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.

Cite nonsense

Last year a friend asked for my help with a paper she was writing for a class – how should she cite a YouTube video? Her professor didn’t know the proper format, and my friend knew that “Go to YouTube and look for [title of video]” wasn’t correct. At the LIRT session I attending during ALA10, the student voice on the panel said “there are more citation styles than MLA!”, and Joyce Valenza’s survey backs up this poor student’s experience. What wasn’t discussed (or asked) was how one cites in the paper itself: footnotes, endnotes or parentheticals?

The Role of Reading

The recent twitter effort to get our senators to remember school libraries/librarians during their ESEA discussions made me think about the role of librarians – or, to be accurate, it was one of the things that made me think about our role. 

The Big (and not so) Easy: Missing Voices on the Student Transition to College

Ok, I get why there were no school librarians or academic librarians on this panel – apparently our voices have been heard.  But still, having representatives from those groups on this panel would have really added to the discussion.  According to a few people, school librarian membership in LIRT is negligible, so I encourage all my peers to go and add that $5 membership to their dues now!

So, who were the “missing voices”?  A public school teacher (PST), a public librarian (PL), a college freshman (CF) and a graduate student (GS) who teaches incoming freshmen writing.  Here’s what I got from their discussion:

Native? Immigrant? Inhabitant? Visitor? Who cares?

In April I heard John Palfrey, author of Born Digital, speak.  Thanks to his book, we now use the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant” – terms that have annoyed me since they first emerged.

Why?  Because I don’t believe that they’re good descriptions of a generation.  What I mean is, I – a member of the Baby Boomer generation – am considered an “immigrant” because I didn’t grow up with computers.  Or did I?  My father (whose original training was in electrical engineering) created what we referred to as “blinky lights”, a series of lightbulbs that we could program to blink in patterns or randomly (like those on a marquee, only small enough to be a night light).  He brought home a Commodore PET and I learned BASIC as a teen; my first post-college job had me learning CalcStar and WordStar (remember those?).  I’ve helped business offices automate, creating templates for mail merges in WordPerfect (still a better program than MSWord!), and installed upgrades to Windows OS.  Why haven’t I gone Mac?  I like getting to the C:> and feeling more in control of my computer (much as I prefer driving manual).  My other “native” creds?  My cousin created the first version of spell check.

A couple of months ago I was doing something with Photoshop and one of my students was amazed at the control I had over my mouse.  “I can’t believe you’re so good”, he said, “because I’m not and I’m supposed to be a digital native.”  My argument isn’t that I’m special, but that those of us that have used computers longer than college students have been alive shouldn’t be considered “immigrants”.  We’re natives, too – just a different kind.

Maybe we all need to stop using that term, because it’s really more like the stages of life: I’m a digital adult.  My students?  Digital teens (playing, practicing, still learning but not needing training wheels).  And my father, who taught a course on how to build computers and use them in the 70s?  Clearly he’s a digital grandfather.

College Bound Students and Independent School Libraries (part two)

After John Palfrey’s keynote, we then had a panel discussion with Beth Rohloff of Tufts, Kwasi Sarkodie-Mensah of Boston College, and Susan Gilroy of Harvard University.  These are three of the people my former students will meet in September, and their insights into what those incoming students will experience and be asked to do was invaluable.

College Bound Students and Independent School Libraries (part one)

(also known as “what I need to keep my eyes on as I work with students”)

This was an interesting one-off “conference”, organized by the wonderful librarians at BB&N in Boston and presented at my mother’s graduate school alma mater, the Harvard Graduate School of Education (although she wouldn’t recognize the library we met in!).  What attracted me is that while most independent schools do a lot of thinking about what a graduate of [school name] should know in terms of the major academic subjects, and some schools think about the skills needed in addition to the curricular scope and sequence, not as many think about these things from the other side: what do colleges need for our students to know?  What skills do they expect them to have?  This panel was a good opportunity to see what my recently graduated seniors will find in September when they meet their new librarians, professors and expectations.

First up was John Palfrey, author of Born Digital.  He’s the one that coined the phrase “digital natives”, a phrase that has bugged me no end; imagine how pleased I was to hear him recent that, slightly.  But more on that later.  Here are his main points:

A quick fix

I’ve been going through my personal library with an eye to – gasp! – weeding out those books I don’t absolutely love/would want to re-read/would want to loan to like-minded readers.  As I’m doing so, I’ve been thinking about a number of the libraries I’ve seen recently and conversations I’ve had with other librarians about displays and reading.

One of those conventional wisdom things is that high school students are too busy to read (they’re worried about their GPA, they’re building their college résumé, there’s no time thanks to sports and afterschool clubs, etc.).  Here’s the thing: that’s nonsense.  This year our non-fiction circulation among grades 9-12 skyrocketed, and you can’t convince me that these students were any less studious, any less interested in getting into a good college or any less involved with sports and other extracurriculars than their peers.  What changed?  We put fiction front and center.

In a number of the libraries I saw this year, fiction was hidden in the back or upstairs.  What greeted the library visitor?  Reference.  Now, perhaps my students are different, but they don’t need to be reminded that the reference books exist (we’ve interfiled them in the collection, which has led to their being used more during research than before).  When they’re working on a project on the Cold War, they’ll look at the relevant shelves and use the books there. Some students use the non-fiction for personal reasons, but the vast majority go there because there’s a grade involved.

But fiction?  That’s something they want to read – and they’re always looking for the next new great thing.  So why hide it?  Why keep it tucked out of the way?  Remember when Brian Jacques died?  We immediately did a display of all the Redwall books, and many students stopped to look and remember how much they’d enjoyed the series.  Some even borrowed a more recent book!

One librarian asked what I’d change in their space and my immediate response was “I’d move the fiction to the front”.  Not just the Middle School fiction, but all of it.  It’s summer now, and if you make the same switch, I’m guessing you’ll also prove conventional wisdom wrong.

Have I done my job?

This past year I’ve worked closely with our History 9 teachers to integrate skills into the curriculum, with a secondary goal of lessening the panic that sets in when a research project is announced.  We broke things up into several short pieces:

• a scavenger hunt in our print and electronic resources
• an annotated biography of print and electronic resources
• a fully-cited PowerPoint
• a short (2-3 page) paper and glog (cancelled due to snow!)
• a 5-7 page paper that I helped grade for process

When I told people that I was grading the papers, the surprise was evident.  So why was I?  Because the teachers know content, I know process: did the students follow MLA format for their title page?  were the facts cited properly? was the bibliography correct, or was it missing information (or out of order)?  did they proofread, or did they just trust spellcheck?   To make it easier on the students, I strongly recommended that they share their projects with me via Noodletools (I could see – and comment on – their bibliographies and their papers).

Gratifyingly, many students did use Noodletools and I think that their papers were improved as a result.  Those that didn’t?  Well, let’s just say their grades were lower.  Here’s what keeps me up: what of all this will they retain over the summer?  and what could be done better next year?  Maybe there needs to be more on-line tutorials and in-class instruction on the basics of MLA formatting.  It’s clear that many didn’t understand that it’s not just quotes, but ideas that need to be cited.

In April I attended a seminar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education on College Bound Students and Independent School Libraries (notes to follow).  The librarians there, from prestigious institutions, are asking themselves the same questions I am asking.  Whether or not I’ve done my job will only be evident to them, as my students graduate and head off to college on their own.

What the school needs now

Last summer I attended my 30th high school reunion. Several years previously, the school (Emma Willard, for those who care) started to rethink and repurpose some of the campus – they did this deliberately, thoughtfully, and with great care.  When we got back, the biggest change we found was that the main floor of the dorms was completely different: instead of two dining rooms joined by a kitchen, there was one room with an open kitchen, and where there had been a kitchen there was now day student lockers and a lounge (there were other changes, but that’d just get boring for everyone).

My point is, the school didn’t make these changes capriciously. Of course it was completely confusing for me to navigate, but I figured it out, just as all the other returning alumnae did.  One classmate was upset, and remained upset throughout the weekend.  This change seemed unnecessary, the dining room couldn’t possibly hold the entire school, etc..  While as an alumna I understood her complaint, as a school librarian I was on the school’s side.

The other night I had dinner with someone from our Alumni & Development Office.  We talked a little about the New! Improved! library space and she mentioned that there were alumni who didn’t like it.  It wasn’t “their” library, it was too modern, etc..  Ok, I hear that.  But the old library physically burned down four years ago, and rebuilding it exactly “as was” would have done the school a disservice.  As for the contents, I wasn’t about to miss this opportunity to replace print with digital (where appropriate), to interfile our REF and BIO collections into the Non-Fiction, to upgrade our fiction, etc..  While I appreciate their sorrow at the loss of our print OED or Britannica, it would be doing the students a disservice to have replaced them in print when digital serves their needs better.

And, of course, there’s the way I run the library now – it’s not the Silent Sacred Space.  It’s not a madhouse either… most of the time.  Know what?  Student usage is rising.  Circulation is rising. Teachers collaborating on research projects is rising.  Yes, I still adhere to some of the librarian stereotype (and for more on that, Lipstick Librarian says it best) but I try to do what the school needs now.  Not what they needed five or ten or fifty years ago.

And I try to anticipate what it will need in five years.  Because what it will need then is going to be different from what it needs now.