Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

Plagiarism and Academic Integrity

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, we’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…

Categories
Digital Culture

Reference as Help Desk

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few months as I worked through the website redesign at MPOW is how reference departments interact with patrons in the virtual world. In conjunction with the re-launch, we’re going live with our IM reference service, and re-visiting how we take virtual reference questions. As I think about how we do things, I realize I’m not happy with the overall way we’re dealing with email reference…it’s distributed, so there’s no single record that can be browsed for common questions. It’s not archived in a meaningfully searchable way. It’s not flexible. It requires us to manually forward emails and potentially miss a followup.

So in re-envisioning email reference in a new way, I realized that what I really wanted was a Help Desk/Trouble Ticket system. Is anyone out there using a formal Trouble Ticket system as a reference tool? Or, is anyone using one at all, in any capacity, and could recommend a good Open Source php/MySQL system?

I’m looking for something that presents a browser-based form for collection of issues, with a big plus if it also allows email reception into the system. Anyone got a favorite?

Categories
Digital Culture

One reason to vote republican

republican sticker

After a comment from a friend, I’ve decided to throw this up on Cafepress and see if anyone else thinks it’s as funny as I do. I suppose it’s one good reason to vote republican…head off and buy one! I’ll donate 10% of any proceeds to an appropriate charity (ACLU? EFF? Leave a comment if you have a suggestion as to the best charity).

I’m just hoping this doesn’t devolve into a flame-fest in the comments…I don’t think anyone reading this is particularly conservative, but you never know.

Categories
Media

Grindhouse

Tarantino is back, and he brought Rodriguez with him.

Oh hell yeah.

Tom Savini and Zombies? Machete? Rose McGowen as a grindhouse dame? I’m so very, very there.

Categories
3D Printing Digital Culture

Objects in Space

I am absolutely enamored with physical representations of virtual objects. We’ve skipped over the marvel that a digital photograph can become a physical print (mainly because the digital photo is a mimic of the physical, down to thinking of photos as single objects and talking about something as nonsensical as “digital filmmaking“), but I love the idea of Fabjectory:

Fabjectory

Bring your avatar out of the virtual world and into the real world with Fabjectory’s avatar creation services. We’ll fab a miniature statuette of your avatar that you can take with you anywhere.

Create a digital you, and then have your own action figure statuette made, complete with tattoos and pithy t-shirts. I know a lot of WoW players who would jump on this.

According to their blog, they’ll also let you create a customized USB key case in-game (graphics, logos, textures, legs…whatever) and then create it for you IRL. We’re getting closer and closer to The Diamond Age and drawing things off the Feed. I want me a matter compiler!

This is roughly related to my adoration of the new Moo Flickr cards…it somehow makes your photos both weightier and more desireable. These little things are awesome…you want to share them, but you want to keep them all for yourself. I ordered the free sample of 10 cards, and immediately ordered 100 when I got them…they are that cool. My next plan is to take a picture of my Moo cards, upload that to Flickr, and have cards made from it…how many cycles of Meta-Moo can you go?

Categories
Digital Culture

$1.65 Billion

That’s what Google reportedly just paid in stock for YouTube. The interesting question is whether Google Video will go away, or will YouTube? The press release says that both will stick around…but that makes little sense. It will be interesting to see, that’s for sure.

Categories
Library Issues

Emerald and TurnItIn

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:

  • iParadigms is described as: “developers of the Turnitin plagiarism detection product for academic institutions and the iThenticate plagiarism detection product for content publishers”
  • This agreement “reinforces Emerald’s proactive stance on plagiarism, and ensures that Emerald content continues to maintain its high standard of integrity.”
  • Malik AboRashid, Senior Director of Business Development, from iParadigms makes a statement that includes the phrase “confirms Emerald’s commitment to supporting integrity in scholarship and their position as a publisher of high quality research”
  • Emerald’s Editorial Director Rebecca Marsh’s statement includes “…help to promote integrity in academic research …” and “…guard against plagiarized and duplicated work appearing in Emerald journals…”
  • Then without warning, we get one mention of copyright: “…Allowing Emerald to be proactive and check submitted work for copyright infringement against content it has previously published…”

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.

Categories
Digital Culture

del.icio.us as social network

Over at Read/Write web, there’s an article today about how del.icio.us is moving towards becoming a social network:

But Joshua has bigger plans for del.icio.us – it will essentially turn into a social network, with more focus on people instead of data. I learned this when I asked Joshua what kind of new functionality we can expect to see from delicious over the coming 6-12 months? Joshua replied:

“One of the amazing things about our users is how smart and far-reaching their interests are. While delicious previously has been very much about just the data, in the future I hope to allow our users themselves to come forward within the system. Additionally, I want to help people connect with others within the system, either to people they already know or discovering new people and communities based on interest.”
(emphasis mine)

This points to a social networking future for del.icio.us, perhaps more so than a content bookmarking one (which it currently is). delicious already has a ‘Your network’ feature, but that basically just connects users’ bookmarks. I think what Joshua is talking about is expanding this into a more full-featured social networking system – with commenting, groups, etc. Perhaps similar to Imeem, which combines content browsing with social networking.

I would argue that del.icio.us is already a social network. It’s possible to identify users with similar interests (a la Facebook), you can “subscribe” to a users information, you can send links to users in your network, your network acts as a sort of friends list…it’s all there already. If what Read/Write means is that the individual user will become the focus rather than the user’s content…I hope desperately that’s not the case. Del.icio.us is nearly perfect at what it does. I would hate to see any of the functionality buried or de-prioritized for the sake of becoming more social.

Now what I would like to see is a collaborative folksonomic site that merges del.icio.us and flickr (both owned by yahoo now). Not inside the current site of either of them, but some new site where you could see how the tags interacted…search for “cats” and get flickr pictures of cats along with del.icio.us links on cats. Hell, if del.icio.us returned relevancy ranked links, you’d have a sort of human-powered Google…both sites and pictures that have all been vetted by an actual human to relate to tag X. I’d love to see how that would look…Yahoo? Pretty please?

Categories
Digital Culture

Photos and licenses

Twice in the last two months, I’ve found myself re-examining my Flickr account and my photos. I’ve had two instances of people wishing to use my some of my pictures for various things. One, a website about Sewanee, and the other a publication about the Immersion program.

All of my pictures are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and in both cases the first two criteria are fine for the uses. The Share-Alike is where stuff starts to break down…people seem unwilling to ensure that the resulting work is licensed in the same way. In some ways, it’s a sort of educational issue…most people are still not aware of Creative Commons.

So I’m torn. On one hand, I certainly do want people to use my photos. On the other, I also want to push the Creative Commons message, and requiring that the resulting works Share Alike is the right thing to do, I think.

Has anyone else dealt with this friction? How did you resolve it?

Categories
Digital Culture

The strange continues

So, dear readers, you might remember my post from a few weeks ago that brought into your awareness the existence of the Otherkin.

Well, evidently, they’re lonely.

I give you: OtherKin Dating.

Yes, really.

I shudder at the power of the Interweb, and fear the day it becomes sentient.