Next week I’ll be heading out to Crystal City, VA to attend CiL 2007. It’s the first conference in many moons that I don’t have a presentation or other formal commitment to attend. This means, of course, that I have completely overbooked my time in sessions, because there is so damn much good stuff. Plus, I’ll get to catch up with lots of good friends.
But, if you are attending, and you want to catch up with me, take your pick as to calendar format:
The last part of my day was spent whipping up a couple of newspaper ads for the Student newspaper here on campus, the Echo. Since I’m pretty happy with them, I thought I’d share:
The survey is for faculty and students here on campus, so don’t go running trying to win the iPod, gang. đŸ™‚
Just an idea that others might find useful…after participating in the remarkable 5 Weeks to a Social Library course offered by my heroes, I began to think of ways to re-use all of the incredible content.
As you may have noted, at MPOW we’re hiring two new librarians. Hiring new librarians is always accompanied by some type of orientation process. The Head of Reference and I are going to collaborate on the orientation process, and the plan is to use some of the 5 weeks presentations as introductions to tools we’re using and concepts we’re interested in pursuing. Here at UTC we’re using WordPress, Joomla, RSS, del.icio.us, GAIM, and the plan is to implement other things discussed during 5 weeks…why reinvent perfectly good introductions and explanations of those tools?
I’m thrilled with the thought that all of this content can be used for free, and for any number of things…learning takes many forms. I know that it’s going to save me enormous amounts of time at MPOW. Thanks to the organizers, and also to the participants who graciously allowed your work to be licensed for reuse.
I’m in the pacific Northwest, at the ALA Midwinter meeting! Had a good conference so far, but yesterday the jet lag got to me. It’s only two hours, but it’s the two hours that made me wake up at 5am, and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.
Took some great shots of the city yesterday, and of Pike St. Market (you know, the famous one where they throw the fish around). Here’s a few of my favorites:
On my campus, as well as others, there has of late been a terrific focus placed upon student plagiarism. I’ve been asked to teach a handful of plagiarism workshops (4 down, 1 to go…this Thursday, if anyone’s in town) and I was recently asked to produce a “statement” of a sort to be used in advertising a conference on Academic Integrity that is being held here at UTC. So I said:
There is a lot of confusion among students as to citation in academic writing, including what needs a citation and who should be cited in specific circumstances. My feeling is that if we continue teaching the specifics of what, who, and how, weĂ¢â‚¬â„¢re missing the real issue. Students need to understand why we insist on citation, and the purpose and goals of this very specific sort of writing. We as educators need to encourage students to be willing to see themselves as part of the academic dialogue, as a piece of the ongoing attempt at the creation of knowledge. Students need to see academic writing as a conversation between themselves, the professor, and the rest of the Academy, and not as a hoop to jump through or a check-mark on their transcript. A large part of their vision of academic writing is formed by the way educators present assignments, and I think that we can better serve the student by re-imagining the way this is done.
Plagiarism is something that strikes me as old news…always been here, always will, and until we can convince professors that traditional “write a paper on X” assignments aren’t the best sorts, we’ll always have to deal with it. I need to find a way to get my workshop online…it uses music as a metaphor for academic writing, and shows how something can move from “bad” reuse to “ok” reuse, and how to think about academic writing in a different way. I believe that the current “millenial” student really has a difficult time understanding plagiarism, and the workshop is designed to get them thinking in a new way. I’ll put that on the pile of things to do in the next year or so…
I have difficulty relating my feelings about the announcement by Emerald that they have partnered with TurnItIn (again no link love from me…for my views on TiI, feel free to look at my last post on the matter). I do not believe that a journal publisher would voluntarily show such disregard for the Intellectual Property of their authors.
The partnership with iParadigms allows Emerald to address the problems of plagiarism and copyright infringement in two ways:
- By allowing students, tutors, researchers and editors to compare content that they are submitting, marking, editing or publishing with content previously published by Emerald through the Turnitin and iThenticate services. This will alert the enquirer to possible duplication or plagiarism, and allow them to take the appropriate action, for example revision.
- By allowing Emerald to be proactive and check submitted work for copyright infringement against content it has previously published, plus 8.6 billion web pages, tens of millions of articles in more than 15,000 periodicals, and copyright free material.
Let’s deconstruct this press release, briefly:
The amount wrong with that last bullet could be a novel, but lets start with the fact that they’re now concerned with “copyright infringement” instead of plagiarism. I thought that TurnItIn was a tool used for upholding academic integrity…what sort of “copyright infringement” might be of concern to a academic paper and publisher?
Is Emerald prepared to apply Fair Use principles to these instances? Or will the author simply be told to “fix” the work when nothing is legally wrong? Emerald also, given the above excerpt, appears as if it can’t check its own databases…do they really need TurnItIn to compare a submitted paper to their own holdings?
I, along with other academics, believe strongly that TurnItIn is profiteering off the un-compensating backs of the students. I really hope that a campus student organization at a university where TiI is used takes notice of this soon.
As noted in a comment on ACRLog, this is remarkably humorous when you consider that Emerald has been called out in the past for shady intellectual property treatments:
A librarian at Cornell University has discovered that a major scholarly-journal company, Emerald, has often published the same article in multiple journals without noting that the material had already appeared elsewhere.
“I found journals that were complete copies of one another,” says Philip M. Davis, a life-sciences librarian at Cornell.
He found that Emerald, a British company that publishes journals on management-and-information science, had republished 409 articles in 67 journals from 1989 to 2003. Mr. Davis says that he contacted the authors of the articles and found that, in some cases, Emerald had asked to republish articles, while in other cases authors could not recall whether they had been contacted.
Facebook seems to be getting touchy in their new-found attempt to take over the social network world…they took down the University of Kentucky’s profile with no warning, citing breach of ToS:
Facebook profiles are intended for use by a single individual. Groups, clubs, and other types of organizations are not permitted to maintain an account. I apologize for the inconvenience, but you will no longer be able to use this account. I will not be able to reinstate the account under a different email address.
—text from email from facebook support
So Facebook won’t give them back their content? This seems like a BAD idea on the part of Facebook support, and I’m guessing this will get fixed in short order.
I’m friends with a few libraries…curious how long it will take Facebook to get rid of them all. Here at MPOW, we’ve not created a page just for the library, instead having the library as Group, as Facebook suggests. This wasn’t done with any forethought…just seemed to make sense at the time.
All I can say is that it’s about time some students got upset about TurnItIn (no link love from me). I expected that it would be a university student somewhere that realized what they were doing, but nope…it was high school kids.
The for-profit service known as Turnitin checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. School administrators said the service, which they will start using next week, is meant to deter plagiarism at a time when the Internet makes it easy to copy someone else’s words.
But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students’ Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin’s automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend that the school’s action will tar students at one of Fairfax County’s academic powerhouses.
Indeed. I asked TurnItIn representatives years ago at an ALA Midwinter conference how long they thought they could maintain their business model without compensating students for increasing their databases…no suprisingly, they didn’t really respond to my question.
I have long thought that they were getting away with something in the IP arena. Yes, I’m sure they’ve covered their legal bases with click-through licenses and such, but everyone knows those are only good until challenged. I see a class action suit on the way…students who’s work was used to produce profits for TurnItIn should see some of that profit, I think.
I actually spoke up here at UTC during my last faculty plagiarism workshop against TiI. Several of the faculty knew of it, but didn’t understand how it worked or what you got from it…although there were a couple of strident defenders of it in the room, I got across my rather strong feelings on the subject. It’s just wrong, even apart from the IP issues, in the same way that strip searches at the airport are wrong…trading liberties for an illusion of security (or in the case of TurnItIn, trading trust and honestly for guilty until proven innocent) is not the sort of image that our institutes of higher education should be dealing in.
So at MPOW, we’re trying to drum up student interest in a few upcoming events, as well as get some input on the new website design, so I dove into Facebook. I’m curious if other libraries are using the “event” function in this manner to drum up attendance at workshops.
Plagiarism Workshop
Citation Workshop
So I posted our classes as “events” and then pushed invites to all of the students and professors in my network. I also decided to reach out for website testing:
Love / Hate the Library Website?
Here I’m hoping to get some remote feedback as part of our usability testing. We’re doing on-site testing next week, but hopefully someone will find this interesting enough to leave a few comments on the wall and we’ll be able to use them.
Anyone out in LibraryLand doing something else interesting with Facebook? Anything new?
Check out Jessamyn on the Flickr Blog’s Then & Now. Great photos!