Saturday, July 31, 2010

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The labor of knowing

In the July 19 Wired, Jonah Lehrer alludes to the joys of fieldwork versus the “drudgery of the lab.” After several years’ work on the Citation Project, I have a much better sense of what he means. We set off on the Citation Project with the objective of having a broad data-based portrait of what students do when they work with sources. As teachers we had some pretty concrete ideas, drawn from our work with the student writers in our own courses; as scholars we had some glimpses from occasional published pieces. Most of the published literature, however, was anecdotal or was based on survey or interview data from a single institution. We wanted something more. Trained in literature departments for the humanistic interpretation of texts, we had a lot to learn. Some of it we learned by direct instruction and some by studying methodological texts. The rest we learn as we go... [Read more]

The recycled news story, yet again. Nauseatingly.

On July 5, the New York Times offered “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery.” Exactly one week later, it was “Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name).” Thus does the Times publish two stories that, while they have been circulated widely among educators, actually set back the cause of good teaching. Like most media coverage of issues of plagiarism, cheating, and academic integrity, these pieces go for simplistic, sensational claims. And the Times replicates the same claims that have been circulating in hundreds of media stories for nearly a decade: Students cheat. They cheat a lot. They are determined to cheat. They use technology to cheat. Teachers’ only recourse is to use technology to catch them at their dirty ways–or not to teach at all. Either of these options is legitimate. Feeding on a culture-wide fear of uncontrolled, incomprehensible... [Read more]

Why use a handbook?

College instructors are justly concerned about textbook costs for students who may be financially struggling. We’re all trying to teach as well as possible, with as little financial burden to our students. That’s only right. One thing I’m hearing is debates about the value of *not* adopting a handbook in writing courses, on the premise that students can find answers to questions about grammar and documentation online. That’s a great idea. But it’s a great idea, I believe, only for students who know what the questions are and who are motivated to find answers to them. That would certainly describe most graduate students, advanced undergraduates, English majors, and the like. It wouldn’t actually describe me; I still turn to authoritative hardcopy references (which now include my own handbook!) for such information. But I recognize and respect that it describes... [Read more]

Hidden challenges in source selection

At the beginning of fall term I presented some of the Citation Project research to Writing teachers in my own department, and as the semester has unfolded, I’ve had a number of opportunites to work through those same materials in webinar conversations with teachers at other institutions. The research I’ve shared in these presentations illustrates how students’ desire to use condensed, factual sources creates an array of problems as they try to write from those sources: Stylistically, it’s very hard to summarize or even paraphrase someone else’s summary of factual material. Instead, students in our study have had to resort to extensive patchwriting–copying closely from the source but with some changes–or to unmarked direct copying. In the Citation Project research, we usually find that these textual appropriations are cited, but it’s often hard... [Read more]

About those videos

The McGraw team has put a couple sets of videos online. Some of these were taken in a studio, using a script I had written in which I talk about Writing Matters. Some were taken during a keynote speech I made at Bridgewater State College for the Massachusetts CONNECT conference last spring; those are on the video link on this blog. It was a neat experience, doing the studio shoot. Made me feel like a movie star for a day; it was just fun. Seeing the film online is another matter: I’m just not used to watching film of me. So I watched it all through, each segment of each set; took a deep breath; and said, “Well, that’s done.” But today a friend called to say that colleagues in her program are using the Bridgewater film in class, to help explain to their students what patchwriting is and why they’re asking their students to write summaries of sources. That shifts... [Read more]

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