Lessons Unlearned

Like so many of us, I was shocked and horrified about the events in Boston last week – Monday, I worried about friends and family who might have run in/been supporting those running the Boston Marathon, and Friday I worried about all of them simply living in Boston and environs.  Having lived through Sept. 11, with good friends (and family) who worked near the World Trade Center, I was terrified.  That day, thanks to a friend in an Alabama militia and another in the Canadian Army, I was able to keep current via AOL Instant Messenger (the school didn’t have good tv reception, and the news websites were unable to keep up with the demand on their servers).  It became part of my job that day to relay information that was as accurate as possible to the students and my colleagues, all of whom were stunned and shocked.

Flash forward to this day of Twitter, Facebook and texting and the ease of sharing information, accurate or not.  As this BBC article points out, the citizen investigators “helping” the FBI got the photo ids wrong. Very wrong. (to its credit, Reddit has apologized for its role. damage is still done, though.)

It’s gone beyond sharing faked photos after Hurricane Sandy to potentially destroying a person’s life.  The 24-hour news channels don’t help, either.  The ratio of real news and information to speculation, outside “experts” (those nowhere near the actual events) and people-on-the-street interviews is increasing, all because the moment something like this happens we Must.Drop.Everything and watch.  Obsessively.

Compare that to this clip from ABS’s coverage of the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan.  It’s clear that this is raw footage, with nothing really known beyond the shooting and some people being injured.  They cut into programming for nearly 10 minutes, then signed off until they knew something more:

And CNN was actually being responsible in their reporting, not wanting to spread inaccurate information.

When we have events like what happened in Boston last week, what message are we sending our students when we obsessively narrate the coverage, asking all and sundry to comment, whether or not they know anything (like the doctors serving in Congress who did a long-distance diagnosis of Terri Schiavo)?  We spend time teaching about digital literacy, showing how to evaluate resources and find quality information.  But do we also take the time to say “just because [news channel/reporter] says something, doesn’t mean you can check your skepticism at the door”?

Imagine how proud I was when one of my students tweeted the following:

Twitter / JohnDemar: Thought I saw the September …

Ok, maybe some of his classes as a journalism student at Emory also had an effect, but still, I got to him first!  My hope is that more people question what they hear during these events, when information is so fluid and our knowledge of the people supplying the information is minimal

Let’s go back to the 1980s, where there still was some sense that important events needed fact-checking and gravitas, not non-stop talking heads.   The way we’re going, lynch mobs attacking innocent people based on false/erroneous information and guesses will become a common event.

Speaking Up

A couple of weeks ago, there was a huge uproar about a teacher’s decision to make every student in her class participate, regardless of whether they were an introvert or extrovert. SLJ has a good round-up of the various posts and thoughts. I’d been discussing this (in a way) in my class on instructional design, so I posted the link to see what others in my class thought.  This week, we’re talking about engagement and again, I’m pondering the question of how to ensure engagement across age groups and personality types.

The difference is that my class is focused on online instruction, where engagement and “speaking up” is an entirely different thing.  There’s a lot of evidence that those who don’t speak up during face-to-face classes will often be very engaged in an online situation – a time where they can really think and ponder their responses, choosing the exact words they want, ensuring that their message is not overwhelmed by the more extroverted in the class.

A lesson to be learned?

On Friday, as the news reports from Connecticut continued unabated, I turned off my tv.   Because I was working on a project that required internet research, my access to twitter and Facebook was still there and I read people’s reactions and thoughts as I continued to do my research.

One student (well, former student; she graduated high school in 2002) had two posts on FB that drew my attention: one was to a photo of a class leaving the school, the other was a link to a FB profile that was the shooter’s profile.  My reaction to both was horror, but for different reasons.

The photo made me wonder why the children’s faces weren’t blurred out.  Why were reporters (I use that term loosely) interviewing children, getting their reactions?  Was there no decency any more?  I recognize that many schools now have policies that inform parents that their children may be interviewed and their photos may be posted on-line.  But at a time like this?  Surely there’s a time… and a place… and this wasn’t it.  This wasn’t a sporting event, or a class play.  This was exploitation and just wrong.

The second link was premature.  I suggested that perhaps she should wait until all the facts were out before posting this.  She responded that she was merely reposting from a reliable source (Russell Simmons – not quite as reliable as, say, CNN, but to her, this was ‘reliable’).  I reminded her that earlier this year, ABC News incorrectly identified the Aurora shooter, and that at the time of her posting, no one had officially named the shooter (as it turned out, the name/profile were wrong).  She took down her post.

We all know how difficult it is to determine rumor from truth on the web at the best of times (Gay Girl in Damascus, anyone?).  And during Sandy, there was as much information as misinformation shared on FB and Twitter. But at a time like this, a time of shock, horror and distress, shouldn’t we take an extra few minutes to sort out truth from rumor?  So often the media got it wrong – and then the errors were shared on social media.

I thought about September 11, 2001, and how two friends (one in Alabama, hooked in to militia networks, the other a major in the Canadian army) kept me informed that day with real information (for example, that we’d closed US airspace to all but our military and that the jets we were hearing overhead were ours, not an invading armies or more hijacked planes).  I passed that along to others at the school, knowing that this wasn’t speculation.  What if we’d had social media instead of AIM?  I wonder what I would have passed along then, and how correct that information would have been.

If nothing else, these are teachable moments for ourselves and our students.  The former in decency, in respect.   The latter in holding off, in searching for the facts inside the rumors (often difficult to discern ‘in the moment’). Digital literacy is so important, and we need to teach students the value of turning off the supposed news and searching for verification and multiple confirmations (an AP report on several websites doesn’t count!).  That’s not to diminish the events – far from it – but to perhaps bring something positive out of what happened.

Minor Musings

Books, Reading, Etc.

• More on E-Reading: A Midterm Progress Report  (I don’t annotate, but I can see the appeal for many readers… and the loss.  What will we do when marginalia is completely lost? It’s a great insight into the reader’s mind.)
• Why social media isn’t the magic bullet for self-epublished authors (and this article from the Atlantic Wire on how reviewers and authors are behaving badly, this on Slate pleading Hey, Writers on Twitter: Stop Being So Nice to One Another) Of course, the Guardian writes So much more than sock puppetry: in defence of reader reviews which contrasts nicely to this one asking Are Amazon reader reviews killing off the critic?)
• Several years ago I had an argument/discussion with one of my staff about Modern Classics.  Guardian asks What makes a Modern Classic?, which leads to the question: when do you know it’s a modern classic?  After five years? ten? less?  more?  And what defines “classic”?  There’s also the question of Why we reread some books, and not others
• Let’s talk teens and books:  6 Great Platforms Where Students Share Book Reviews and Reading Recommendations (great for starting conversations about appropriate ways to interact online and review). Sadly, Be seen with a book? It’s just not cool, say one in five children

School Life

• As the start of the school year, it’s a good idea to have this conversation with everyone in the school community: Secure your online life
• Another great start-of-year conversation:  Is plagiarism the result of journalists being stretched thin?  (my feeling is that they’re just lazy – and that publishers need to employ more fact checkers).  More questions about ignorance, laziness or something else are posted in this article, reporting that Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera’s Free Online Courses. Barbara Fister has some thoughts about plagiarism, and you can read my other musings here.
• Following on that, those MOOCs that everyone’s talking about?  The Globe & Mail says There’s no online substitute for a real university classroom.
• Students find e-textbooks clumsy and don’t use their interactive features (no surprise: the “killer app” for e-texts hasn’t arrived yet… but I suspect it’s close)
• Curation is still a huge buzzword (my thoughts here) but RebelMouse: Smart Curation for the Classroom may be a good way to collect/curate.
• Beating an old horse: Why kids need to fail to succeed in school

Tech, Tools and Other Stuff

• This looks like a great new tool: Annotary (I’m about to embark on some serious research/writing, and this will really help!); if I had an iPad, I’d use ZotPad to better use Zotero
• Recently I was asked about tech trends that were fads, or not worth the ROI.  I mentioned Pinterest (don’t hate! it’s a time suck, with little proven ROI) but this provides additional food for thought: Electronic ink could kill QR code
• Curated cool: Where to watch the strange and the worthy on the Internet
• ProfHacker has a Mac App Pack for you Mac people
• Much like the various NYPL iniatives, Historians Ask the Public to Help Organize the Past
• We often complain about how the shortness of tweets is killing grammar and spelling, but  there’s also Tu and Twitter: The death of ‘vous’?

 

And finally, I just loved this quote from an interview on Powells:

Straub: I had to do so much research. I had no idea how much fun research could be. It turns out, to my great delight, that if you write a book about something that is really fun and interesting, research is also fun and interesting. [Laughter] (Emma Straub on Laura Lamont)

 

Don’t blame the students

I’ve mentioned before that I’m on this year’s YALSA Excellence in Non-Fiction for Young Adults award committee and will be spending eight hours over this next weekend discussing the over 40 books we’ve read (ok, not all of them – we’ll concentrate on the ones that have been nominated).  In other news, I’ve been asked to join the LIRT Transitions committee, which focuses on the high school to college transition.

What’s the connection?

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?