Plagiarism is a favorite topic of mine. In part because of the complexity involved – some plagiarism is acceptable while other forms are frowned upon. I was very pleased to come across the post and great infographic Did I Plagiarize? The Types and Severity of Plagiarism Violations by The Visual Communication Guy
In most developed countries, education builds from generation to generation: Adults often have more education than their parents, and they expect their children will be better-educated still — or at least they expect their children won’t slip behind. But data released today from the OECD shows this isn’t happening…
From Vox The surprising truth about downward mobility in US higher education by Libby Nelson
Tomorrow its the beginning of WikiConference USA 2014 which is an exciting conference will be devoted to topics concerning “…the Wikimedia movement in the United States, as well as related topics of free culture and digital rights.” This is going to be an interesting couple of days.
My presentation will be made for Commons Machinery and is called Image by Wikipedia Here is the abstract
Imagine if you could go anywhere online and see the license and credit of any image you so choose. With the click of a button, you could see who created an image, where it’s been published before, what license terms are associated with it, where you can find other copies or mashups of it, and where you can buy a signed print from the creator.
Providing proper attribution for images is the key to making that happen. Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for images and other material from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons to find their way into newspapers or other publications with less than stellar attributions. “Image by Wikipedia” or just “Image from Internet” is a common attribution to find. Creative Commons and other open licenses have made it simple to license images for everyone’s free use, but using images licensed in such a way requires proper attribution and this has proven to be quite difficult.
In this session, we invite participants to a discussion about the relevance of attribution, the possibilities that proper attributions offers, and how contributors to Wikipedia (and Wikipedia itself!) want to be attributed when images and other materials are re-used. The session will also give examples of how the world would look if we could automate the process of attribution, demonstrate some of the tools that already exist for automatic attribution (as well as the limitations of current technologies) and lay out how Wikipedia could help people move from “Image by Wikipedia” to something more relevant.
When did the anti-lecture trend begin? It seems to have been around for a long time. I’m sure the internal discussion has been around for an even longer time but the outwardly loud anti-lecture discussion has at least been going on for the last two decades (this is just my feeling and experience).
So its hardly surprising then to read yet another article joining in the lecture-bashing trend and Science writes Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds.
Interestingly, the article included the quote
“This is a really important article—the impression I get is that it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data,” says Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has campaigned against stale lecturing techniques for 27 years and was not involved in the work. “It’s good to see such a cohesive picture emerge from their meta-analysis—an abundance of proof that lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient.”
When I tweeted out the link a colleague sent me this link to a quote in Paul Ramsden Learning to Teach in Higher Education “Despite the firmness of the lecture’s foothold, the best general advice to the teacher who wants to improve his or her lecturing is still ‘Don’t lecture’ (Eble, 1988, p. 68).” So almost two decades later, a world of new technology has evolved and the best thing we can do is still to say don’t lecture?
From my perspective there are two problems with the whole lecture-bashing argument. The primary flaw is the way in which the argument generalizes all lectures and lecturers. While I hate the comparison with actors, or even worse, stand up comedians it is important to remember a lecturers delivery style varies as much as these professions do. I am aware of the studies that exist (and we should all be able to recognize their strengths and flaws) but I find the statement “all lectures are bad” is similar to “all sport is boring”. This is a statement of taste not of fact.
communication age by Dom Dada cc by nc nd
The reason why I consider this taste as opposed to fact is connected to the second problem in the lecture-bashing argument. And this is that it ignores the responsibility of the learners (as opposed to the teachers). If a student is working full time on a topic then the amount of time they are spending is 40 hours a week. This is obviously not happening but lets be nice and say that they “should” spend at least half their time on a full time course.
This still means four hours a day, five days a week. Seriously not a lot. Then the question is how many lectures is the student “enduring”? Supposing there are three two-hour lectures a week. This means 6 hours a week. And it still means that their are 14 hours a week the student should be working. Again this is only working with the idea of a half time job.
The lecture is not reading the book for the students, the lecture is not teaching everything the student needs, the lecture is not the message (sorry really bad pun). From my experience lectures work well when they highlight the important issues for an audience that cares (or at the very least knows) about the topic. But this means that the students cannot just crawl out of bed and attend a lecture on a topic they know nothing about and then expect to be enriched by it. They need to do their part.
The problem is that the lecture-bashing argument is letting the students off the hook. If the students are not learning from, or being bored by, the lecture then obviously the lecture is the problem. I find that this perspective demeans and infantalizes the student.
Hundreds of smart, stylish and intelligent people met in Brooklyn for two days in April. But this wasn’t just a hipster meetup in Williamsburg it was the venue for the refreshingly interesting Theorizing the Web conference.
Conference in New York
Setting the conference in a studio was a fun idea. The space was made up of large, mostly white, rooms and were a fun backdrop for the creative lineup of speakers all exploring the many exciting things the web have brought our society.
With three parallel sessions going on at all times and a very active twitter back channel the experience is exciting and intense. And unfortunately this also leaves the visitor with the experience that there was so much happening elsewhere. The good news is that everyone gains their own personal conference experience.
Photo @jeffreykeefer
Some of the highlights of my conference were @the_log_lady on the poetics of image search, @OddLetters brilliant analysis of the gay girl in Damascus, @AnneLBurns on disciplining the duckface, @mathuclair provoking thoughts on neoliberalism and digital technology, and @hegemonyrules on assholes on reddit.
Now that I look through the program I realize how much I missed and how much more I would have loved to see. The joy of the conference however is the chance to participate, present (I spoke about the impact of e-books on culture) and to talk to smart people with a burning interest for the was in which the web is changing our lives.
Thankfully the sessions were both livestreamed and recorded and can still be accessed here.
Yesterday I was invited to give a talk at the Drexel University Library and in a fit of hubris I decided to attack a problem that many of us in academia face: how to interact with society, engage your students, get your papers read, not become an “empty” entertainer, while avoiding burnout and staying happy… The actual title to the talk was slightly less ambitious but maybe a bit of a downer: “Nobody cites your work: copyright licensing and public engagement”
These are questions which have long been close to my heart but it was great to be given the opportunity to be able to share my thoughts about what we should or could be doing about this. The presentation began with me explaining that there will be no easy answer to all the questions I pose but that we as a community of academics must continue to raise awareness in these issues in order not to be overcome with them. So the talk would really present some issues, solutions, and a critique.
The issues I wanted to address were interaction, students, being ignored, and edutainment.
Interaction: The was a response to the recent critique by Nicholas Kristof Academics, We need you! in which he wrote
“If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized.”
and the article by Joshua Rothman Why is academic writing so academic? in which he wrote
“Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds”
There have been much written about these two articles and suffice to say that there is a perception problem when the hoards of engaged and enthusiastic academics that I know and work with are being portrayed as dated, distant, and disinterested. I’ve written more on this earlier here and the links are rewarding. The difference between perception and reality is what makes this a real problem.
Students: Many of our students are as young as 18 years old. This means that they were 8 years old when Facebook emerged. They have been online, using technology, and being shaped by digital technology for all of their lives. In order to communicate meaningfully to them we must be prepared to both demand that they struggle but simultaneously understand that they are shaped by the environment. A quote by Missy Cummings puts this into perspective (BBC The Why Factor: Boredom):
“We’d be lucky today if they had a 20-30 minute attention span, now its more like 5-10, because if their minds wander they immediately go to another information seeking routine like their cell phones… Like it or not this is the new norm.“
Yes of course we can be upset about this development. But more importantly we must accept this development to be part of the reality of teaching today.
Being ignored:This is the incredibly disheartening realization that lies at the heart of academic publishing. Lokman I Meho The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis
“It is a sobering fact that some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited. Indeed, as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.”
Between the amount of time academics spend on unsuccessful grant applications and creating articles which are unread it is difficult not to throw ones arms up in the air and scream in frustration.
Edutainment: This is the unreasonable expectation that learning should be fun. Of course learning can be fun. But actually learning the basics of something is a challenge and the pride one feels after mastering something comes as a result of the effort it takes. If it’s all fun then maybe it’s not really effort? The problem that education should be fun is partly caused by the snappy lectures presented in short pithy formats like the TED’s. The TED isn’t about basic education. It’s about small ideas with personal experiences and easy to swallow segments. Imagine trying to learn a foreign language, programming or the finer details of procurement law in TED talks! Unfortunately the talks have sometimes been presented as the future of education. For more on TED’s negative effects and sources to its critics see The Cult of TED harms lectures.
Following a presentation of the issues I wanted to address some of the solutions being put forward social media, open access, and licensing. These were presented with the understanding that taken as general one-size-fits-all solutions they are not particularly usable. The reason for presenting this set of “solutions” was also to enable the discussion on the shallow critics which have been particularly vocal in a couple of articles in The Scholarly Kitchen. First there was CC-BY, Copyright, and Stolen Advocacy and then there was Does Creative Commons Make Sense? these articles were critiqued in the comments but they still stand as a voices of criticism. In particular the latter article attempts to argue that CC is unimportant because copyright law exists. Sad statement, a rebuttal could fill several books… oh, wait it they already exist.
As a slight aside, as I couldn’t resist pointing it out, the existence of law does not in itself protect the individual. I told the audience of the situation where Lawerence Lessig (copyright professor and activist and founder of CC) was sued for posting a lecture online. He argued fair use and eventually won his case. But would many professors have the knowledge, tenacity and support to fight in cases such as these?
Following this I presented a quick intro to Creative Commons licensing including a small description into the progression from version 1 to the current version 4 of the licenses. Then I moved on the lecture to the analysis. Does social media and lowering barriers work and if so how and how much?
The material I presented was a mix of cases with the efficiency of open access and open content licensing in making material available to larger groups of people. These systems also have the ability to make material available to groups who would not have access through the channels we as academics take for granted. When I came to the discussion on whether or not open access helps I used this article Open Access increases citation? A brief overview of two reports
Two different methods and two different results. Which one is more accurate? It is hard to determine. Open Access is not a panacea for all problems. It does not automatically increase the level of citations. But, without doubt, it helps when it comes to getting more visibility, which obviously is of a great advantage for the articles and their authors. There are other factors in play which shape the level of citations for specific paper; for example the Impact Factor of journal, promotion efforts of publisher and author himself, the chosen subject and field of research, as well as an extended reference list at the end of a research paper. All these factors may have impact on citations level. But all in all, almost all studies into this subject confirm – direct or indirect – positive impact of Open Access on level of citations.
The result of everything? Lowering barriers helps academics, social media can increase range. All must be used with knowledge and caution in order not to become worthless and we need to be knowledgeable about our realities in order to carry out a well informed discussion. Now, find your comfort level & share your work!
Here are the slides I used:
In our culture, obesity equals moral and intellectual laziness. Fat professors feel compelled to overperform. I’ve felt the need to make the fat invisible and be even more excellent at my teaching duties. I’ve wanted people to look at my mind and not at my body. But I realize that my body is important in the classroom—I can use it as a tool—so I no longer try to flatten myself.
I believe there is fat discrimination in academia, but there’s no hard evidence. The numbers of obese faculty are low. The problem is that society believes the university is above all that. Many people think that muscles and beauty don’t matter here, but we are a mirror of our culture at large. People bring their attitudes about obesity to the classroom. They think that if you’re fat you’re lazy, that you’re not going to want to participate in the committee work. These stereotypes play on people’s thinking when they’re making hiring decisions.
For fucks sake! Really Geoff? How dumb are you really. Firstly the fact that fat people have will power does not need to be proved. Just look around you. Second of all, you should know that this view is discriminatory, fat-shaming, rude and borderline illegal. He later “apologized” with the enigmatic words that his own tween did not reflect his “views, values, or standards”
Really Geoff? This is the strangest disclaimer (after the fact) I have ever read. I dislike the whole “Tweets are my own” “RT does not mean endorsement” culture but to actually state that your tweets do not reflect your own ideas seems just nuts. So yes, I know that he probably reacted to save his arrogant ass but as apologies go this is pretty insincere.When my mother attempted to teach us manners as a children she would strictly enforce the no-elbows-on-the-table rule. But when we would question her elbows on the table she would reply that she was old enough to know it was wrong. This is a bit how I feel about the news that Zygmunt Bauman has plagiarized texts. From websites no less!
His accuser, Peter Walsh, a University of Cambridge PhD student, said the websites are at times mentioned in passing as sources, but Professor Bauman does not make clear, through quotation marks or indented text, that he is directly reproducing material.
The Times Higher Education article is interesting in that it demonstrates the sensitivity and care it takes for a PhD student to accuse someone of Bauman’s status. Another academic in the article both says that students would have been failed for doing this but everyone is prepared to give Bauman a chance to explain himself. “He suggested that Professor Bauman’s apparent indifference was the result of “generational differences”.”
The list of venerable established scholars who have been caught plagiarizing is surprisingly long. Recently Jane Goodall blamed “chaotic note-taking” for her plagiarism. The sad thing is that I have heard this excuse from students caught plagiarizing. Being caught seems relatively inevitable in a digital age and the excuses everyone uses are equally sad.
Bauman and Goodall are old enough to know plagiarism is wrong. But does this excuse his plagiarism or make it worse? The question we could ask ourselves is plagiarism as well as the no-elbows-on-the-table rule an anachronistic remnant and we should just ignore these rules since everyone is doing it (not just the kids)?
Plagiarism by Steve Ransom CC BY NC SA
The quote above is from a Slate article The End of the college Essay. The photo is by Kristina Alexanderson and its called Plagiarism. The fun part is that the photo on Vader’s screen is my photo Reaching for my morning fix. Christina uses the photo to discuss what plagiarism is and how a Creative Commons license can help in situations such as this.
Joshua Rothman published an article in the New Yorker: Why is Academic Writing so Academic? as this article follows on the heels of the vaguely infamous piece in the Times by Nicholas Kristof “Professors, We Need You!” I was wondering if the whole thing should be seen as an exercise in trolling. In particular when I came across the interesting sentence:
“Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds”
Disinterested? Really? Most academics can be called many things but disinterested is not one. I agree with Peter Medawar‘s (Pluto’s Republic, p. 116). description of scientists:
Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
It is not really possible to define scientists in any easy way. But all scientists are interested in their work, most are passionate, some are obsessive. There are famous arguments and grudge matches in academia to prove the level of intensity scientists feel toward each other. There are levels of passion for theories and objects studied that border on love.
Our published prose strives to be exact and specific but dry language should not be confused with lack of emotion – and definitely not be seen as disinterest.
Exactement. Another one of Hilary Winston’s quotes by Rebecca CC BY NC ND.jpg
In the wonderful way that social media works an article in the Guardian from December last year became popular in my twitter feed again last week. The article was about the reasons for academic blogging and explained, with some empirical backing that blogging among academics is less about public outreach and more like some form of international faculty lounge.
The article is interesting but takes as its starting point that academic blogging was done for public outreach and failed. But the idea of an academic using social media for public outreach is only a small part of what social media (and blogs) is for. Only famous academics can start a blog or launch a twitter account and instantly receive feedback in the form of comments, questions, compliments and hate mail. Most of us are silently ignored.* Let me be clear. I have been nicely and widely ignored since February 2005. Surely if I was looking for public outreach I would have stopped by now?
People (academics are people too) use social media for a wide variety of reasons (for old posts about why I blog see here, here & here). This means that the rewards for typing texts into various blog software cannot simply be all about public outreach.
Public outreach is important and a perfectly good reason for blogging. But if the whole system is to become measured as valuable or worthless in relation to outreach or impact factors then something important will be lost. For me, and I suspect based on conversations with blogging colleagues, public outreach is a by-product of academic blogging.
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* By ignored I mean that most posts do not get comments and very very rarely are discussions sparked from the blog posts.
