Plagiarism - in the web world

Found someone plagiarising text for a school-assigned website. When I googled, the student's text was found on at least five other sites. The student used someone else's text word-for-word, but so had others outside the school environment!

We know about peer-to-peer with music and movies, we wink at image re-use, and cut-and-paste is leading to more and more plagiarism. Is intelligent, meaningful, and well-designed content, irrelevant of its sources, the way of the future?

In this new communicative space with its ease of reproduction, what rules are appropriate? And what is the relevance of a source when cropping and altering have been applied?

Keeping Up and Choices

Spent the day reviewing Stephen Downes emails, catching up.

There is so much, and developments are exploding possibilities.

I can't try everything; I have to chose what to play with. Stay with a limited JotSpot, or shift to Drupal? Be serious about using Backpack to plan, or let it drift away? I have chosen to commit to Furl, and it's working for me. FLickr, to a limited degree too. I should start looking at the urls posted by others who have matching urls to what I've chosen - using the social web.

I need to learn more about trackback, and use the Creative Commons.

Never enough time!

No Change

Nothing has changed;
everything has not changed.

Did I not get what I wanted, or
did I not get what I wouldn't have wanted?

Is that rationalization,
the self comforting herself?

And if so, is it self-deception, or
merely constructing a different ending?



Cassandra: Blind and Mourning from http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Cassandra.html

An MIT Survey on Blogging!

Doesn't take long.

Credo

My Class Wiki

See the new banner one of the students made

Stress - Good or Just Stressed

Why do I find it so hard to plan? I suspect that trying to plan a multi-threaded experience with all the threads in place from the beginning could be the problem.

I'm planning a course with many learning filaments woven into a complex cord that I hope leads students out of a labyrinth into an open space where they can see their own path.

Poetry may be possible again, after so many years.

Solo Images

Solo Images, originally uploaded by Semiotic Explorer.

Or to show you a larger size, as I set up another small tutorial ...

In the Halls of Academe

What are we selling our young? Who are we selling our young to? Is this subliminal seduction with multiple repetions of an act (a suggested act?) at the edges of consciousness - what we almost ignore?

Language and the Web

So I'm noticing this difference in the way my students freewrite. Freewriting is an exercise developed by Peter Elbow where you write without pausing for a timed period, not stopping to think or correct, just steadily writing. It's an exercise aimed at getting in touch with our internal flow of words, (with reference to Vygotsky).

My students not only don't have to be nagged to keep going; they have told me they like it!!!!! Very different from my experience using free writing with students 3 years ago. Plus I have noticed that none of them handed in papers that were shorter than the required 15 pages, and many, if not most, were longer! Another surprise.

After thinking and discussing it with my students, I have come to the conclusion that this is the generation that has been using web writing for social purposes, like they do for talking. They are already in touch with their inner flow of language!!!! Their connection with written language is vitally different in a significant way.

And now this Wired article with someone in Wales noticing a variation of the same thing!

This shift isn't the end of teaching writing. No more than talking precludes learning how to present. There is still much for students to learn if they want to write academic papers or business reports.

When is a Sick Day Not a Sick Day?

So - two days at home, one afternoon nap, two after dinner work sessions, as well as all day, both days. What is a sick day currently?

And why the wool? A metaphor for learning GoLive. How does one learn a complex tool? Where does one start? What thread do I pull out the allows me to follow it into the creativity I seek?

All day, and almost nothing accomplished! Ahrggg!

Gladwell's blink

Only someone who loves reading could have drawn this

I just finished reading Gladwell's blink today. What he says makes total sense to me. It's the scientific, academic information that backs up something I've been (sort of) aware of since I figured out how to write multiple choice tests in high school. I can't remember how I figured it out, but I do remember knowing that I should go with my first (instinctive?) choice, rather than thinking about it. If I thought about my answers, I got lower marks than if I just "guessed," so I "guessed." I remember feeling guilty because my friend Barb, who studied harder, I thought, and often helped me review, sometimes got lower marks. She tried too hard.

I remember reading somewhere, years ago, that if runners ran full out, and at 3/4s effort, that they often ran faster at 3/4s. Same thing, I guess.

And I really like how Gladwell writes, with information embedded in narratives, and descriptions of the people involved as researchers or as examples. He humanizes knowledge.

I was a bit disappointed that he didn't mention Michael Polyani, because I think some of the research, especially the stuff about "implicit" knowledge, was rooted in Polyani's thought.

And it is relevant to teaching. The rules about how to make an improv work were interesting, and I often think that teaching is a lot like performing an improv, and "mindreading" the student's faces to see how it's going over (or rather "in"). The part about Rip and the red and blue team, reminded me of how the rules can be used by people not in the classroom to actually diminish a teacher's skills and abilities. Some people prefer power to understanding and success.

William Stafford's "The Way It Is"

Using Picasa

The frustration of learning relieved by beauty

This picture by Mondrian was uploaded using Picasa2 and Hello.

PRACTICE

Here is a photo I took and, using Flickr, posted here!




Do the Tool and the Times Make a Difference?

I believe that the act of writing is changing. We have a radically new tool, no make that plural, we have radically new tools, and we think through them differently. Does anyone think we would write the same way with a quill pen as with a ballpoint pen? Does writing with a pencil change the way we write from how we would write with a fountain pen? And the big question, does writing with a word processer in an online environment change how we write?

The second question is, do we humans write the same way at different points in history? Do I write like Aphra Behn? or George Elliott? or Emily Bronte? or Virginia Woolf? or Margaret Lawrence? or Margaret Atwood? Or even in a similar style? Of course not. And are patterns in writing changing? I've read that articles in scholarly journals written in the 1930s were much denser and more formal than modern articles. And magazines are very different too. Do we even think about writing the same way as writers did then?

Now that we can write and "publish" for the world to read with no publishing "gatekeepers, now that we can write knowing our spelling mistakes will be automatically pointed out to us, and a correct possible replacement offered to us, now that we can write, and change what we've written immediately with no traces of the previous wording left, now that we live in a world with informal writing, email and messaging, for example, as well as formal business reports, do we all need to know formal stylized rhetoric of the 1960s?

The First Time Ever I Heard My Voice ....

Academic Writing Made Easier by the Computer

• Format bibliographys


• Compose Academic Papers


• Information Literacy Tutorials

These three web sites are almost a course in themselves!