Academia: August 2008 Archive Page

I'm teaching a 200-level "Writing for the Internet" class, with students ranging from seniors to first-semester freshmen.  Our opening unit is on social, academic, and professional conventions, foregrounding the fact that the internet on which young people play and learn is the same internet in which the adults in their lives are teaching and working (and playing, and learning).

Senior Denamarie Ercolani, responding to an April NYT article about the prevalence of IM shortcuts in high-schoolers' written work, writes

I, personally, have never used emoticons, text shortcuts or omitted proper grammar and puncuation in my schoolwork, but outside of essays and other schoolwork, I find myself using this new form of communication frequently. Any type of writing is real writing even if it is improper.

You can see for yourself what some other students had to say about that article.  In a comment on Denamarie's blog, MS replied:

As an English teacher, all that I have to say is that these IM's and text messages are destroying the English language faster than anything else... This abomination of our language is not cute, hip or expressive; it is dangerous.

I sympathize deeply with MS, and expect that any student of MS's will be well prepared for the rigors of college writing.  Yet I can't share MS's hatred of txtspk -- a wildly successful, specialized offshoot of English, characterized by its reliance upon thumb power, creative use of abbreviations, and the expectation that any useful bit of communication will likely involve numerous rapid back-and-forth sallies.

I remember the Biden law school incident. Not long after that, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, I remember reading that law school students were secretly photocopying homework assignments submitted by their arch enemies, in the hopes of one day using that information to torpedo a big political appointment.

By choosing Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has insulted academics -- students and teachers alike -- a constituency that was significant in bringing him the nomination of his party. Especially in a year that has seen two prominent political careers hamstrung by sex scandals, and in an era where choosing vice presidential candidates seems to be foremost an exercise in avoiding skeletons in the closet, it's surprising that Biden's record of plagiarism did not disqualify him from Obama's consideration.

Joe Biden, you will remember, ran for president in 1988. He delivered a speech that presented the thoughts of British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock is if they were his own, and was slow to explain or apologize for this transgression. The ensuing scrutiny of Biden's record revealed that he had also plagiarized in law school, failing a course for doing so. Shortly after these revelations, he dropped out of the race. -- Jonathan Beecher Field

From a recent study of university libraries. There's plenty in this report on digital scholarship, print journals, and comparative approaches of the various disciplines.

Neither faculty members nor librarians expect e-books to constitute a viable substitute for print books; they are more generally seen as complementary.

Somewhat oddly given this low level of faculty interest in e-books, many librarians consider the provisioning of e-books an important role, and substantially more expect it to be one in five years (see Figure 16). This enthusiasm is notably higher at the largest institutions, with one-quarter of librarians anticipating a transformative role and two-thirds believing that licensing and making available e-books is an important library function, both numbers well above those of smaller schools. Librarians' enthusiasm in the face of a relative lack of interest from faculty may indicate that librarians are responding to student demand or expecting future faculty demand.

It is also possible that librarians believe wider use of e-books will improve their ability to provide library services in a cost-effective manner, and are interested in driving the transformation of the book medium.

Our provost sent this link to English faculty members this morning.

One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."

Okay, you may think, this is a kid geared to excel in history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."

So there you have it: A smart teen and motivated reader goes to high-school English class and discovers that the classics have nothing to offer him. "The reason I did not participate in class," he admitted, "was that I found the reading a chore." -- Nancy Schnog, The Washington Post

While I think it's an important part of a liberal arts education that a student know something about the great, formative stories of his or her nation and/or tongue, I can sympathize with Schnog. Several students in my "History and Future of the Book" course last term reported that school made them fall out of love with reading. And I'm not surprised, when I see how many English majors arrive on campus with the idea that studying a work means memorizing the contents of the Big Dusty Book of Literary Meanings (you know, the one that says blue symbolizes peace, and that if you can match up a detail in the story with a detail from what Wikipedia says about the author's life, then your job interpreting the text is done).  I realize that high school students generally aren't ready for college-level critical thinking, but I'm still surprised at how tightly some students cling to the expectation that my job is to tell them what a passage means, and that their job is to memorize what I say and spit it back.

I enjoy teaching "Introduction to Literary Study" and "Writing about Literature" because I'm free to sample different time periods, genres, and geographical zones.  Likewise, I get a lot of flexibility when I teach "Drama as Literature" -- I can cover anything that counts as drama.  I always hope that somewhere along the way students will encounter a text that inspires them to dig beneath the surface. 

Mike Arnzen writes about the thinking behind his decision to revise his syllabus to include a statement on the use of electronic devices in class.

In some ways, there's no difference between a student texting and a student flipping through a magazine in the back row of a class, but there are times when we use technology to multitask and this is where the issue gets thorny and complex. What if we're discussing Foucault's "Panopticism" in the classroom and a student wants to quickly do some web research on a referenced person in the article, like Jeremy Bentham? I wouldn't want to ban such ambitious impulses to learn more, so long as it pertained to the subject at hand or contributed to the collaborative learning of the class.

What I'm really concerned about is multitasking that puts personal interest above the class interest, and the fetishism of technology that reinforces gizmo play for its own sake. My hope is that I can help students consciously rethink their gizmos as tools for learning and research and communication, and to respect the social space and dynamic of the classroom.

Mike does a great job putting forth the thinking behind his new policy, which carefully instructs the students with examples of what counts as an actionable offense. My own syllabus, rather than listing sample infractions, refers more generally to common sense and common courtesy.

I've considered having students in each class come up with their own policy on the use of electronic devices, since, for instance, students in "New Media Projects" will be sitting at machines programming in Flash or working on 3D animations, and I hope the in-class activity will be challenging enough that they'll want to spend class time on the course material. But in that class I'll be asking them to follow online tutorials, and to use the online user forums and tutorials (as well as my personal feedback) to find answers to their technical problems, so I would expect them to be online.

Our dependence on electronic gadgets -- hand-held yesterday, ear-mounted today, cranially implanted tomorrow -- makes classroom manners a moving target.  Manners depend on perception and context.  Several years ago, when I was experimenting with using a PDA to do all my in-class housekeeping (such as taking notes on class participation and oral presentations), a student was offended because, as he saw it, I was playing with my gadget instead of paying attention.  And once during an inspiring faculty workshop, I was pouring out my brainstorming into a word processor file, when the leader interrupted her presentation to ask, "Could the typing please stop?"  Whenever my preferred method of staying on task is perceived as rude, it stings a little.  But manners are socially constructed tools, and manners differ as contexts differ.  At academic conferences, I regularly see more than half the audience tapping or thumbing away; yet when a rising freshman asks, during a summer orientation, "Should I bring my laptop to class?", I reply that each professor's preference will vary. The student using technology during class may, of course, simply be wasting time. But as long as the technology does not disrupt anyone else, I tend to give the student the benefit of the doubt.

It's downright rude when students entertain themselves instead of listening to their peers reciting their work, and really it's no different if they choose to ignore me when I introduce a new concept or the next assignment. I try to work around this by promising that I'll give students some in-class writing time in the last 15 or so minutes, but that for now they need to pay attention to this next topic. (Is that bargaining? Conceding too much power over how to spend our limited time together? Are my expectations too low?) 

Somewhere I heard of a professor whose policy is that if a phone goes off in class, he will answer it. I can't imagine myself doing that. Not only am I concerned about appearing to be heavy-handed, and I'm also not sure that I need a separate policy for technological distractions.  Do we have or need to articulate a policy to deal with the student who sits, with arms folded, refusing to take notes (ever!) ?

Many years ago (not at SHU) in a technical writing class, a student who sat in about the second row often fell asleep leaning her head against the wall.  I had the fleeting thought that I should pretend to fall asleep during her final report, but rejected the idea. (Yes, she would have remembered the event, but for all I know she had narcolepsy, was up all night working a night-shift job to pay for her education, etc. etc.)  Instead I just spent more time right in front of her row, more time making eye contact with her.  She was actually a very good writer who made substantial, lasting contributions to the class. I'm not sure that shaming her in class would have helped. (Had she started to snore soporifically, so that other students also dropped off one by one, that would have been different.)

Another time, at the same school, I taught a class with a student who kept her chair aligned so that she was directly behind another student, no matter where I was in the room. She frequently talked with that student during class at inappropriate times, and when I looked up, I'd see the student in front whispering a reply, so I always assumed that the visible student was the troublemaker.  One day the fall guy was absent, so the ventriloquist sat in another chair so that she could pull the same routine on someone else.  At the end of the year, when I didn't give the ventriloquist her full marks for class participation, she argued with me on the grounds that she never missed a class. 

Such cases of deliberate, immature, low-tech rudeness are rare, but the common technological infractions are often the result of simple carelessness. It's happened more than once that a student who was in the front of the room had to interrupt her own presentation, walk back to her desk, get her bleeping phone out of her purse, and shut it off.  If I taught lectures with 100 students, where phones rang several times during each class period and the offenders were always anonymous, I might get more upset about the use of electronic gadgets. But so far, I find that the self-moderating social system functions fairly well, and what goes around comes around.

An Ohio State press release discusses how a student's psychological profile correlates to academic integrity. An interesting study in rhetoric, focusing on promoting a cultural identity for the "academic heroes" who do honest work, rather than hunting and trapping those whose behavior is less exemplary:

The students completed measures that examined their bravery, honesty and empathy.  The researchers separated those who scored in the top half of those measures and contrasted them with those in the bottom half.

Those who scored in the top half - whom the researchers called "academic heroes" - were less likely to have reported cheating in the past 30 days and the last year compared to the non-heroes.  They also indicated they would be less likely to cheat in the next 30 days in one of their classes.

From The Washington Post:

It hit Mark Gruntz all at once, while he was sitting flat-broke in an airport in Greece: He had lost credit for three summer courses, wasted $11,474 in student loans and gotten kicked off a boat. All because he hadn't cited Wikipedia enough in a paper about a movie.

Last week, he and another college student, Allison Routman, were expelled from the Semester at Sea program for violating the University of Virginia's honor code. The expulsions raised questions for some students about whether the school's more than 150-year-old tradition is too harsh -- and for others, whether students have a different understanding of plagiarism and research now that online resources make it easy to find information.

The headline is misleading. The problem here isn't that the students didn't cite Wikipedia enough... they included direct quotations from their sources without using quotation marks or paraphrasing. This has little to do with online sources, other than the simple notion that because so many facts are available in a few mouse clicks, a new generation of students devalues the work that goes into attaining (and verifying, and documenting) those facts.

An Associated Press article repeats the three sentence fragments that student Allison Routman says she included in her paper without citation.  They're not deep, meaning-laden passages, but they're all from the same source, and as I see it the paper was intended to be a reflection paper -- students were supposed to watch a movie and then relate the movie to their experience during their travels. Not an intellectually heavy task, but Routman says nobody had ever defined "paraphrasing" for her before (which, even if true, suggests she was too helpless to find the definition on her own), and Gruntz, in an interview from the airport in Greece, told the Washington Post "I got in trouble for not citing it enough, I guess" and "I think I was supposed to put quotations around it" and "I don't really think I did anything wrong" (and this is after the students have spent at least a full year at their home college, before signing up for Semetser at Sea; and after a librarian on the ship gave a presentation on proper academic research methods, and after the guilty students sat through a meeting with a panel of five faculty members that picked his paper apart... somewhere along the line, I'm sure all the students were told exactly what's expected in an academic essay).

Yes, the University of Virginia's single-sanction honor code is strict, but it's supposed to have bite. I remember having to write an essay about the honor code when I applied to U.Va., and I remember every year some students would start a motion to lighten up the honor code by instituting a wrist-slapping punishment, but if it ever made to a student body vote, the students would always vote to keep the honor code as-is.

If U.Va. is sponsoring Semester at Sea, and students from other schools who sign up for the program have to agree to abide by the U.Va. honor code, which is clearly explained in the Semester at Sea handbook (PDF).

Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students' atrocious spelling. Aren't we all!?

But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell. -- Ken Smith, Times Higher Education Supplement

I sympathize with Ken Smith's frustration, but not the solution he proposes.

There's a good case to be made for being flexible with language. Text-message abbreviations and chat-room shortcuts are not simply degraded forms of idealized English. They are a set of conventions that serve a purpose, such as improving the efficiency of two-thumb typists, or letting members of a group focus on the free flow of ideas (or gossip, or vitriol, or whatever) rather than on the more rigid and time-consuming conventions of standard prose.

Professionals and educators have little to gain by belittling or ignoring the accomplishments of youngsters who are skilled in these kinds of communication, just as today's college students have much to lose if they don't take advantage of their time at university to develop the intellectual habits that are necessary for the reading and writing of complex, well-organized, authoritative texts.

Ken, I'd suggest that you let students know that certain assignments, such as in-class essays or overnight reflection papers, will be evaluated only on creativity, or the student's ability to apply a key concept or to spot the methodological error in a case study.

But for an assignment in which the student has access to a spell-checker, or where the point of the assignment is to model professional behavior (writing reports that could be used to determine a defendant's guilt or innocence, for example), to encourage this kind of compositional sloppiness would be a crime.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I think the lack of respect for math and science is one of the largest unacknowledged problems in today's society. And it starts in the academy -- somehow, we have moved to a place where people can consider themselves educated while remaining ignorant of remarkably basic facts of math and science. If I admit an ignorance of art or music, I get sideways looks, but if I argue for taking a stronger line on math and science requirements, I'm being unreasonable. The arts are essential, but Math Is Hard, and I just need to accept that not everybody can handle it.--Chad Orzel, Inside Higher Ed

When I teach "News Writing," I include a brief unit on reporting with statistics and percentages, and the "New Media Projects" seminar exposes upper-level students to various computer programming tasks.

I wonder whether Orzel would feel comforted to know that I regularly encounter people who laughingly dismiss their self-proclaimed inability to master the (heart-breakingly simple) rule about when to use "its" and when to use "it's."

From a 2007 report on liberal education, by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World

• Through study in the sciences and mathematics, social sciences,
  humanities, histories, languages, and the arts

Focused by engagement with big questions, both contemporary
and enduring

Intellectual and Practical Skills, Including

• Inquiry and analysis
• Critical and creative thinking
• Written and oral communication
• Quantitative literacy
• Information literacy
• Teamwork and problem solving

Practiced extensively, across the curriculum, in the context of
progressively more challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance

Personal and Social Responsibility, Including

• Civic knowledge and engagement--local and global
• Intercultural knowledge and competence
• Ethical reasoning and action
• Foundations and skills for lifelong learning

Anchored through active involvement with diverse communities and real-world challenges

Integrative Learning, Including

• Synthesis and advanced accomplishment across general and
  specialized studies

Demonstrated through the application of knowledge, skills, and
responsibilities to new settings and complex problems