Nothing new under the sun

I’m sure everyone’s been reading about the recent plagiarism issue over on Story Siren (thanks to Liz Burns for the great round-up).  My friend Chuck talks about the “kitchen sinking” that often happens when something like this occurs.

It’s beyond the question of citation, though.  There’s the question of consequences. When I was at Hamilton College, we signed an Honor Code statement that the school took very seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that the President, Eugene Tobin, resigned when his lack of citing a book review was caught.  More recently, the President of Hungary was forced to resign. The examples go on and on… but then there’s the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin who has managed to evade serious consequences from her plagiarism issue.

So ultimately, what will the consequences in this case be?  Or in this case, highlighted in the WSJ’s Best of the Web column.  Both writers have taken the questionable content down.  In the Story Siren case, there’s been a lot of vitriol between her supporters and those of the two victims.  In the WSJ case, this “apology” was issued: Note: Creators Syndicate mistakenly sent through the wrong text for Joe Conason’s column.  The following is Conason’s updated column for this week.

In thinking about how to approach this with students, it’s important to differentiate the plagiarism from the public outcry.   It’s always been important to speak with them about what plagiarism is,  how to avoid it and what the consequences could be -  now it’s equally important to work with them on protecting their own on-line work and how to respond appropriately (whether they’re responding to someone accused of it or being accused themselves.

The Gift of Cite

This is one of those “just publish already” posts, one that’s been sitting in Draft status for a while.

Let’s start with two posts that my friend Chuck pointed me to, one by Kevin Marshall and one by Kristi Gustafson Barlette.  Kevin’s came first, Kristi’s a few days later.   Coincidence?  Possibly… except they know each other, and the former probably influenced the latter.  Notice there’s no mention of any influence, no citing of the original source for the second post.   Is it plagiarism?  By the standards we teach our students, the answer is a resounding YES.

But… what about in our own lives?  I’ve posted on a number of topics and then seen friends/peers/colleagues posting similarly themed posts without suggesting that they’d perhaps read mine and been influenced.  Do I go after them and say “hey! cite your source you plagiarist you?”  No (quiet steaming and perhaps a pointed comment to someone else, on the other hand…).  I do remind myself to not fall into that trap in my own posts.

Posting is one thing, but what about tweeting?  There’s the obvious RT, which clearly “cites” the source.  On the other hand, I see a link… I click on the link… I like the link… I tweet the link (knowing that many of my followers won’t have seen it; sometimes I check Is It Old first). When I’m tweeting directly from the website, using Add This or some other widget, perhaps I want to add my own comment or highlight a phrase, or I’ve simply forgotten who sent me to this page in the flood of tweets received.  It’s not intentional, but I’m not citing my inspiration – according to what we teach students, this is plagiarism.

The same applies to anything added to LiveBinder, Scoop.it, Delicious, etc.   Even more dangerous is Pinterest, which is facing some real copyright issues.

In many of the conversations, seminars and workshops I’ve attended that deal with the K-20 continuum (or some portion thereof) one of the biggest concerns the academic librarians have is students ability to synthesize information and to cite their influences.  Paraphrasing is a skill that many students don’t have.  Knowing that if they got information from another source is another skill they seem to lack.  There’s a great tutorial that I’m going to incorporate into my teaching of research skills.  Academic librarians seem to think these skills are “writing skills” to be taught in the classroom (per the ILL-I discussion on “Citation Instruction and Mission Creep” – archives here); at a K-12 school they should be co-taught by teachers and librarians.

But what about the ways in which I teach students to collect information using curation tools?  Do we need to worry about this?  Isn’t it important for us to start that conversation with our students, and to catch ourselves when we fail to live up to the expectations we have for them?

There’s also an on-going discussion about how to cite, which I’ve already covered here. Suffice it to say, with all these new tools the ways in which we cite information are constantly changing and – in my opinion – getting obsessed with the exact format is detracting from the need to cite. The more complicated it is, the less anyone will want to teach it, learn it or do it. At all, let alone “properly”.

Don’t Read That Book!

Those that know me know that I can be critical when reviewing books – one friend said I was more critical than most of the other reviewers she knew.  That’s ok, because my policy for reviewing is to help people choose what to read next, always with the understanding that their tastes and mine might not mesh.  I’ve blogged before about Reader’s Advisory and censorship, but recently I’ve been thinking about how to do RA best if you don’t like the book.

Diversity in action

At the start of each year, our Admissions Office reports on the composition of the student body: male/female ratio, class sizes, and how many students come from HUGS (“historically underrepresented groups”).  What they don’t report is diversity in learning styles, economic status, sexual orientation, athletes vs. artists, science nerds vs. humanities fanatics, and other equally good measures of ‘diversity’.

As a faculty, I’d argue that we’re relatively diverse with one major exception: the liberals far outweigh the conservatives.  That’s not a slant that’s new to academic institutions – it’s been reported on, and decried by conservatives, for years.

One of the things I’m proud of, perhaps incorrectly, is that I keep my biases and personal preferences relatively hidden and am neutral on most “hot button” issues .  Even the topic of what my personal favorite genre for reading is not something I’ll readily discuss (dark mysteries, but that doesn’t mean I won’t drop everything and read a student suggestion in any genre).

So last week, after observing back-to-back conversations with two students, my assistant laughed at the diversity I was showing.  One student, a leader in the Young Conservatives club, is considering ROTC in college… the other is a leader in our GSA and was so excited about having met Kate Bornstein.  And I thoroughly enjoyed both conversations and genuinely like both students.  There are adults at MPOW, and at MFPOW, would couldn’t do that (I worked with one woman who would grade conservatives more harshly than liberals, and boys that were conservatives harshest of all.  Sad thing is, the students knew it because she was so open about her biases. And one person I currently work with said how sorry he was that most of my family are die-hard Republicans.)

I’d like to think I’m doing my bit to keep diversity alive.

Community feeling

Yesterday I spent several hours with a group of women I’m proud to call classmates – we didn’t all graduate at the same time, but we all feel connected to each other and to our school.  The reason for our gathering was to begin preparing for the bicentennial of the school, in 1814.  One of the things we continually came back to was how much of an influence Emma Hart Willard and the school she founded (fittingly called Emma Willard School) have had on the lives of many more people than have actually attended, and how our time at the school has profoundly affected our lives.

As I drove home, I started thinking about other schools I’ve known either through personal involvement or through the involvement of others.  One friend calls it the Cult of Emma Willard; I think it’s not quite that, but we do seem to be an incredibly committed group.  When I talk to the students with whom I’ve worked over the years, their ties to their alma maters is less than mine is to Emma.  Yes, they feel a closeness with their classmates or with people in their “generation” (those that were 1-2 years ahead and behind them).  Often there’s a teacher or two they remember with particular fondness.  But the depth of a feeling of community is not there.

Here’s an example: in a few weeks, Hackley will host Alumni Weekend.  Many people from different classes will attend, but the mingling between the classes isn’t quite the same as it was at my reunion last June; the same holds true for college reunions.  This cross-generational mingling is something that I think is unique to Emmies.

Yet it’s a different sense of community than the one my friend K told me exists at Sudbury Valley, the school her daughter attended.  We weren’t all one big happy family at Emma, and there was a sense of Us v Them vis-a-vis faculty/administration and students.  At Sudbury, one of the things that attracted my friend was that when there were infractions of the rules, the discussion wasn’t a top-down “you bad person you!  you broke a rule!!” but one of a community discussion centered on “you’ve hurt the community and how can we heal this?”  – two very different approaches.

While I think the things that make the Emma Willard community special can’t necessarily be duplicated at other schools, it should be possible to repeat the Sudbury Valley community.  As the school year progresses, I’m going to do my best to work to create that collaboration between faculty and student. Perhaps one will follow the other?

Blinders anyone?

Recently, Buffy had quite the twitter conversation regarding the etiquette of the automatic follow.  Karl asked a similar question yesterday:

Twitter / Karl Fisch: Someone thinks I’m impolit …

My response was that if you follow someone expecting to be followed in return, that’s nuts.  Some people have thousands of followers, and to expect them to be able to follow each and every one in a way that is productive and meaningful is just unrealistic.  Seriously.  Look at the surface to noise ratio on Twitter and ask yourself, how many people can I follow and get something out of the “conversation” (I use quotes because often we read someone’s stream and don’t always feel the need to respond to their comments/links/thoughts).  Of course, it wasn’t quite that eloquent but 140 characters is a bit limiting at times.

Chris Brogan has created technology blinders, and I wonder about how we can compartmentalize within those blinders.  Chuck has limited the number of friends he has on Facebook.  If you’re among the many moving from Bloglines to Google Reader (as LizB is), it’s a good opportunity to clear your RSS feeds.

It’s not about uncluttering, although that’s part of it.  It’s more about being focused in your learning: ensuring you get the biggest bang for your professional networking buck.

What blinders are you using?

Nail on head!

Shooting the messenger

One of the programs I attended at ALA was a joint panel sponsored by ACRL and AASL on K-20 information literacy. The first speaker, David Loertscher, has been speaking on the topic of “information commons” for quite some time now, and I’ve heard his spiel at three different conference. I’ve also heard (and edited an article by) Valerie Diggs on the IC at her school, Chemlsford.

This is a worthy idea, and one that I’m trying to implement in my library.

The problem was the presentation that David gave: he talked about getting away from the old lecturer/lecturee model, yet that’s exactly what he delivered. With a PowerPoint, no less. There’s a perfect example of cognitive dissonance (aka “don’t do as I do, do as I say to do”). Even worse was that one of his examples was the idea that entering data contributing to a class wiki or Google Doc spreadsheet was somehow new, radical, different.

It isn’t – people have had similar projects for quite some time. Perhaps the data doesn’t live in the cloud, editable in real-time, but these types of collaborations have been around before. I remember doing similar projects in the pre-computer era I call high school. So does the fact that it’s live editing/cloud computer magically change the assignment? I think not.

His claim that when you do this type of work, “plagiarism doesn’t matter” because students are forced to think about the essential questions being asked also struck a nerve. You know the one: the one the dentist hits when he’s poking around trying to find the perfect pain-filled spot? I really, truly hope that he misspoke, or that I (and several others) misheard, because any time you ask students to “write” you run the risk of plagiarism. It’s about the question, not the product, and unless the question is constructed in such a way as to not be plagiarizable (ok, that’s not a word but tough), any student can plagiarise. Adding a new technology doesn’t make the fact of plagiarism go away.

Here’s an example. Our 9th grade history class covers the Early Modern Era, and looks at people, places and events through the prism of PERSIA. We’ve been considering creating a wiki for students to be able to add examples of each as they come across them in their research/classwork, so that by the end of class they’ll have a grid showing the political side of the Glorious Revolution, Cortes v. Aztecs, etc. and the religious side and the artistic side, and so on. GoogleDocs or a class-editable LibGuide would be another way to go, and I’m sure that there are still others I haven’t thought about. Anyway, what’s to stop students from cutting/pasting information from the web into this document? Nothing.

So while I’m in agreement with the idea of a blended setting where students can learn and create and analyze and evaluate, I’m not in agreement with the idea that simply changing the format or adding 2.0 tools to the process changes anything in terms of real student learning. It’s our job – as librarians, technologists and teachers – to collaborate and create projects that lead to better understanding of the subject and ways to internalize and present that information, as well as to increase students respect for others’ intellectual property.

One person’s #TEDxNYED

It’s lunch and my brain is exploding – all the great ideas I’m hearing about at this conference, and trying to fit it into some coherent way in which to incorporate it at work.

The thing that struck me first was, there’s definitely a way to make our students’ experience of class both more participatory and more open.  How?  What if we expanded (and reformatted) our course packs to include multi-media and allowed students to help add content for future years and classes?

Back[stab]channels

The idea of a back channel is still relatively new to conferences – for those of you who don’t know what one is, it’s the ability for the audience (and I’m using the term loosely, because it includes both those actually at the session and those following it from afar) to interact with each other and with the presenter. This can work well, or it can be a disaster (see danah boyd, Web 2.0).

danah’s post sparked a conversation between @buffyjhamilton, @activelearning and me and led to Buffy’s post here and Kristin’s post here. My thoughts are complicated: we need a discussion about professionalism on-line (twecklers take note) as well as a new paradigm of what happens at a conference.

As someone who presents (and is planning future presentations), I’m mindful of both sides of the podium. On the one hand, I would like audience feedback. On the other, I’m wary of the Mean Girl syndrome, where a mob “get ‘er” mentality takes over. Yes, one could argue that the better the presentation, the less “mean girl” the audience. But I’m also guilty of that type of twittering, albeit not when there’s an obvious backchannel (because that’s not the presentation set-up or because I don’t tag my posts). So this is definitely the pot calling on the kettle!

To be honest, this isn’t something new. I remember years ago, during a 9th grade pep rally at my school, chatting with my friends about the ridiculousness of the event: who really cared about our Division III football team? And those cheerleaders? please. What a waste of our time to sit and cheer and have all this faux school spirit. I’m sure some much younger version of me was texting the same thoughts to her friends in the same stands at a similar event in SmallTown this past September. Is that ok?

It’s the leap to public that changes things. I can comment to friends within earshot… text to a few friends at a time… or tweet and get retweeted to hundreds (or thousands).

I’m also wary of the quality of the tweets. As I mentioned to Buffy before Conference Season began, this is the type of tweet that I really don’t want to see:

• Waiting to hear (speaker)
• (Author) is signing books
• “pithy quote from wonderful speaker” with no context
• RT “pithy quote from wonderful speaker” with no context

I much prefer tweets that allow me to link to a presentation, a blog post or something meaty and I’ve been known to use TwitterSnooze to block posts that are coming too fast, too furious without that pause for reflection. Maybe I’m in the minority on this, but, well, that’s my viewpoint and I’m sticking to it.

Ultimately, if a backchannel is going to work, the audience needs to make their comments valuable to the presenter and to the audience (“hey, (presenter) is an idiot” doesn’t cut it, “what does (term) mean” or “is there a link to that study?” does). Presenters need to be aware that even if the backchannel isn’t obvious, it’s there. It’s going to happen unless the room has no wifi and cellphone dampening attached. It may mean upping our game, or it may mean rethinking how we interact with the audience.

This two-way street needs to be negotiated carefully. I’ll do my bit as both audience and presenter. Will you?