If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.
Posts tagged writing
Just because you can write more doesn’t mean you should.
Outsourced Grading, With Supporters and Critics, Comes to College
Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.
Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”
That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
Literary Scholars Turn to Science
This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.
Now English professors and graduate students are asking them too. They say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?
Ms. Zunshine, whose specialty is 18th-century British literature, became familiar with the work of evolutionary psychologists while she was a graduate student at Stanford in the 1990s. “I thought this could be the most exciting thing I could ever learn,” she said.
At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is a providing a revitalizing lift.
» via The New York Times
When Writing Class Moves Online
For first-year students at many colleges and universities, the single course that everyone takes and the course with the greatest chance for personal interaction with an instructor is writing. So what happens when that key part of the curriculum moves online?
The Conference on College Composition and Communication is trying to find out — and also trying to develop “best practices” guidelines to assure quality as this significant shift takes place. Leaders of the association, gathered here for the group’s annual meeting, on Thursday presented preliminary results of national surveys and in-depth focus groups that they have conducted with online writing instructors.
» via Inside Higher Ed
There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true.
— Ian Hart (via libraryland)
6,500 authors opt out of Google Books service
Six and a half thousand authors, living and dead (via agents), have opted out of the Google book settlement, according to papers released yesterday.
The authors had until 28 January to opt out of the revised settlement prior to the ruling last week that would allow Google to digitise many millions of books. However, the judge received over 500 written submissions, forcing him to delay his ruling.
» via TechRadar
The Future of the Internet IV
In an online survey of 895 technology stakeholders’ and critics’ expectations of social, political and economic change by 2020, fielded by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center:
Google won’t make us stupid: 76% of these experts agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid.” Some of the best answers are in Part 1 of this report.
Reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge will be improved: 65% agreed with the statement “by 2020 it will be clear that the Internet has enhanced and improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.” Still, 32% of the respondents expressed concerns that by 2020 “it will be clear that the Internet has diminished and endangered reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.” Some of the best answers are in Part 2 of this report.
Innovation will continue to catch us by surprise: 80% of the experts agreed that the “hot gadgets and applications that will capture the imaginations of users in 2020 will often come ‘out of the blue.’” Some of the best answers are in Part 3 of this report.
Respondents hope information will flow relatively freely online, though there will be flashpoints over control of the internet. Concerns over control of the Internet were expressed in answers to a question about the end-to-end principle. 61% responded that the Internet will remain as its founders envisioned, however many who agreed with the statement that “most disagreements over the way information flows online will be resolved in favor of a minimum number of restrictions” also noted that their response was a “hope” and not necessarily their true expectation. 33% chose to agree with the statement that “the Internet will mostly become a technology where intermediary institutions that control the architecture and …content will be successful in gaining the right to manage information and the method by which people access it.” Some of the best answers are in Part 4 of this report.
Anonymous online activity will be challenged, though a modest majority still think it will possible in 2020: There more of a split verdict among the expert respondents about the fate on online anonymity. Some 55% agreed that Internet users will still be able to communicate anonymously, while 41% agreed that by 2020 “anonymous online activity is sharply curtailed.”
» via Pew Internet
Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism
Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.
» via The New York Times
Could Written Language Be Rendered Obsolete, and What Should We Demand In Return?
For the literate elite—which includes everyone from Barack Obama to this spring’s MFA graduates—the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the demise of reading has become obligatory theater. Poets, writers, and teachers alike stand over the remains of a once-proud book culture like a Greek chorus gloomily crowded around a fallen king. How can it be that less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, or the percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period (as measured by the NEA in 2007), or that 40 million Americans read at the lowest literacy level?
The answer that rises most immediately to meet this anguish is: the image makers. Television, the Pied Piper of the last century, has been joined in its march by video games, YouTube, and an assortment of other visual tempters that are ferrying Western culture further away from the nourishing springs of literature. The public appetite for images — scenes of war, staged or otherwise, music videos, game shows, celebrities roaming the streets of Los Angeles in a daze — seems both limitless in scope and apocalyptic in what it portends for the future.
To the literary eye, the culture of the image has grown as large as Godzilla, as omnipresent as an authoritarian government, and as cruel and erratic as the Furies. In our rush to blame the moving picture for the state of our cultural disarray, we’ve overlooked the fact that — as a carrier of data, thoughts, ideas, prayers, and promises — the image is neither as functional nor as versatile as text.
The real threat to the written word is far more pernicious. Much like movie cameras, satellites, and indeed television, the written word is, itself, a technology, one designed for storing information. For some 6,000 years, the human mind was unable to devise a superior system for holding and transmitting data. By the middle of this century, however, software developers and engineers will have remedied that situation. So the greatest danger to the written word is not the image; it is the so-called “Information Age” itself.
When printed books first became popular, thanks to Gutenberg’s press, you saw this great expansion of eloquence and experimentation. All of which came out of the fact that here was a technology that encouraged people to read deeply, with great concentration and focus. And as we move to the new technology of the screen … it has a very different effect, an almost opposite effect, and you will see a retreat from the sophistication and eloquence that characterized the printed page.
— Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic, quoted in the story How E-Books Will Change Reading And Writing : NPR (via obsoletethebook)
Today…the familiar letters of the alphabet are more abundant than ever. One of the most astonishing consequences of the rise of digital media, and particularly the Internet, is that we’re now surrounded by text to an extent far beyond anything we’ve experienced before. Web pages are stuffed with written words. Text crawls across our TV screens. Radio stations send out textual glosses on the songs they play…I have little doubt that in 2050 — or 2100, for that matter — we’ll still be happily reading and writing. Even if we come to be outfitted with nifty Web-enabled brain implants, most of the stuff that’s beamed into our skulls will likely take the form of text. Even our robots will probably be adept at reading. What will change — what already is changing, in fact — is the way we read and write. In the past, changes in writing technologies, such as the shift from scroll to book, had dramatic effects on the kind of ideas that people put down on paper and, more generally, on people’s intellectual lives. Now that we’re leaving behind the page and adopting the screen as our main medium for reading, we’ll see similarly far-reaching changes in the way we write, read, and even think.
— Nicholas Carr (via chrbutler)
Plagiarism Prevention Without Fear
Could student plagiarism actually be reduced? And could it be reduced not through fear of being caught, but through … education?
The evidence in a study released Monday suggests that the answer to both questions is Yes — which could be welcome news to faculty members who constantly complain about students who either don’t know what plagiarism is or don’t bother to follow the rules about the integrity of assignments they prepare.
While many instructors have reported anecdotal evidence of the success of various techniques they have used in a few courses, this study is based on a much larger cohort, including a control group. The study found that a relatively short Web tutorial about academic integrity and plagiarism can have a significant impact on whether students plagiarize, with the greatest gains (for integrity) coming among student groups that are statistically more likely to plagiarize — which are those with lesser academic credentials.
Further, surveys of the participants suggest that it was the education involved — not fear of detection — that led to the differences.
» via Inside Higher Ed
U.S. writers’ groups team up to protest Google settlement | Quill & Quire
The ramifications of the amended settlement for any one author and any one book are exceptionally complex. We’ve talked to our members, authors like yourself. The ones who got the notice found it incomprehensible and just shook their heads in confusion. Go to the settlement website’s poorly implemented database and see for yourself how tricky this is – has your book been scanned? Is it commercially available? Should you opt out? If you do nothing, you’re automatically included in the settlement. If you opt out, Google doesn’t even guarantee that it won’t steal your work in the future.
It isn’t fair. There are millions of book authors in this country who could be locked into an agreement they don’t understand and didn’t ask for. The Authors Guild represents only a tiny fraction of published writers, yet the new regulatory board set up in the proposed settlement will override individual book contracts – not to mention common law and even the Constitutional protection of copyright. Mary Beth Peters, Register of Copyrights, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the settlement would “turn copyright on its head.” Nothing in the revised U.S.settlement changes that.
» via Quill & Quire » via TeleRead
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Christopher D. Barth.
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