I need to write the acknowledgments section of my dissertation but I can’t help going back to Maha and Groom’s post on the ethos of educational technologies. Now I’m thinking about plagiarism in higher education courses, what it means for instructors and for learners themselves. In every undergraduate class I taught there were always one or two students who copied material from other resources and used them in their work without appropriate references. However, I’m very careful to say that they were plagiarizing, because in my experience, most students want to do a good job in their projects and they don’t understand why copying content without references may not be appropriate. Consider this:

In a ceramics class the instructor tells student that she can’t just copy a design from a book onto her vase. Student tries to explain that the design is traditional and anonymous. Instructor isn’t interested. She cuts the conversation by firmly saying “No. That is not your design. You can’t use it. That’s plagiarizing.” The instructor is patient but it’s clear that the conversation is over. The student is offended, can’t understand the instructor’s point of view. The instructor can’t understand the student’s point of view.

Ehem, so that student was of course me.🙂 To give this incident a little bit of context, that was my 2nd year in Minnesota and I had a book that I brought me from Turkey on traditional shadow puppets Hacivat and Karagoz. This was a precious book; my husband’s grandmother (who is now 99) had given it to me. Its pages were falling apart and that day I must have taken it to the class with great care. I’m sure I was excited about using it for my project. But I remember coming home frustrated and disappointed. I hated the instructor (although I’m sure she had good intentions), and why were we so far away from home anyway?

Picture taken from here

So you can clearly see how context complicates things when it comes to plagiarism (to this date I still don’t know if it was ok to use the design on my vase). This experience significantly shaped how I go about plagiarism in my own classes. In one class focusing on children’s and youth’s use of social media, students were given the option to design an educational website on a topic of their choice for their final project. To my surprise one student in the class, and she was doing really well in class discussions and in other class activities, copied most of the content of her site from other sites. The website itself looked really nice; it wasn’t a last-minute project where she dumped all the content to her site. When I brought the issue to her attention, she panicked. She explained to me she never had the intent to plagiarize stuff. She wanted to make her site look good, professional. By taking content from other credible sites she was making sure that she was providing professional content.

I believe it’s the instructor’s responsibility to offer as much guidance and support as possible long before a project begins to avoid issues like this. And this is not only about  technical guidance or even about ethics. It is also about helping students understand that a course project, a website, a blog post, an essay, can always be a work in progress. It can always be improved and they shouldn’t be afraid of failing. What matters is the way they go about their work rather than the end result. I have had hundreds of undergraduate students in my courses and in most cases of plagiarism (using it for the lack of a better term), I chose to trust my students. Even if they were being dishonest it didn’t matter because I knew that when I had a positive attitude and when I believed that they approached their work with all the best intentions, our relationship would always, always be better.

So when we use a tool like Turnitin in our classes, what are we saying to our students? I wouldn’t prefer to use the tool in my classes because I don’t think it gives the right message to students. I think it creates power issues between instructors and students when actually it’s so much more important to remove those barriers in a meaningful way. And when you know your students, you just know when something is not quite right🙂 and you can always use that as a way to improve your relationships in class.

Picture taken from here

Can we separate the way we teach from the technological systems in which we work? This question was posed by Maha Bali and Jim Groom in a thought-provoking post critically examining the ethos of educational technologies. Maha and Jim argue that the choices we make in educational technology say something about our values and pedagogical visions–they are inseparable from how we go about teaching and learning.

Couldn’t agree more. When I was teaching online classes in Learning Technologies at the University of Minnesota most faculty and graduate instructors were using Ning as an alternative to Moodle (institutionally supported) because its design better aligned with the values of the program. In Aaron Doering’s words, the goal in LT courses was “for students to discover and create knowledge as a group, with the instructor acting as a guide through the assigned materials” and Ning was a great platform to achieve that. A lot of what we were doing in Ning was driven by pedagogy but we were also guided by the possibilities and limitations of the platform itself. On the plus side learners could easily get a sense of others’ presence in the course through features like member pages, blogs, discussions, chat and photos and videos. There were small design touches we liked a lot, like how each forum post appeared with a member thumbnail picture. (In a class I’ve taken as graduate student all students had administrative access to Ning so we could even change the design of the platform if we wanted to.) On the other hand, I had to grade students’ work and Ning didn’t have a gradebook, I couldn’t set up assignments or create a sophisticated system to archive course resources. After all Ning wasn’t originally designed as a Learning Management System (LMS) and the way it worked was so different than Moodle, which is specifically designed for that purpose. I’m not saying that Ning is better than Moodle, it’s just for our purposes Ning seemed to work best.

Now I’m going to diverge a bit because it is really interesting to think about the multiple layers of values and visions embedded in educational technology. Especially when we think about technologies that are designed specifically for the purpose of education, like a course management system.

Let’s consider Moodle, for example. I find the misalignment between the ethos of the Moodle developer community and the end product quite puzzling for example. Let me explain:

Moodle as a design project: is community driven, globally supported, open-source.
Moodle as an LMS (how the end-product is typically used in higher education institutions):  is institutionally driven, locally supported, closed. Also supports the use of copyrighted materials because it’s institutional (this is one point I deviate from Maha and Jim because they argue that LMSs are copyright havens).

I believe there is a strong mismatch between Moodle as a design project and Moodle as an LMS because there’s a disconnect between the field of computer science and education in general  online learning. A recent TaLIC lunchtime conversation where two (brilliant) computer scientists presented their work also made me realize the big gap between the two fields.

Solution? More partnership, more conversation between computer science and education and less bias toward our own assumptions and the paradigms of each field. Result: (potentially) innovative products to use in education. What do you think?

Bonnie Stewart’s “Academic Twitter: The intersection of orality & literacy in scholarship?” is one of the most inspirational works I came across recently. Bonnie talks about identity in open scholarship from many different but connected angles: personal/professional divide, multiple identities, performative identities, quantified identities… What interests me most is where she talks about the difference between literate and oral traditions:

Slide 39: Oral Tradition: Participatory, Situational, Social, Formulaic, Agonistic, Rhetorical
Slide 40: Literate Tradition: Interiorized, Abstracted, Innovative, Precise, Analytic, Indexical

I find this distinction, although it is quite obvious to me now, fascinating, because it makes me think about the dominant traditions in academic scholarship and how alternative modes of communication like blogging, tweeting, having a Google Hangout with colleagues, and multimodality challenge that tradition. In an earlier post, I talked about how Nick Sousanis, for example, created a comic book for his dissertation (you can find more examples for comics as scholarship here).

Bonnie also says that we’re experiencing a confusion between oral and literate traditions on Twitter. She talks about how some treat informal speech online as if it’s print based material. The reverse is also possible, very often I see tweets which look like informal speech (they happen in a conversation) but they sound like quotes pulled from a book, which makes me think that they are out there for dissemination. I’ll call these blurry lines in oral and literate traditions “confused speech;” I’m sure a better term exists somewhere but for now it will do the job.🙂

Confused speech can happen everywhere in education. I see it in text-books (e.g., text that might sound conversational but in fact designed to transfer factual info), in conference presentations (e.g., presenters read their paper in front of an audience), and in conversations (like a Twitter message created for reproduction in  a conversation). Confused speech is also evident in a book I recently started reading:  Introducing Foucault: A Graphic Guide. I wanted to read this book because I came across this journal article (published as part of Comics as Scholarship, a special issue for Digital Humanities Quarterly) on multimodal educational texts via one of Maha’s blog posts and wanted to learn more about Foucault through a non-traditional way of academic writing. The author of the article, Aaron Scott Humphrey from the University of University of Adelaide, says:

Academic writing has generally been understood as operating primarily within the linguistic modality, with writing remediating the “voice” of an educator or lecturer. Comics, by contrast, are more explicitly multimodal and derive much of their meaning from visual, spatial and linguistic modalities. Because of their multimodality, educational comics challenge the conception of an authoritative author’s “voice,” as is typically found in traditional educational and academic writing.

If we throw images into a book, does that make the text multimodal? I don’t think so. I see a confusion between oral and literate traditions in the Foucault book. When I see two people in the same comic frame, I expect them to communicate somehow. I don’t expect them to go into a disconnected monologue and certainly I don’t expect them to talk like a “textbook.” What I actually see in the images below are text highlighted from the book in disguise as “comics.” Take out the text and what meaning is left in the drawings? I think these images just give an illusion of multimodality, the illusion of “something interesting is happening here.”

What do you think about confused speech? Does it make sense? Please leave a comment and let me know; perhaps we can refine this post together.🙂

Maha posted a live blog while Laura was having her dissertation defense. I have on my desktop about 3 or 4 draft blog posts waiting for me to finish. At this rate I will have only 3-4 posts each semester. But ideas can’t wait! Blogs are more exciting when they capture moments in time, the lived experience, half-baked thoughts, burning questions, and, of course, the not so burning questions.

Maha was saying that because Laura is a public scholar, we already know about her research. We know the process: the challenges, aha moments and tensions she had as she refined her chapters. Not all of them of course, but even having a glimpse of the process through Laura’s voice humanizes the whole research process. So this is more than having a Twitter presence, it’s about having a human presence. And it brings academia back to where it really belongs: the everyday life people.

I can’t wait to check the Tweets at night, join the conversations and be part of Laura’s defense. Thank you Laura for being a human OER and congrats on completing this part of your journey!

I was watching Russell Howard’s Good News and came across Benjamin Zephaniah: “a poet, writer, lyricist, musician and trouble maker.” It was interesting to watch what he has to say about poetry as an art form. Zephaniah was talking about poetry and mentioned how he saw Bob Marley as a poet. As an example he recited lyrics from one of his songs (Burnin’ and Lootin’) :

This morning I woke up in a curfew;
O God, I was a prisoner, too
Could not recognize the faces standing over me;
They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality.
How many rivers do we have to cross,
Before we can talk to the boss?

“That’s a song lyric but it’s a poem,” says Zephaniah; “it’s beautiful.”

Russell Howard then at some point asks: Who is your favorite poet? Or your favorite poem?

Zephaniah replies: Well, my favorite poem is by Adrian Mitchell. Very short poem. The version I like is only three lines:

Most people ignore most poetry. Because most poetry ignores most people.

Ever since I watched the program I’m thinking about what poetry means to people, what it means to me and how music can be poetry. I read a few other Bob Marley lyrics but couldn’t relate to them much because his context is so different than mine. But then few days ago I listened to space oddity by David Bowie (Chris Hadfield’s version) and it hit me:

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating
in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do

This was the poetry I was looking for. It inspires me. It makes me emotional. It makes me wonder and think. I can read/listen to it over and over again, I can quote it, I can re-play it in my head, the most important thing: although I have never been to space (!), I can relate to it.

Which takes me to educational research. I’m thinking how people might ignore educational research because educational research ignores them. I’m thinking about the language of “academia,” the alienation I feel when I can’t relate to academic articles, when I can’t really understand what the authors really, simply, in all honesty, mean.

I’m questioning the language of academic journals also because as I’m coming towards the end of my PhD journey, I’m questioning the whole dissertation process. It has been very rewarding for me, there is no doubt about that, but I feel like I could have followed a much different format, more suited to the affordances of the web and more accessible to others. It’s odd to think that there isn’t a single hyperlink in the hundreds of pages I’ve written. There are people who did really creative stuff with their dissertations. Nick Sousanis, for example, wrote his dissertation in comic book format. I’ve seen a few pages where he was talking about Bakhtin. It was amazing! There is also Dani Spinosa who has blogged her entire dissertation. I wish I had done something different and pushed the boundaries of traditional academic writing with my dissertation, but this has been a stressful journey and at this point I just feel fortunate to have at least a refined draft ready.

I stopped blogging, stopped my inner voice which is in a constant conversation with others to focus on my dissertation. I missed it a lot and I’m feeling excited to be back with this post:)

This post is inspired by author pledges made for open access publishing. I completely forgot about this post until last night when I was cleaning my desktop folders and I didn’t want to lose it again because I find it more and more important to talk about issues of power and privilege in accessing knowledge. So here you go, my take on author pledges!

A pledge can go like this:

or this:

“I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.” (boyd, 2008)

So author pledges often advocate for open access publishing. A common argument is that “we have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and at a much lower cost to society,” so why not open the products of academic work to everyone?

The author pledges I have above are bold and inspiring; they carry with them an air of academic  determination. As a (kind of) fresh academic, I’m not ready to make a pledge to publish only in open access journals yet. So here is an author pledge that makes sense to me the most at this time in my life:

I will share with you my thoughts and research whenever I can… because ideas are also valuable in their draft forms.

I will be open to questions, criticisms, or suggestions about my work… because then I can (we can) find new directions to inquire.

I will listen to you with an open mind and will be appreciative and considerate because that’s the only way openness can be mutual.

…

Here are some useful links if you want to learn more about open pledges and if you’re thinking about making a pledge yourself:

Making a pledge by Maura A. Smale

Open or Shot by Steve Wheeler

Reasons to pledge by Open Access Pledge

Make a commitment for open access by Open Access Pledge