One teacher's plea re. plagiarism

"Plagiarism at Uni: An open letter to students by English teacher Suzanne Linder" by Katherine Allen.

Suzanne Linder teaches English at University Laboratory High School in Urbana, IL. She writes calmly and sensibly to ask students to quit plagiarizing, to think for themselves and create original work. What good ideas.

Be sure, too, to follow the comments thread: more good ideas there, especially about the limits of certain kinds of assignments and the benefit of consistently re-examining our pedagogical practices. Also, click on the audio link to hear Linder explain what prompted her to write the letter.

I received the link to this article from Jennifer Veltsos's message on a wonderful listserv I read, TECHRHET, a space/place I've mentioned before, a place/space for great discussion about technology and teaching composition/rhetoric. It's a list hosted by InterUniversity.org.

Join the discussion. Find colleagues. Educate yourself and others.

Period Trick

I found this trick on Steven Krause's teaching blog (found to the right on my higher ed. blogs), entry for April 8, 2008.


http://view.break.com/232903 - Watch more free videos

Perhaps this lesson will be a "public service" to my colleagues and a reason NOT to specify page-lengths with essays/papers. Word counts might be a better way to let students know how much depth you want them to go into.

What's cheating?

An interesting article on Slashdot makes me ask the question. The article's called "Student Faces Expulsion for Facebook Study Group," and the comment thread offers a bunch of takes on the issue. (For a fuller version of the article, read "Student faces Facebook consequences.")

Seems to me that study groups are always helpful for learning something and that technology is just a magnifying glass, letting those study groups happen more quickly and remotely. In fact, students say that a Facebook study group is a "valid studying technique in the information age." Makes perfect sense -- as a technique for *learning* stuff.

But the way for instructors to find out if any particular student has learned anything [either with the help of a study group or not] is to provide some kind of opportunity for said student to show s/he has learned. In fact, I call tests and quizzes "opportunities to show me what you know" whenever I give them in class.

So I can't see why Facebook study groups would be cheating: if they're used to take exams, when those exams are not group exams, then they'd be cheating.