Category: Education and Administration

PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer

Image of Paper FoldingPocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer is a cool web site where you can make small booklets for your pocket from a printout. They have Flash tool where you drag out the types of pages you want and then it prints the PocketMod so all you have to do is cut and fold into a booklet. Saves on cute little pocket organizers as they have a variety of pages you can use. A great way to recycle paper too.

Harley: The Journal of Electronic Publishing

The Journal of Electronic Publishing has an artile, The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices, which nicely summarizes the state of perceptions about electronic publishing. The article doesn’t talk much about how they arrived at their conclusions, but the conclusions strike me as likely. Some of the conclusions worth noting for digital humanists:

  • Peer review is still important for tenure and promotion, which makes it difficult for un-reviewable works to be treated as scholarly contributions.
  • Academics are worried there is too much stuff on the web and that lower costs of publication lead to lower standards. Therefore print peer reviewed publications are still taken more seriously and online peer reviewed publications are still viewed as less important.
  • Online publication is seen as a way to make a name, while print publication is seen as how you get tenure.
  • Print is seen as more archival and therefore the best place for finished work while online publication is seen as less likely to survive and therefore better suited to scholarly communication. This, by the way, accords with The Credibility of Electronic Publishing report that I contributed to. Print does seem to last longer and therefore is better suited to final archival publication.

Evaluating Digital Media for Tenure and Promotion

I am giving a talk today at the MLA organized ADE/ADFL meeting in Montreal on evaluating new media research work. I prepared this cheatsheet for the participants, Evaluating Digital Work (PDF). The short answer is:

  • Communicate Early and Often
    • Be clear about expectations starting with the job ad
  • Recognize the Administrative Work
    • Don’t ask them to run a lab or fix your computer without recognition
  • Statement of Purpose
    • Have author describe the original reseach
    • Get documentation
  • Have it Reviewed by Experts
    • In the content field, and
    • Technical experts
    • Have it reviewed in original form

CAUT: Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom

The Canadian Association of University Teachers recent Bulletin has a timely story about Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom. The story is about Lakehead University switching over to Gmail. The switch means that students and faculty now have gigbytes of email space as opposed to the megabytes they had from the campus run service (a situation similar to what we have at McMaster.) The switch also raises privacy concerns because Google’s terms of use includes the following:

As a condition to using the Service, you agree to the terms of the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time. Google understands that privacy is important to you. You do, however, agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy. Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.

As Google ads functionality so that they can offer more than just email I suspect this problem will be more acute. Soon we might see universities outsourcing calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and web site functions.

BookCrossing – The World’s Biggest Free Book Club – Catch and Release Used Books

BookCrossing is a project a colleague librarian Barbara suggested to me as an example of new media and books intersecting. The idea is that people release books into the “wild” with a BCID label and number. Then others who find the book can log on and write in the journal of the book. Users can then watch how books travel around, being caught, read and released. Neat idea – would our library do this on campus? What if we took books being deacquisitioned and released them in departmental lounges or the student centre?

Joan Lippincott: Digital Learning Spaces

Henry Jenkins, the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has written a whitepaper, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, for the MacArthur Foundation that talks about the challenges of dealing with students who are (or want to be) participating in creating culture. (See my previous entry for a link to a presentation by Jenkins.) Joan Lippincott from the Coalition for Networked Information gave a talk today about how we should think about the library, learning, and space for these NetGen students who are used to the participatory culture of the web. To summarize her discussion of the differences between us and the Net Generation based partly on Jenkins:

  • We tend to do things in serial (first this task and then that) whole the NetGen multitask.
  • We (especially in the Humanities) value privacy and solitary work while the NetGen like to work in teams.
  • We tend to value linear text while they value hyperlinked visual multimedia.
  • We value critical thinking while they value creative production.

Joan goes on to argue that to reach the Net Generation Libraries need to rethink their services and spaces. She showed images of new spaces and discussed some of what she has written about in Linking the Information Commons to Learning which is part of a book from EDUCAUSE, Learning Spaces. Two things stuck me:

  • Lack of Books. In most of the pictures shown of information commons there were no books! This certainly isn’t true when you look at the workstations of most students or faculty in their own spaces where books, papers, and computer are “mashed” together. Why then are information commons being set up apart from the books and periodicals? One wonders why libraries are building spaces that look more like what computing services should set up. Is it politics – libraries are doing what campus computing services failed to do? Joan, rightly I think, answered that these spaces are/should be set up in collaboration with people with technical skill (from computing) and that the idea is to connect students to content whether digital or print. Books should be there too or be at hand.
  • Lack of Faculty Coordination. While these spaces are popular with students (see Henning’s Final Report on a survey of learning commons), the deeper problem is integration into the curriculum. Individual faculty may take advantage of the changing services and spaces of the library, but I haven’t seen the deep coordination that sees courses across the curriculum changed. Faculty assume the library is a service unit that supports their teaching by having books on reserve. We don’t think of the library as a living space where students are talking through our assignments, collaborating and getting help with their essays. We don’t coordinate changes in how we teach with changes in space and service, but stumble upon new services and weave them into our courses if we have the time (and it does take time to change how you teach.)

So here are a couple of ideas:

  • Curated Distributions. We should think along the lines suggested in A world in three aisles, Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ fascinating discussion of the Prelingers’ personal curated library where materials are arranged in associative clusters based on a curatorial practice designed to encourage pursuing topics that cross traditional shelf distribution. Why not invite faculty to curate small collections of books to be distributed among the workstations of a commons where users can serindipitously come across them, wonder why they are there, and browse not just sites, but thematic collections of books?
  • Discovery Centres. Another approach would be to work with chairs and deans to identify key courses or sets of courses and then build spaces with faculty input that are designed for studying for those courses. The spaces would have a mix of meeting spaces optimized for tutorials in the course(s), groupwork spaces for the types of groups formed in the courses, print materials (like books and magazines) needed for the course, and electronic finding aids for online materials related to the course. These topical spaces would be centres for students in these courses to access relevant information, browse related materials, meet other students, and get help. A library could obviously only afford a limited number of these, which is why the idea would be to target stressful first and second year courses where chairs identify the need and opportunity for discovery centres.

International Network of Digital Humanities Centres

There is a call circulating to set up a International Network of Digital Humanities Centres which looks like a good thing. It is in part a response to the Cyberinfrastructure report. The initiatives they imagine such a network being involved in are:

  • workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students
  • developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities
  • exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through a digital humanities portal

Plagiarism

Like most profs I have had to deal with plagiarism cases. Over the years I have become convinced that the problem is not the odd cheater, but students who have developed habits. My hypothesis is:

Prepatory colleges in Canada that prepare foreign students for acceptance to Canadian universities are a breeding ground for writing coping tactics. Students who go to these schools unprepared for high school writing in English, learn from their peers a collection of tactics that let them get by. Because of the family pressure to succeed and the short time they have to learn to write in English, they have to avail themselves of these tactics and don’t feel they have the luxury of really trying to write in their own voice. We make matters worse by, on the one hand threatening them with expulsion if caught, and on the other hand offering no real alternative tactics or writing courses with individual attention in the first year. Further I suspect that:

  • Students know that plagiarism is an integrity issue, but are more scared of failure. Even if students don’t understand all the nuances of plagiarism they know they can’t write the way they can in their native language.
  • Students fool themselves by thinking it doesn’t matter for the moment, or that this is what everyone does, or that they will learn it later.
  • We fool ourselves into thinking that it does matter in the work world the way it does to us when, in fact, in many situations a report cribbed off the web that answers questions is good enough. There is even software to support such cribbing, see Net Snippets.
  • Students in this situation don’t trust staff or their professors to help them as they are committed to coping tactics and don’t have the oral communication skills to get navigate help without admitting they are doing something they know is wrong.
  • Students are using a variety of tactics and find it easier to modulate tactics or acquire new ones than to start writing. These vary from collaborating to buying essays.
  • These tactics are successful at getting passing grades on writing assignments.
  • Native English writers are a very different problem and interventions aimed at them won’t work with ESL students. Most plagiarism modules are aimed at native writers.

    • ESL and native writers have realized that in the economics of education it costs under $100 to buy a cust written 5-page paper that will not get caught and will get a B for the assignment. This is less than the cost of textbooks for a course.

In short, with ESL students we are dealing with habits formed before they come to university and habits are not changed the way exceptional behaviour is. Habits are changed by understanding them, understanding the triggers, providing alternative tactics, and motivating students to try alternatives.

A good site on plagiarism is, Assessing Student Learning – five practical guides from the University of New South Wales. PLAGUE is a special interest group based at Monash University who are researching the issue. See their papers and links.