Top 10 Plagiarism Scandals of All Time | Online Classes.org: Find the Right Online Class Match

Ah, so this is where the students learn it's okay to plagiarize...

Top 10 Plagiarism Scandals of All Time | Online Classes.org: Find the Right Online Class Match Sphere: Related Content

Work-Life-Furlough Balance

It finally happened. After months of speculation swirling like a hurricane off the coast, California State University Employees (faculty and staff) are on a furlough system. Other state workers have been furloughed for months before this, and getting IOUs on top on that. I think the IOU days are just about over. But my furlough days are just starting.

I'm sitting on the couch, laptop open, The People's Court is on television (glad I don't have to experience daytime TV too often, though there is something soothing about the easy conflict resolution portrayed on the show). And I'm thinking about how silly it is to expect someone like a professor, who doesn't normally work 9-5 hours, to reduce his or her workload simply by not coming into the office. Many of the academics I know write at home, on the weekends, and during off-hours anyway.

I'm resisting the urge to do any work, thinking that I may actually have to do some work today to stay caught up, and wondering whether writing articles counts as work. If the question is, "Would I write anyway?" the answer is yes. Do I get paid to do it as part of my workload? Yes. So, is it work? Is it enjoyable play? Yes on both counts. It's a wonderful part of my job that these two strands are intertwined. Even my writing this entry could count as a pre-writing for possible articles: work-life balance, organizational identification, emotion labor... I could go on. But am I allowed to?

And so, I've come to the point at which the furlough system breaks down, no longer makes sense, though I'm sure all my academic friends have already come to a similar conclusion.

I turn the channel from the People's Court to a Tool Academy marathon on VH1. On this show boyfriends who cheat on their girlfriends, verbally abuse them, and don't respect them (hence, the "tools") are tricked into coming to a school where they will supposedly learn better relationship and life skills or be booted out of the school and possibly their romantic relationships. I study the communication of gender and masculinity. This show could make a potentially interesting artifact of analysis. Uh oh. Am I suddenly working again? Should I change the channel? Sphere: Related Content

The Department of Compartmentalization

One of the reasons I think I've been successful at--and enjoyed--my teaching career so far is my ability to compartmentalize. While the best teachers are lauded for being inspirational, emotional and exciting in their delivery style, ingenious in their activities, and dedicated and demanding in their grading, I wonder if successful teachers are successful because they've also developed the ability to effectively compartmentalize.

What does this mean? That good teachers leave their emotions and personal lives at the door? Partly, I suppose. Though all the emotion labor research I've read tells me this is ultimately harmful. So, I'm sure there are downsides.

My wife and I put our beloved Black Lab, Val, to sleep last month. I was scheduled to hold office hours that day and to teach a graduate seminar that night. I canceled both. But I went in the next day to teach my 10 am lecture. I was sort of walking around in a daze, though it did help me to be at work doing something. I realized that I honed my ability to take these worries and leave them at the door. I was able to engage students, concentrate on the material, and deliver the material in what I hope was a lively manner.

I again return to my question: does being a good teacher mean, in part, that we must compartmentalize? I know many would disagree, especially when so many teaching moments can be found in the lives we (teachers and students) live outside the classroom. But sometimes I wonder in what ways teachers' abilities to set aside our personal lives fosters effective teaching practices... Sphere: Related Content

Stories as Teaching Tools

It's been a while since my last post. I've been busy with writing and teaching. In the first case, I've gotten caught up in the revise and resubmit cycle as I submit articles for publication. Same with teaching: prepping, grading, etc. In both of these cases, it's easy to lose track of the stories I'm trying to tell. All of which prompts me to consider the role of stories in my teaching.

For my morning classes, I come into the lecture hall at the tail end of a History professor's basic course. And I listen, caught up in the stories he tells to teach the class about English expansion and Napoleon's conquest, about the development of raw materials like gold and salt as precious commodities, about ethnic strife. And I think about what I teach: theories and concepts broken down into bits and pieces, partly because of who I'm teaching (first-year students), but also, I think, because of the subject matter.

I know that many communication scholars, especially qualitative communication scholars (like H.L. Goodall and others), claim that scholarly articles and theories are themselves narratives, stories. So, what are the stories in a basic communication course?

I'm sure they're there. But because the basic communication course (which often focuses on public speaking) is chunked up into discrete skills (language use, gestures, researching, using citations, supporting arguments, volume, rate, pitch, etc.) for the purpose of teaching students both "life skills" and skills that will be useful to them for the rest of their college careers, the format resists stories and a "big picture" approach. And believe me, I've tried time and again to stress the latter. But without much life experience, it's difficult, I think, for students to appreciate the big picture.

So, the question for me becomes not only what stories do I tell, but how do I tell them? It's a shame that many of the basic studies-general education classes we ask students to take resist the story form, as that's what students are most used to (in songs, movies, television shows). My task, then, is to figure out the stories embedded in common communication experiences and attempt to tell them. But whose stories? Mine? Some students could surely relate, but there's a generation gap that may be difficult to cross. Theirs? I can't speak for them. I continue to look for the stories to tell. Sphere: Related Content

Making the grade, assessing our grading

I know there are smarter people than me who have written about both of these subjects, but as the semester winds down I can't resist revisiting in a more colloquial way the two topics that are (likely not) near and dear to most teachers' hearts.

It is the point in the semester when students begin asking about their grades, points, can they be "bumped" up since they're so close to the next highest grade, there was an illness they forgot to bring a note in for, they over slept the final exam period, etc. I know these are valid concerns for students, and I was certainly the sort of student who was hyper-concerned with his grades. So, I can give forgive them the barrage of e-mails here. And I don't blame students for often missing the big picture of whether and what they actually learned in class (this is the assessment part). However, the grades-assessment dynamic is something that's easy to lose sight of for teachers as well as students (if students even think about assessment).

I'm not saying grades and assessment have to be dichotomous; it just all too often seems like they are. Students are concerned with grades. Teachers are concerned with assessment. Students don't care about assessment unless it's tied into their grades. After some students engage in what is commonly called "grade grubbing," many teachers just want to chuck the whole grading system out the office window.

I admit, grading is my least favorite teaching duty. I also admit that assessment is one of my favorite. I think this is because I enjoy the myriad possibilities of assessment. In addition to exams, I use reflective writing, presentations, discussions, and short performances. Of course, I have to assign grades (in my case, points) to each of these activities so students will take them seriously. And I suppose that's a common way grading and assessing are folded into each other.

What I'm more concerned with is where these folds rip and grading and assessment appear if not incommensurable then two patches from a different quilt. As I'm sure many teachers and students can attest, getting a good grade doesn't always mean that one has learned something. And, certainly, one can learn something valuable and not achieve the desired grade.

I'm not necessarily offering answers; most teachers will tell you there are no easy ones. And then they'll digress into a highfalutin discussion about it: "isn't interesting that...," "the pedagogical tensions..." Which is what I suppose I'm doing right now. But teaching is a learning process, so I constantly have to ask myself: Am I making the grade on assessment for my classes? Sphere: Related Content

Students cheating: What to do?

I have my own ways of preventing plagiarism on scholarly papers, most notably using turnitin.com and relying on the vigilance of the graduate teaching associates in our School. I'm also very careful, perhaps overly cautious, about student privacy as per the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). For example, I have on more than one occasion refused to tell parents who contact me how their child is doing in my class. Of course, dealing with "helicopter" parents is another subject altogether. Needless to say, these parents were none too happy that I was not forthcoming with the performance of their children in my class.

But when I read this article about a professor going "vigilante" on students he caught cheating, I had to take a step back and wonder how best we can prevent cheating and plagiarism rather than trying to catch students in a "gotcha" sort of way.

One of the ways I do this to make the turnitin.com match reports that tell me how high a match is to other papers and articles in the database (numbering in the millions) available to the students themselves. What I've found, and this is especially useful for graduate students, is that doing this helps students understand the importance of paraphrasing. First, there's less a chance that they will plagiarize if they have it in their minds from the outset to mostly paraphrase. Second, since a high match only indicates a match to existing text and not outright plagiarism, a closer look reveals how much the student is quoting.

This last part is important for graduate students, as I try to communicate to them that they shouldn't let other scholars speak for them; they shouldn't quote unless the original language is poetic, unique, and otherwise something they couldn't themselves put in a different but equally explanatory way. So, a student sees the match report and gets a first-hand look at how often he or she is quoting. A high match in this case may not mean plagiarism, but it does mean that the student's scholarly writing skills need work in terms of synthesizing ideas and paraphrasing others' ideas.

One certainly fallible way I do my part to prevent and educate students about cheating. I'm not saying the professor in the article linked above eschewed this attitude. It just got me thinking. Sphere: Related Content

Flashback to a simpler time...my old website!

Just had a strange experience. I went searching for an old hypertext performance I had put together for a graduate class at Arizona State University. It's a personal narrative that plays with voice and the temporal nature of storytelling by using hypertext to lead the reader to (seemingly) unrelated websites that may (or may not) contribute to the story being told. Most of the pages linked from my original page cannot be found, and I didn't bother to update them, but you can experience it here.

The strange part, besides reading what I wrote years ago (which has since been published in a different version), was that this narrative was linked to an old website I created as a Ph.D. student. It listed similar (but ultimately different) research interests and foci for teaching. The descriptions were more complicated yet stunningly simple in their assertions. I've changed them to link to my current page, but before I did I marveled not only at my own assessments of my research and teaching but the fact that I had this other, outdated, piece of me floating in cyberspace. I had literally lost track of myself! Sphere: Related Content