say about teaching at the college-level, too. When I was in college in the mid-80’s, I was told by a number of college professors that there would certainly be jobs teaching in universities soon because all of these folks who were getting ready to retire. Well, guess what? A lot of these folks (at least in fields like English) either didn’t retire or they weren’t replaced with full-time professors. I don’t know if the powers that be could get away with that for K-12 schooling, but it is something to keep in mind: don’t count your retiring teachers until they actually hatch– er, I mean retire.

Teaching Online at EMU: The Learning Curves

Despite the fact that I’ve been involved in using technology to teach writing for a long time now, I’ve never taught an online class before, at least before this semester. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the big one for me is that at EMU, these courses are offered through Continuing Education and they tend to staff them with faculty who teach the courses as overloads. I wasn’t willing to do that, but then (for a variety of different reasons that really aren’t that interesting anyway) I was told that I could teach an online class as part of my “regular” teaching load after all and I’m going to start teaching one online class on in a couple of weeks.

After both procrastinating and working on other things I needed to do this summer, I’m finally starting to get my online class together. EMU Online uses eCollege to support their online classes, and eCollege is pretty decent software. I have some issues with it (see below), but it sure as heck is better than WebCT, which I tried to use for another class back in January. Incidentally, there’s actually some campus politics surrounding this because there are “forces” around here who want us to use WebCT to teach online. My hope is that the pro-WebCT people lose this battle.

So far, I’ve got three observations:

  • Once again, I am reminded that a little HTML goes a long LONG way. Every once in a while, I encounter colleagues at EMU or online or at a conference or whatever who say that there’s no real point in learning or teaching basic HTML skills, in part because software like Dreamweaver makes it easy to avoid messing with the code. And you can get away with not using an HTML with eCollege, too. But it sure helps to know at least the basics of HTML.
  • Despite what I do know about HTML and CSS and other computer geek things, I still have to get over a learning curve to make this software work, at least work for me. eCollege isn’t nearly as frustrating as WebCT, but it’s frustrating enough.
  • eCollege (and just about every other software I’ve seen for teaching online) isn’t really designed to teach a writing course, at least the way I tend to teach writing classes. This is kind of hard for me to explain just now, but I guess what I’m getting at is this: eCollege seems to me to assume that a college course is made up of individual units which students work through, more or less independently, and then take a test about to demonstrate knowledge. Sure, there’s plenty of opportunities for interaction between students and between the instructor with the software, but it doesn’t seem that easy to me to exchange drafts of essays in small groups. Of course, that might be just because I’m missing something in the instructions for how to do this.

Oh, and eCollege supports streaming audio and video. I still think I’m just going to upload mp3 files weekly or so. Eventually, I’m going to figure out how to post a “real” podcast for this class– one with an RSS feed and the whole bit– but I probably won’t publish it as part of the eCollege shell.

Are there any freshmen reading this?

The new school year is approaching and it’s approaching more rapidly than I would prefer. I keep getting email messages from students asking about the reading list and assignments for my classes, and I keep having to email them back and explain that I am still trying to figure out what the assignments and the reading list are going to look like. Interestingly enough, these “extra eager” students are enrolled in the online class I’m teaching.

Anyway, as is typical of the new year, there’s a discussion right now about the extent to which first year students do (or, as the argument goes, don’t) read. I say this is “typical” because usually about now, someone posts to the WPA-L mailing list and other places a list of “things entering college freshmen don’t know,” which lists stuff like “freshmen have never heard of Richard Nixon,” an assertion based on nothing and also one that doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot.

This year though, there’s a different twist: the posts are revolving around Tommy Lee Goes to College, the latest “reality” show about rock-n-roll guy Tommy Lee (who, like a lot of other celebrities nowadays, seems to be a lot more famous now for “being vaguely famous” in the past rather than actually doing something to make him famous in the present) going to college at the University of Nebraska. One of my colleagues posted a message to the WPA-L list reflecting on the show, noting with despair that “freshmen just don’t read.”

I posted back to the list about this, and as I said there, I think it’s worth remembering that the Tommy Lee show is A TELEVISION SHOW. Even though they say it’s about “reality,” it’s most certainly not really about reality. Thus is the nature of the genre, which I generally do not enjoy at all (though The Amazin Race was pretty cool). And while I haven’t seen the show (and I won’t, unless there is nothing else on TV and I have absolutely positively have nothing– and I mean NOTHING– else to do), I would have to think that it’s pretty heavily edited If you were going to make some choices about what to show Tommy and his new college pals doing, would you show them all studying?

And besides all that, it’s pretty hard to make any clear assumptions about the concepts of “freshmen” or even “reading,” at least around here. EMU is probably best described as a “comprehensive and opportunity-granting regional university,” and what that means in terms of freshmen here is we’ve got a mixed bag. Sure, we have “traditional” college freshmen– 18 or so years old, middle-class kids– but I’ll bet this group makes up just about half of incoming first year students here. We certainly don’t have as many “traditional” freshmen as that quaint liberal arts school in Ann Arbor; our students come in all ages, races, and socio-economic backgrounds.

Because EMU is an “opportunity granting” kind of school, we do admit a lot of dramatically underprepared students, and a lot of these students indeed “don’t read” or do much of anything else related to the college experience, largely because they never were asked to do this kind of work before. Some of them will get their proverbial “acts” together, taking advantages of various tutoring and support services and teachers and such and they’ll go on with their college career. Some won’t and they’ll leave college to go and do something else. And to tell the truth, I think giving students the chance to discover that college is not for them (at least in the moment they are in school) is in itself an “opportunity.”

On the other hand, because it is a bargain, costing literally half as much as U of M (and I like to think we’re a good school, too), we attract a lot of perfectly prepared and “normal” students who just don’t have a lot of money and/or who are working themselves through school.

As far as reading goes: well, this post is long enough without me going down that path. I guess I’ll just say that when we say that “freshmen don’t read,” it seems to me that it depends a lot on what you mean by “freshmen” (see above) and “read” (does skimming count? how about skipping around? what sorts of things do they have to read to count as reading? etc.).

Interestingly enough, literally while I was reading this conversation on WPA-L, Annette was telling me about a blurb for a book she saw in Newsweek. It was My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student by Rebekah “not her name” Nathan. Here’s a blurb from that web site about the book:

Placing her own experiences and those of her classmates into a broader context drawn from national surveys of college life, Nathan finds that today’s students face new challenges to which academic institutions have not adapted. At the end of her freshman year, she has an affection and respect for students as a whole that she had previously reserved only for certain individuals. Being a student, she discovers, is hard work. But she also identifies fundamental misperceptions, misunderstandings, and mistakes on both sides of the educational divide that negatively affect the college experience.

By focusing on the actual experiences of students, My Freshman Year offers a refreshing alternative to the frequently divisive debates surrounding the political, economic, and cultural significance of higher education—as well as a novel perspective from which to look at the achievements and difficulties confronting America’s colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.

There’s a decent article in Inside Higher Ed about Nathan’s book and experience. In terms of the whole “freshmen don’t read” issue, here’s an interesting passage:

In the classroom, Nathan found that she sometimes engaged in the same behavior that had driven her crazy as a professor and that annoys faculty members everywhere: feeling tired or coming to class without a firm sense of the reading. These experiences have made her a different kind of teacher, she says.

“I really did not understand about the reading thing,� she said. “If you ask most professors at most schools, they will tell you that students don’t read.� Nathan said that she, like her fellow students, did the readings when there was a direct relationship between the readings and the course. Obvious ways to make that connection are quizzes and essay assignments. But Nathan says less obvious ways, in which readings are directly related to key themes, can work as well.

“You have to make it useful in the classroom,� she said, “not just reading for reading’s sake.�

Bingo.

In any event, Nathan’s book sounds like it might be interesting, er, reading.

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!

"Downloading for the greater good"

Via Johndan’s blog, I found this amusing look at plagiarism, “Downloading for the Greater Good,” by Lauren Frey and available at her blog “The Morning News.” It’s a firmly tongue-in-cheek look at the “up-side” of students buying/getting papers off of the Internet. Like Johndan, I thought this was the most humorous passage:

Most tenured professors didn’t grow up with computers, so they’re not always that sharp when it comes to zeroes and ones. I used to work as an administrative assistant at a very reputable college. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the professors couldn’t handle making microwave popcorn, much less checking their email.

But since students started downloading papers, professors have been forced to catch up with technology. Skipping past the skills needed to operate a microwave, they now have to search the internet looking for proof that the papers are “plagiarized.� Professors have had to learn software such as the “Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program,� which blanks out every fifth word of a student’s paper and then tests how long it takes the student to fill them all back in. Also, many colleges maintain online anti-plagiarism databases that allow professors to type in any eyebrow-raising turn of phrase from a student’s paper to see if it was copied from another source.

This may sound like simple stuff to you and me, but keep in mind that about half of currently tenured professors were born before TV sets became common in American homes.

That popcorn bit got me. I don’t know about where you work, but every time one of my colleagues screws up making microwave popcorn in the faculty lounge, it stinks up the whole floor.

Anyway, two thoughts:

  • To be fair, I have plenty of junior colleagues, some born in the 70’s, who not only routinely burn the popcorn but who are still somewhat in the dark about this whole new-fangled “Internet thing.” Sure, they do email and they will look stuff up on the web, but I think that people of all ages find themselves in fields like English because they don’t want to become particularly computer literate. Of course, as Frey suggests, they ultimately have to become at least a little computer literate.
  • If you’re a student and you’re reading this blog right now and you are thinking that your teacher will never know if you just “copied and pasted” a paper and hand it in, you are probably wrong. Let me try to explain why:

    As I mentioned back in June, I had a student lift a paper from one of these sites with free papers last Spring term. I honestly think that this was the first time this has happened in one of my classes ever. I’m not suggesting that students have never passed any plagiarized material by me or they haven’t passed work by me where they have received maybe a little too much help from a friend or whatever. But I’m talking here about a paper that was pretty much lifted wholesale from a web site.

    The student who did this in June was clearly desperate. The student (I’ll leave the “he or she” thing up in the air) was going to fail the class because he/she was not able to write a passing essay the entire semester. His/her writing was simply that bad. How bad? Well, I was going to type a sentence from one of his/her essays, but I decided that wouldn’t really be that nice, even though this student did in the end cause me much grief. Let’s just say that I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I have had few college-aged students who demonstrated this lack of basic literacy skills. In short, passing off someone else’s writing was his/her last-ditch effort.

    How did I know it was plagiarized? Well, I was reading along in this student’s final research essay and it seemed like his/her writing for the first page or so. Then I came across the sentence “Since strict monitoring of diabetes is needed for the control of the disease, little room is left for carelessness.” That sentence struck me as being distinctly not this student’s writing, so I did a Google search. And the rest, as they say, is history.

    This is obviously an extreme example, but I tell this story because I have had any number of students who have inserted passages and quotes from their sources without giving them credit. This is technically plagiarism, but I usually attribute this sort of thing to not properly citing evidence. Sometimes, when I note in a marginal comment that a particular passage has come from a different source and needs to be properly cited, students respond as if I’ve performed some incredible mind-reading/magic trick in being able to spot this. I think this is because some students think they have seamlessly integrated the lifted writing into their own writing. And yet every college teacher I’ve ever met can spot most of these kinds of mini-versions of plagiarism the same way that anyone listening to the radio can tell when the station changes from classical to rock.

    Anyway, a long way to the moral, but here it goes: Students, better to cite your evidence too often rather than not enough, and if you’re going to steal from the Internet, do a really good job of it because most professors know how to do a Google search, too.