The thrust of the talk was that there are important structural similarities between social media like blogs and Twitter (their openness, their relative lack of imposed structure, their focus on audience and emergent conventions, their positioning of the individual as the locus of value and meaning) and the kind of general education that we’re seeking during this year of gen ed reform at QC.

I transcribed the video after the break, mainly so I’d have the text for my own purposes. It’s lightly edited to cut out some of the more egregious ums and ers and actuallys. Video of the talk is below for anyone who is interested. I spoke mostly extemporaneously and said some dumb things, so please be generous in your interpretation!!

Special thanks to Zach Whalen, who generously answered some of my questions about his Graphic Novel class. (And to his students, whose tweets served as fodder!)

Teaching on the Coattails of Text Messages from Boone Gorges on Vimeo.

Transcribed text

Hello everybody. I’m here to day to talk on a subject that I have titled “Teaching on the Coattails of text messages”. It may or may not end up that I have actually talked a lot about text messages, but I thought it was provocative enough to get you in the room to about the things I really wanted to talk about. Consider yourselves baited and switched.

I have two points to make today. The first one is that there is a structural similarity between the things that make social media work the way that they work; the properties of social media that set it apart from what we might call “traditional media”; that make it popular; that make people want to use it – and, on the other hand, the structure of general education. Or, more specifically, the properties that we want our general education to have here at Queens College. There is a sort of isomorphism, a sort of equivalency between the two, and I want tot alk about where those properties lie. I’m going to do that by looking at a couple of specific examples of the way that social media can be used in a classroom, and I’m going to sort of let these properties emerge.

The second is the upshot of this equivalency. What does that mean? What are the pedagogical consequences? What are the consequences for the way that we think about the class, the individual class level? What are the consequences for the way we think about the general education curriculum as a whole?

First, I should start off by talking about the phrase “social media”, which I don’t really like very much. It sounds a little buzzwordy, it sounds a little like marketer speak. And to some extent it is. But that’s only because it’s been co-opted from its true roots. Social media is media that is, at its heart, social. You might actually argue that all media is at its heart social, it’s always about some sort of communication, which is a social activity. But social media is predicated on being primarily social, as opposed to being unidirectional.

When we talk about social media, we usually mean these sort of very big, fancy web apps that are worth billions of dollars, things like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Youtube, but there’s a panopoly of other ones. I’m going to talk about each one in turn. No, I’m not going to do that. One of the things that I want you to take away from what I say today is that even though I’m going to be talking about specific examples – in particular, I’m going to talk a little bit about blogs, and a little bit about Twitter – what I ultimately want to say about this equivalency relationship between social media and general education can really be abstracted away from any of the particular technologies. You don’t really want to tie your cart to any one horse; you don’t want to give yourself over to one single technology just because it’s the one that people are using today. I want to talk about more general facts about social media, and I’ll just be using a few of these as an example.

The first one is blogs. As I look around the room, I see a lot of people who have heard me talk about blogs a lot before, until I am blue in the face. I’ve been working on blogs here at Queens College for aoub tfour years, since I started here as a Writing Fellow. For those of you who don’t know, a blog is a website that is easily updateable. It’s a little bit like a journal that is kept online: the most recent stuff shows up at the top. It’s dynamic, as opposed to static. Generally, it allows for some sort of interactivity between the reader and the author – that’s what makes it social, in the form of comments that happen on each post.

I want to talk a little about a particular classroom use. Having surveyed all the classroom uses of blogs I’ve ever seen, I’ve chosen the following example: my own. This isn’t just egotism, it’s that I want to give you a phenomenological account of my experience using blogs in the classroom. I want to tell you the ways in which I found myself surprised, and the sorts of qualities that emerged as I used these blogs.

So here’s the setup. The semester I’m talking about I believe is the fall of 2008, which is the last time I taught Introduction to Ethics. This was at Hofstra, where I was an adjunct. I had taught the time maybe ten times before, over the course of a couple years, and I’d had real problems with it. Most of my students were business majors, and this was part of their general education requirements. Ethics in particular was required by the business school for reasons that you can probably divine, although I’m not sure if the business school really knew what happens in a philosophical ethics course. But that’s kind of beside the point.

So, I’d taught this multiple times before, and I really thought that the students had more of a knack for philosophical thinking than they thought they did. But I had a real practical problem, which is that the students didn’t read the stuff before they came to class. We were reading original texts, which are extremely daunting. It’s very hard to get anything out of the Nicomachean Ethics or something like that, and actually be able to come to class and say something about it. My initial interest in using blogs came out of my interest in using things like reading quizzes and reading response journals, namely that I wanted to give students an impetus to actually do some of the reading before they came to class, and engage actively with the texts. In philosophy, at least, unless you’re actually reconstructing the arguments and the theories in your mind, you’re not really doing anything at all. In order to learn philosophy, you have to actually do philosophy. That’s probably not unique to philosophy, though philosophers like to say that it is.

The structure of this particular assignment is: I gave them a blog assignment just about every class. They were not terribly exciting. It was something like: Here’s something we talked about in class, or something from the readings, maybe we applied a particular theory – let’s say Kant’s theory – to a set of cases in class, the blog assignment was to apply it to another case and explain how it would work. Not terribly exciting, but, like I said, the purpose was not so much to foster conversations, so much as it was to get students to think a little bit and to read a little bit.

I found myself surprised in a number of ways by the things that emerged over the course of a semester. Things that I hadn’t really thought about at all. Now, all of the purposes for which I originally used blogs were not really inherently social, you’ll notice. they were all about the traditional learning goals of making sure students absorbed text, and interacted with them in an absorbtive way. I hadn’t really thought about anything particular social. So I was surprised when a couple of different kind of things emerged. And I want to look at a few of these blogs, to talk about what some of these things are.

This is one example of a blog. (It’s very pretty. I used wordpress.com – it was all free.) I apparently had asked something about whether, under Hobbes’s theory, it made sense to talk about the moral value of government actions. In any case, it wasn’t a particularly engrossing question, perhaps. But one of the things I found emerging was a different sort of community inside of comments sections than what I had originally anticipated. As the semester went on, I thought that the posts themselves got better. But that’s not really what surprised me that much. What surprised me was that kind of culture was forming inside of the comments sections, and it was a comment section that reflected a few higher-end cognitive abilities – I might say something like higher-order community properties – than I had anticipated.

Let me talk about what one of these is. Here the author has written some things about Hobbes and morality. Jeffersson responds and says: “the golden rule does fit very nicely here…”. So this is just a sort of debate emerging out of the comments. It’s already a step in a nice direction, where I had this student Jeffersson saying “The golden rule does fit very nicely here,” responding to a particular example that the student had brought up. “Treat others the way you want to be treated”, and then bringing it out and expanding upon it ( 10:00-10:30). I thought this was a relatively high-level thing.

What’s really interesting is that here at the bottom, I’ve got a response from CM Tisdale. CM Tisdale was not a student in my class. I have no idea who CM Tisdale is. But CM Tisdale says: “That’s just the problem. ['That' being something that was said earlier.] The agents of law and conduct believe it’s their job to keep us from destroying each other. My view’s always been that such and such and so and so.”. I had a habit at the beginning of every class of bringing up some blogs in front of the class, just to see what was happening, and to highlight some interesting things. When I brought this up, they looked around the room and said, “CM Tisdale?”, and they kind of freaked out, to be honest. They freaked out because it had never really occurred to them that anyone was going to be reading this, or more so that anyone would really want to read this, or that anyone would want to read it enough that they would take the time to respond to it. It was a big surprise for them. It didn’t happen a lot over the course of the semester, but CM Tisdale was a fan of our blogs (I’m not really sure why, but he posted in a few different places). We had a few other scattered comments.

Just from an anecdotal point of view, what this sort of outside comment did for me was that they highlighted the extent to which students started to see themselves as authors who were writing for a real audience. This is in contrast to the kind of reading journals that I had previously received. When I had asked students to answer very similar sorts of questions to the ones I was asking them to answer in the blogs, they would be written in a very rote way, in a way that presumed that I had certain background knowledge. And I do, because I’m the instructor. But that started changing, as students started gaining what I assumed was a real cognizance that other people were reading. The comment from CM Tisdale is just an extreme example of it. It’s really manifested throughout the semester, as the comments that classmagtes left on each others’ blogs became more sophisticated and more analytical. You found the original posts beginning to anticipate the possible problems with the arguments they were putting forth. What emerged was a real eye for debate that I hadn’t previously anticipated coming out of comment sections.

It dovetailed with something I talked about explicitly in the class. As a philosophy instructor, especially in an ethics class, which can be sort of heated because students come with their preconvceived notions about what constitutes ethics, I have to deal a lot with students who engage in the worst sorts of logical fallacies. Anyone who has taken a Logic 101 course will know things like ad hominem, strawman arguments, situations in which students will defend their own position by attacking the weakest part of the opponent’s theory. This is something that I talked a lot about in class, because I had good reason to: students would say, “I already believe this” coming into the class, “so I’m going to defend it by attacking the opposing theory’s weakest parts”. And I talked a lot about what we in phiosophy call the Principle of Charity, which is the idea that if you really want to find out what the other person is saying, if you really want to establish genuine conversation, if you really want to search for some kind of authentic truth, then you should be responding to the very best formulation possible of your opponent’s position, rather than the weakest formulation possible. A metaphor for this is that you can only build truth on a strong foundation. The knowledge building enterprise is about building on what other people have done.

This is something that I talked about in class, but talking about it explicitly with students, that method of knowledge production doesn’t really sink in. To them, it’s just “Tell me what Kant thinks.” In the comment sections, though, engagement with a genuine audience gave them a sense of how it works without my imposing it on them. You would have an individual writing somehting about how they interpreted Kant, and then other people from the class – real people, a real audience – would come in and respond. It’s a microcosm of the way that scholarship, philosophy actually works.

[Question] You were lucky, because Tisdale said something that was relevant. Suppse the comment was way out of left field, even pornographic. Then what do you do?

There are technical and pedagogical ways around this. For one, at the beginning of every semester, I made sure to be active in comment sections, modeling the kind of comments I wanted, and students started to take on that role as well, as referrees for each other. This is another part of the community that emerges. Technically, of course, if someone posts a pornographic comments, then students are able to delete it. They’re in charge of their own blogs. I’ll talk a little bit more about building a sense of consciousness about decorum online when I talk about Twitter, so that question may be answered a little more.

Let me look at another example. I really love this one. It’s at the end of the semester, December 11. “Nietzsche is wrong”. I spend one day talking about Nieztsche in my Intro to Ethics class, because, for the life of me, I don’t understand Nietzsche. I wish that I did. I love reading him. But I can’t spend a lot of time on him. I paint a very cartoonish picture of what Nietzsche thinks in Beyond Good and Evil.

This particular blog happens to be written by a student who is one of the students who tends to be very vocal in class, always having a lot to say, which is generally a pleasure, but also precludes participation on behalf of some other students. A really great an enjoyable student, and his blog posts are obviously quite good and wordy in themselves. What I really like here is, once again, what happens in the comment sections. First comemnt is a very straightforward “I agree. Nietzsche is wrong to assign the power of value to only those individuals he deems worthy.” Here we have a very amicable but distant tone. It’s very similar to the tone I’d seen earlier. The tone changes as the comments continue: “Maybe you’re wrong, Eric….”

Now, this student was NOT one of my vocal students. This student is one who was relatively quiet a lot of time. What’s happening here, at least in my point of view, is that you have social lubricant building. Where you wouldn’t otherwise have participation from this particular student, especially engaging with the student who is the most vocal student in class. Earlier in the semester, this student Liz actually says, “I haven’t commented so far, but I wanted to get one in by the end of the semester”, and finally, through a sort of snowball effect, the student has built up enough rapport with the other student to be able to couch the intellectual content of what she wanted to say – something that is relatively simple (Nietzche is wrong), but something that is actually antagonistic to what the original poster says, so even harder to say – but is able to say it because it is lubricated by the social layer that is on top of it (“Maybe you’re wrong!”) and below it (“Yay!”).

And then Eric responds: “Yay for you!” And here’s another student who’s stepping in – the tone has been set at this point, right? – “I disagree completely with everything in your title and with the other conformists of Eric’s regime. You forgot Nietzsche is entitled to free speech as a human being…” Here we have the sort of mixing of tones, the mixing of cotexts, that is enabled by this sort of medium. This is really the important point here. It’s not because I fostered a community that this emerged. It’s certain facts about this medium that allowed the community to emerge. Certain properties of the medium itself.

What properites? In this case, one of the properties, I think, is its relatively egalitarianness. What I mean by that is that each student had his or her own blog space, and in that blog space, he or she was the primary voice. Other voices, in turn, had to respond to that voice. That’s a lot different from the classroom space, which is stratified in a much more obvious way. First of all, I’m standing here at the front of the class spouting my knowledge to people who are facing me. But also, students who are very vocal preclude involvement by other students in the class – necessarily, because we only have a certain number of minutes in the class. So that’s one thing about this medium – it’s relative flatness – that allows this sort of flower to bloom where it otherwise wouldn’t.

Another one is its openness. By openness, I mean “visibility to others”. It’s only because students were reading what others were written, and moreover it’s only because the authors knew that they would be read by their classmates, that these sorts of conversations and conventions could emerge. This is a fundamental fact about this medium. If you have a student writing a response journal and handing it in for a grade, that’s a different medium, and that medium does not allow for this sort of openness. So these communities don’t emerge.

let me step back. Here’s a couple things I take away fromt he example of blogs. First, there’s a focus on audience. There’s a focus on having a real person on the other end, other than the instructor, who is the abstraction of a person, mixed with an intellect (from the student’s point of view, I presume!). You have a real audience. And, not only do you have a real audience, but the focus is on the audience. After the first few times around, after the first few assignnments, when the students start to see that they get better comments when they step up their game in their blog posts, the audience becomes the focus. And that is what we’re trying to teach our students in everything that we do, but especially when we’re teaching them to write. We want them to think about the audience that will be recieiving their work, and to write with them in mind. That’s somehting that the medium enables, and that’s somsheitng that emerged here, in virtue of the medium.

Another one is empathy. Now, “empathy” is sort of a loaded word. You could think of empathy in a hippie-ish way. But I think of it in a more philosophical way, along the line of the principle of charity. You have these students who are taking the best version of what they think their classmates are saying, in order to get closer to the truth, yes. But also because their is a common vulnerability when everyone puts their work out there. It’s the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Everyone puts their stuff out there, and you can’t be too snarky, because everyone’s work is out there. That creates a focus on students as full human beings, as well-rounded human beings. There’s a connection between the words on the computer screen, and the person who comes into class, and the person you have a conversation with in the comments section. These are stratified, but they are connected. And that’s what I take empathy to mean in this case. It emerges because of these facts about the medium, the openness of this particular medium.

So what do you get? Well, when you have these things together (the focus on audience and empathy), you get: the possibility of connection. By connection, I mean all sorts of things, which I’m going to talk more about later, but I mean REAL connection. It’s not necessarily that it’s going to happen but it’s that having these properties of a medium allow the possibility for connections to emerge in an organic way.

Example number 2 is Twitter. Twitter in nutshell: 140 character messages. Why 140 characters? Well, now I’m going to make my tenuous connection to text messages. It’s because a text message can only be 160 characters for technical reasons. It’s actually sent on the dead air between cellular signals. Doesn’t actually charge anything for the cell phone companies to send it that way, by the way, so when the cell phone companies charge 10 cents, it’s 100% profit. In any case, it can only be 160 characters. So 140 characters for a twitter message allows for 20 characters, like your username. Twitter was initially designed when people didn’t generally have smartphones, they didn’t have access to the internet, to the world wide web. They could only access things through text messages. The 140 character limit imposed on Twitter is a remnant of that.

What you’re seeing over there is, by the way, a screenshot of my Twitter stream. I’m going to show you a live view of my Twitter stream in a moment – dangerously.

Another one of the mechanisms that defines Twitter is the ‘following’ mechanism. The following mechanism says: I’m going to put my messages out there, my 140 missives, epistles, I put them out there and other people can choosen whether they want to receive them in their stream. It’s all public by default, but when you log on to Twitter you don’t see every tweet in the world, it would be useless. I don’t speak that language, I’m not interested in that topic, I don’t know this person. Instead, users are able to filter who they listen to by following their tweets.

Out of this very open space, various sorts of conventions emerge. One of them is the at-sign, which we’re going to see in a moment. The at-sign is a way of tapping someone on the shoulder, o mentioning them. Everyone has a user handle. Mine is ‘boonebgorges’ (very long, 11 characters – I wasn’t thinking!). You can see the at-sign in action up here. afamiglietti said: @cscannella dude you’re totally in Amsterdam, bro. Even if cscanella wasn’t following afamiglietti, the message would still reach him in virtue of that mention.

Another convention is the hashtag, it’s another convention that emerges. It’s a tag. By adding #, plus a few letters that are agreed upon in a group, you can have a way of tagging all of your tweets that are about a topic or about an event. So when I went to Educause in Denver last year, everyone who was tweeting about Educause tagged their tweets #educause09. That way, you can instantly search all of the tweets in Twitter for people who are talking about educause 09. It’s a way of consolodating the conversation that you’re interested in out of enormous, flat, unstructured landscape that is Twitter.

Just to give you a sense of what’s going on on Twitter. This is always a little dangerous, but just before I started talking, I sent this message: Starting my Big Talk in about five minutes. Please say hello to the lovely folks at Queens College. We’re going to see if anyone has actually said hello. This is my tweet stream; you’re seeing everyone I follow and their most recent tweets. I’m going to click on @boonebgorges, to filter for those tweets that mention me. OK, here’s some people. “Why hello there, lovely people of Queens College. Be sure to give Boone a hard time.” I only know Ed through Twitter. I think he’s in sociology somewhere, but I don’t know. [Totally got that wrong!] Micah Humphries is, shoot, I don’t know, I think he’s a philosopher. [Totally got that wrong too!] Luke Waltzer works at Baruch. acavender is in Notre Dame and is in the Religion department. Here is “Hello lovely folks at Queens College, if you need BuddyPress…” Oh God, this is advertising. So this is a friend of mine who works in web development. All these people are out there, sitting at their computers, people I’ve met through Twitter or elsewhere. They’ve just responded to my request to say hello to you.

Let me get back on topics. Gee whiz, isn’t that neat? Who cares? As an aside, I’ll say that when I started working on blogs here at QC, a lot of people said “Who cares?” Blogs are self-indulgent, don’t have any point, all of them are about what I had for breakfast this morning, why would this ever have a role in my classroom? Today nobody says that. Blogs are much more than that, and it’s become part of common knowledge that this is a legitamate way to talk. Moreover, it’s become common knowledge that this is a legitimate scholarly apparatus. In every field, there are prominent scholars who are also bloggers about their field. I know it’s tru in philosophy, at least.

So who cares about Twitter? Well, all the same things are leveled against Twitter. Twitter is narcissistic, it’s about what you had for breakfast this morning. What role does this play? Well, I’m going to start off with a personal anecdoete. Not necessarily to tell you how great I am, though doubtless I am really great. I want to show you why somebody would care.

Let’s start with me, because I do care. When I first joined Twitter, I followed people who I already knew outside of Twitter. Of course, because I’m a CUNY student and employee, it includes a lot of people around CUNY. As you start following people, you start seeing who they’re talking to, and what they’re talking about. Maybe you start following some more people. For me, that meant a larger network of CUNY people, who I didn’t know off of Twitter, but I did know on Twitter. So, I’m using Twitter for a while, and one day a friend who I knew through Twitter (and subsequently met in real life) tweeted about a small web development quesiton that he had – how do I make this look like this. Twitter being the sort of beautiful open space of friendship that it is – the commune – I tweeted at him and said, “I’ll help you”. I gave him a response. After a few back and forths, it turned out that he was doing this project the CUNY Academic Commons. After a few tweets back and forth, I ended up getting employed. Now I’m the lead developer, the lead technical person on the project. This happened because I was using this space in Twitter.

As a result of this, I started following people who were interested in the CUNy Academic Commons, and they started following me. Because the CUNY Academic Commons is built on a platform called WordPress, I started folowing people who were interested in WordPress, and they started following me. I became a part of this other network, which had some overlap with the CUNY network, and with the Academic Commons network, but it was distinct in its own way, and larger. And, as I became more well known in the WordPress network, I got all sorts of things: speaking gigs – I go to all of these WordPress events – jobs, prestige, glory, girls money, all that sort of stuff.

The point of this is not that Twitter will get you a job. It’s that Twitter is an open canvas. STructural facts about Twitter, namely the fact that it doesn’t really have much a structure, leave it open for all sorts of possibilities. That sort of unstructured nature allows for these networks to emerge naturally around shared interests. In turn, all sorts of “real life” things can happen as a result of those networks that form on Twitter. It feeds itself in this way.

What’s really interesting is when different networks merge unexpectedly. Just to give you an example, I have other networks that start from me. One of which has to do with, let’s say, academic philosophy. There are a lot of philosophers on Twitter. I follow them out here. It just so happens that some of them are interested in educational technology, especially as it regards philosophy education. So they come down here [pointing!], and it starts to overlap down here, overlapping independently. I just submitted a conference proposal to the American Association of Philosophy Teachers conference, which is in May, or June, or something [way wrong! It's in July/August], and it got accepted, and I had co-authored it with some people I had met on Twitter, through this network. The networked hooked back up down here.

This is not magic, and it’s not something I planned, but it’s something that can happen when you have a structure that allows for spontaneous communities to develop.

What does this mean for the classroom? Here’s an example. This one’s not about me. It’s a friend from Twitter, surprise surprise. His name is Zach Whalen. He’s in English at the University of Mary Washington. He’s teaching a course this semester called “The Graphic Novel” in the English department. The graphic novel, as you probably know, is comic books. Long, beautiful comic books, but they’re comic books. He’s using Twitter for a bunch of things in his class. There are a lot of people using Twitter in their classes experimentally, but I picked on him for a particular reason.

Let’s look at some of the examples of tweets from his class. He’s using it to foster a sort of backchannel. By “backchannel” I mean a discussion that happens during class activities, or outside of class activities, that is secondary to the discussion that is primary. It’s a backchannel as opposed to a frontchannel. In this particular case, what’s happening is that Zach set up a screening time and watch the movie adaptation of a book they had read in class. Most of the students at this point were sitting in the same room, on couches, with their computers in their laps, watching the movie. And tweeting about it in the background. Some of the students were at home, and they had pressed play at the same time. Some of the students had already seen the movie, and were simply following the tweet stream so that they could keep up with the chatter in their classrooms. Here’s what happened. None of these tweets have any value on their own, but they’re all indicative of properties that emerge when you look at them as a whole.

Here’s a tweet. He tagged it #engl375. That’s the hashtag that they’re using to bring together all of the content of this class. “And here’s the most awkward use of music in recent movie memory.” So it’s a little bit of a snarky comment. “And the most obvious visual gag outside of a Naked Gun movie.” Here we have some sort of meta cultural reference, pulling from different areas. Maybe not the most astute thing in the entire world, but it’s a tweet, what do you expect, it’s not supposed to be. Another example: “This dude looks like a troll.” What I love about these tweets as an observer is that I don’t have any idea what they mean. They are context dependent, and necessarily so, because tweets are 140 characters long. You can’t give the kind of context you would give in an academic paper, or even in a blog for that matter. You’re limited. But that is a way of building community into the equation. Where I might write a blog post, and somebody would be able to print off that post and hand it to someone else, and the post would still be coherent, that’s not true for a tweet. A tweet doesn’t have any meaning once it’s taken out of the community where the conventions have been established.

This kind of snarkiness, by the way – I’ve been going back and forth with Zach over the last week or two, asking him about this experiment, and it’s interesting – this sort of making-fun-of-the-movie is both what he likes about the experiment and what he fears about the experiment. Because what can be a sort of edgy critical response can quickly turn into a sort of mob mentality, where people are dishing out for the sake of dishing. But one of the things that Zach likes about this tension is that it gives him a chance to step in as an instructor, and model what it means to be a public citizen on the internet. This responds to what you were saying before, Sam: These students are using their real names, and it gives a chance for people to discuss, in an organized way, in the class, what it means when you go out there and participate in a larger community of people out there, talking on Twitter. These are publicly viewable, and they’re publicly indexed, through Google. So it’s important that students are aware of what they’re doing online, and this is a good opportunity to have those discussions – which are increasingly important as students have more and more of their communication in these open spaces.

Here’s another example of backchannel. I love this page. These are a couple of tweets from one of the students in the class, in the timeline of a single student. We have to start from the bottom, because it goes in reverse order, the newest things start at the top. A very mundane tweet, asking a question about the assignment: “Is the homework supposed to be a single 5×7 panel comic?” But notice that she said #zachwhalen. That’s not the convention. The convention is @zachwhalen. So she says, less than a minute later, “Did I just type #zachwhalen instead of @zachwhalen? lol” Except she misspelled it, so it’s not going to show up on his Twitter stream. “OMG I FAIL SO BADLY I’M GOING TO STOP TRYING TO TYPE RIGHT NOW”, less than a minute later. Then, we have the tweet a few hours later, “I now have dragon edge origins awakenings. Too bad I can’t play it yet”. I assume this is a video game, I don’t know. Next, a few hours later: Cake.

What I love about this is that here we have the literal juxtaposition of tweets that reflect all sorts of different aspects of this student’s life. Here the student is eating cake – that’s an important part of anyone’s life – and then there is this video game, which is clearly important enough to the student to have it as part of her public persona. And then we have things here that are a part of the class. Then we have these sort of bridges bewteen social spaces and academic spaces.

The fact that these are happening right next to each other means something. It means that possibilities for convergence, possibilities for serendipity, possibilities for accidental connections are there, in a way that they wouldn’t be if all these different kinds of communications were isolated in their own silos. Twitter’s formless like that. Your updates show up in a single place. That, in addition to being scary and unstructured, can be an exciting thing. Even though nothing may emerge from these sorts of juxtapositions, it could.

Here’s a silly example. These are two students from that class. Actually, this one is the student we were just looking at. This student said something about “I got to such and such a level in the dragon age game” – it’s a few days later obviously. Blueofthekin kenw that she had just tweeted a few days earlier about how she had just gotten the game and said “Wow, you’re fast”. “It’s not that long of an expansion pack. Not sure how I feel about the ending.” “I’m almost there. I’m defeating Amarinthine from the dark spawn. Love my sword made of elder dragon bones. Love it.” “Yeah, that sword is awesome.” Again, I lvoe this because I don’t understand it. I don’t know the game they’re talking about. I’m not a part of this community. But what’s interesting is that these two are classmates in this graphic novel class. Does this game Dragon Age have anything to do with the class? Possibly not. Did these students already have a relationship before starting the class and meeting each other on Twitter? Maybe, maybe not, I don’t really know. The point is that here we have the opportunity for these things to interact in meaningful ways. Maybe 99% of the time these things are not going to connect. But when they do, it’s in virtue of the fact that they appeared in the same place. #engl375, and this dragon age game. Because they were next to each other, it allows a way for these connections to emerge in a way they wouldn’t otherwise do.

So what do we know about Twitter? It has minimal structure – this is something I’ve already talked about. It’s just there. It has less structure than a blog, because a blog has a hierarchy built into it: I post an entry, and you can leave comments, but they are necessarily secondary. Twitter’s not like that – it’s totally open, totally flat, everyone is the same. It has minimal structure. And it has openness. Everyone can read all of the things that other people are writing, and decide to follow them or respond to them in the ways that they wish.

What do we get? The possibility for connection. It arises naturally out of these features of this particular medium. If you had a medium where everything was siloed; if you had a medium where all of the conversation that happened about English happened over here, and was unconnected with things that happened about video games; or, if my conversations about academic philosophy and my conversations about WordPress were over here, those connections can’t happen. Likewise, if there’s more structure imposed from above, if I say “I’m going to set up a community where you can talk about x, and then another community where you can talk about y”, that structure has the effect of hampering openness. And, again, it has the effect of hampering the possibility for connections that I’ve been talking about. So I see these as key.

What does this say about general education at Queens? Here is the denouement. Let’s talk about the structure of gen ed. We’ll do it by looking at this quote, which comes from the Task Force report. This is from the first bullet points in the introduction, where the purpose is to lay out the purpose of a general education, and here it is: “A central task of general education is to enable students to make connections across course and disciplinary boundaries” – one kind of connection – “and between their undergraduate education and the changing world they will inhabit”. Two kinds of connections that are being talked about here. There are a few other bullet points below this, but all of them make reference back to this underlying, foundational purpose for general education. Why bother to have general education at all? It’s to allow students to have the foundation they need to create connections.

Let’s talk about some of these bullet points. General education is focused on connection. We’ve just talked about that. And not just connection between disciplines, though that’s extremely important, but also connections between what we traditionally call academics and what we might traditionally call “the world students inhabit”, in other words the real world, the social world, life itself. The personal, and the private. The social, and the professional. The connections between these spheres is something that we’re looking for in general education. Not false, imposed connections, but real, authentic, emergent connections.

Second, relevance. One of the things I hear every time I talk about gen ed is that we want to change from LASAR because LASAR felt like it was a check list that students felt like they had to check off. I follow the keyword “CUNY” on Twitter, and I see this a lot: “Stupid CUNY, why does CUNY make me take French, I’m never going to use French”. It’s not relevant. So one of the things that a good general education should do, and a good general education curriculum, is to make its relevance manifest. It’s not about inventing relevance. It’s not about imposing relevance from our points of view. It’s not about pandering, in other words. I’m not saying that we should find something that the students like, like video games, and then connect to that. That’s not what relevance means. Look, we already believe that general education is relevant or we wouldn’t be making our students do it. We have to make our students understand why it’s relevant from our points of view. Again, this goes back to the empathy point. The reason why we care about general education in the first place is because we think it’s relevent in a deep way to what it means to be a human being, to what it means to be a scholar, to what it means to produce knowledge. And that’s somehting we have to convey to our students. That, to me, is what comes out of the general education curriculum.

Another piece of the structure of general education that I see is that the individual is the pivot point. By this I mean the followoing. When you talk about interdiscipolinary connections, you might think of something like: “How does Philosophy relate to Biology?” People do talk about this, and it’s extremely important. But people have been talking about this forever, and it’s really hard to figure that answer out. Maybe we need to step back a little bit – and I think we do this in our curriculum – and ask, instead of what does Philosophy have to do with anything, we ask “What does your philosophy class have to do with your biology class?” The way that Perspectives courses are set up is to foster this sort of individual pivot point. It’s not necessarily about a grand overview, what does Sociology have to do with Biology, it’s instead thinking, “We’re going to talk about human evolution through this particular lens, and then you’ll take this lens that is constructed out of the things that you learn, and then you apply it to the other courses that you take.” It’s about framing it in terms of individual student as a thinker, the student as the scholar, the student as the locus of meaning, rather than thinking about it in some sort of broad way.

And finally, fertile spaces in which connections can emerge – another cornerstone of the structure of general education. I see this reflected everywhere in what we’ve been doing this year. Think about these roundtables. Think about the way that literary studies relates to psychology. Think about the way that poetry relates to sociology. These spaces right here are intended to be those fertile spaces where connections can emerge. But they’re not the only ones, and some other ones are Perspectives courses, and in particular these learning communities where Perspectives courses are paired with English 110 topics courses that have similar content. This again is the construction of a space that doesn’t necessarily foist connections on students, because connections that are foisted on students are bound to be artificial and not long-lasting, but it provides the space, the soil in which they can grow. It’s giving a sort of framework.

What does this have to do with social media? I hope that I don’t really have to tell you: The structure of general education IS the structure of social media. It’s exactly the same. All of the things I’ve been talking about. It’s founded on the idea of connection. If you’re on Twitter, and you’re not tweeting at people, and you’re not using hashtags, and you’re not following anyone, then you’re not really using it at all. That’s what I meant at the beginning when I said that social media is fundamentally social in a way that maybe writing a book is not. The book can have meaning outside of the immediate circumstances, but the tweet cannot. We saw this – we were looking a tweet that said “This guy looks like a jerk”, and we didn’t know. It’s context dependent. It has to be connected or it becomes meaningless.

Relevance. It’s a funny thing – and this is something that the marketers have already figured out – social media doesn’t need to be made relevant because social media is built on a foundation of relevance. A student doesn’t join Facebook and then say “OK, what’s relevant about this for me, I better figure out something that will make it relevant”. No: they joined it because it’s already relevant, because their friends are there, it’s relevant to their own purposes. It’s a fundamental fact about these social spaces that they are immediately relevant. And part of the reason is because of this third point.

Namely, that the social spaces – the ones I’ve been talking about, blogs and Twitter, but also the other ones – think about the person as a whole. What I mean about that is, take Twitter: When I tweet about WordPress, or I tweet about philosophy, or I tweet about what I had for dinner last night, these things appear next to each other. And out of these things emerges a more accurate picture of who I am as a person than emerges out of very segregated spaces. Now, this often seems like a terrifying thing from an academic point of view – well, this doesn’t have anything to do with academics! – and it may not from the point of view of its content. But in terms of establishing relationships that are based on empathy and based on the people who we are, instead of based on some artifical abstraction – well, we’re both interested in philsoophy, so let’s make sure we both talk about philosophy. So the individual becomes the locus in social media. I don’t sign up for an interest-based account on Twitter. I sign up for an account for me, and all my interests fall within that account. Same with Facebook. You sign up for an account for a person, not an account for every single class, for every one of your communities. The individual is the molecule here. That’s fundamental to social media. And I think it’s fundamental to thinking about general education being an attainable goal for our students.

Finally, fertile spaces in which connections can emerge. I don’t know what more to tell you other than the things I’ve already shown. It’s these facts about the social media spaces. It’s these properties of openness, properties like minimal structure, properties like the fostering of empathy and relationships – these structural facts about social media allow connections to form in ways that wouldn’t be possible if those properties were different.

When I flip back and forth between these two sides, you can see what I meant at the beginning when I said that there is a real structural similarity between these things [social media and general education]. So what does that mean? What’s the upshot? Well, I guess what I’m envisioning is a general education curriculum where students are encouraged to bring all parts of themselves to the table in spaces that are fertile for connections. Perspectives courses and learning communities are a step in this direction, but they don’t go far enough. Once that semester is over, all those things are left behind. All those things you might have learned about the different lenses through which a sociologist and an evolutionary biologist look at human evolution remain only a memory. I think that that’s an artificial structure that hinders communication and hinders the kinds of connections I’ve been talking about. So I’m envisioning something where those structures don’t exist. Or where those structures are somehow looser. Or a secondary space over the top of it – you can think about Twitter, you can think about blogs, you can think about personal websites, you can think about these social networks, whatever – some sort of space that acts as the medium in which the connections happen. Because the nodes of the connections, the students themselves, they move through the curriculum, but without some sort of medium, some sort of agar, some sort of gel, those connections can’t survive. The nodes continue, but the connections don’t. So some sort of space that has some of the properties that I’ve been talking about I believe will make those connections happen. How that actually works is a very difficult question to answer.

But I think that, given the structural similarities between general education and social media, we would be foolish not to pursue it as a means to getting the goal that we want, which is a student who is really connected with the world around them. Thanks.

Related posts:

1. Tensions between disciplinary and media instruction

In the past I have taken hard stances against plagiarizers, stances which at the time made a lot of sense to me. Like the author and commenters at the ISW post, it seemed to me that plagiarism is the worst kind of crime and deserves the worst kind of punishment. In retrospect, this attitude seems ludicrous. There is a broad spectrum of actions one could reasonably take in reaction to a cheater, ranging from expulsion to doing absolutely nothing. Why is the transition from “hard” to “soft” to be found between failing the course and not failing the course, a consequence that seems to be pretty far toward the severe end of the spectrum?

To shed light on that question, it might help to think about this one: Why should students be punished for plagiarism at all?

Before thinking carefully about this question, it’s really crucial to remember that there are different kinds of plagiarism, and treating them all alike is like claiming that a candy-bar thief should be punished like Bernie Madoff. I want to know whether there is any justification for plagiarism being punished so harshly, so it makes sense to consider the most serious kind of violation. I take it that this would be a student who copies (buys, whatever) an entire paper and passes it off as his own. If any kind of plagiarism is going to warrant harsh treatment, presumably this will be it. Unless otherwise mentioned, then, this is the kind of plagiarism I’m talking about.

That said, let’s consider a few arguments one might give for why plagiarism is a punishable offense.

1. Plagiarism is cheating, and cheating is unfair to the other players. I take ‘cheating’ to mean ‘breaking the rules’, which is unfair because everyone else has to abide by the rules. But different kinds of cheating are immoral in different ways. Cheating in golf, for instance, is wrong at least partly because my actions have immediate negative ramifications for the other players of the game: I take a stroke off of my game, and you are that much more likely to lose. In golf, what’s good for one person is necessarily bad for the other players (assuming they’re opponents – in fact, this might be a functional definition of what it means to be opponents). The same is not true of plagiarism. Unless you grade on a curve (a practice that a philosopher who is concerned with “fairness” would be hard-pressed to defend, by the way), one student’s cheating his way to an A when he otherwise would have gotten a D does not have a negative effect on other students in the class. You might maintain that students are obligated not do things that their classmates are forbidden to do out of abstract principle, a position that I can imagine various sorts of arguments for. But if the only thing wrong with plagiarism were that it was a violation of an abstract moral principle, it would take a very warped theory of retributive justice to justify such draconian punishment.
2. Stealing is unfair to the person stolen from. Like in the previous case, “fairness” could be judged along two metrics: the practical and the theoretical. Stealing is often bad in a practical sense. If you steal my Charleston Chew, I no longer get to enjoy it myself. Therefore, :’( . Intellectual “theft” works differently, since the person stolen from hasn’t lost the use of the ideas. Of course, intellectual theft sometimes amounts to material theft, as when a breach of patent costs an inventor lots of money. And a parallel consideration might be at work when we talk about plagiarism in the academic community at large. If Dr X writes a great draft, and Dr Y steals it and publishes it, it could mean that Dr Y beats Dr X out for that Ivy League faculty position. Generally speaking, though, this is not a relevant consideration for student papers. Students – especially undergraduates – are neither publishing their term papers (much less their one-page, low-stakes assignments) nor using their papers to compete with others for jobs. The only situation where I can imagine real harm to the victim of classroom plagiarism is where the victim writes a paper with a great, novel idea or argument, the professor reads two or three plagiarized versions of the same argument before getting to the original, and as a result the professor is less impressed with the argument and gives a lower grade to the originator of the idea.
3. Plagiarism devalues a degree, which is unfair to classmates. A bit different from the first consideration above, which is concerned more with a single game. This argument has more to do with iteration. If you cheat once and get away with it, other people will realize that cheating is possible; thus more people will cheat; and thus, somehow, everyone’s degree will be worth less; decreasing the value of a non-cheater’s degree through your own cheating is morally wrong; therefore cheating is wrong. (Andy Cullison lays out this argument here.) There are a couple things to notice about this argument. First, the mechanism by which the actual devaluing of the degree come about are not specified, and presumably they’d have to be abstracted away from in order to count out obvious counterexamples where the student could cheat, get away with it, and never let anyone else know about the cheating. Second, this justification for the punishment of plagiarism is less a moral indictment of cheating than of harming other people’s degrees. In the end, this might amount to the same thing, but it does not justify the kind of snooty self-righteousness that tints some instructors’ lectures on plagiarism, which suggests that plagiarism is akin to a mortal sin. As for punishment, you might argue in this case (as Mill does in his wonky “sensitive feeling on the subject of veracity” argument near the end of Chapter 2 in Utilitarianism) that a harsh punishment fits this crime even though the actual consequences of this particular action are relatively small (or non-existent) because the action has the potential to contribute to the weakening of a larger feeling of trust that is so manifestly important. It strikes me that this is the best reason considered so far for punishing plagiarists.
4. Plagiarism is bad for scholarship/academia/the university. I’ve heard this sort of argument before: if everyone plagiarizes from everyone else, how will any new things be discovered? In one sense this rhetorical question is clearly overblown. Taken more seriously, you might grant that the posting of falsified or plagiarized material in, say, a journal of medicine could end up distracting scientists for several years, thereby diverting valuable research resources. But this argument does not extent to students, who are generally not doing original research, are not publishing, and are not in a position to affect the discipline either positively or negatively.
5. Plagiarism is so frowned upon in graduate school and the professional world that students must be trained as undergraduates not to plagiarize. In other words, you might grant many of the points I’ve made above, which suggest that plagiarism at the undergraduate level is really not worth punishing in itself, but still think that punishment is prudent so that students are trained not to plagiarize when it really counts. I think there are a couple of limitations on this justification, though. First, it’s not obvious that plagiarism really is all that frowned upon in most of the careers that our students are going to end up in. If I crib the opening paragraph of an earnings statement I’m preparing, who cares as long as it gets the job done? I suspect that relatively few of our students end up in careers – academics, journalism, writing – where plagiarism really is so disdained. Second, I am highly dubious that scaring students shitless is a good way to train them not to plagiarize. If you want to train a dog not to jump on a couch, you use a rolled-up newspaper instead of reason; the same should not be true of students. Even if punishment – in the form of failed assignments, failed courses, or grade deductions – is part of the instructor’s arsenal, it should be proportionate with other, more humane teaching methods.

I take away from these considerations that there are both moral and prudential reasons that justify the punishment of plagiarism. But the assumption that harsher is better that I so often see in instructors appears to me to be far off of the mark. Few would say that you should teach philosophy, or chemistry, or poliical science, or mathematics, by threatening and slapping students. Why teach intellectual honesty that way?

Related posts:

1. The ethics of Turnitin, or How I Learned To Stop Detecting Plagiarism

My view is that there are two broad, interrelated reasons for implementing various kinds of technology in the classroom. One, certain kinds of technology can help to achieve the independently existing goals of the course. (For example, blogging in an Intro to Philosophy class might help students get a better introduction to philosophical methods and topics.) Two, it’s independently valuable for students to engage critically with and create content with new media. There are a couple justifications for this second point, I suppose, the more obvious of which is that there’s a vocational advantage to having Google-fu, web savviness, etc. More important, perhaps, the nature of information, and the relationship between information and its producers and consumers, is in significant flux. The more information the internet provides, the more necessity there is for students to develop effective bullshit filters – filters which can only be developed through critical practice with the medium. Moreover, the increasing ease of production (computers, cameras, etc that are cheaper and easier to use; sites like YouTube that allow people to publish and distribute in free and massive ways) means that today’s students could potentially be much greater participants in the creation and dissemination of knowledge than past generations. Part of the educator’s job is to teach students how to harness their creative power for their own good as well as for the greater good.

So I take it as given that there are plenty of justifications, independent of the specific content of a course, for teaching new media literacy. And such literacy can only be taught through practice and iterative reflection. I propose the caveat, though, that one can only become fluent with new media by the right kind of practice. What counts as “right” can vary, but what is definitely not right is to simply do digital versions of analog assignments. If I have my students write traditional, argumentative papers, and then post them on a website, I am just porting an analog assignment to a digital medium. When they add videos or hyperlinks or a comment section or a “tweet this” button, only then are they engaging with features of the native features of the medium that set it apart from what they’d do on paper.

From this I conclude that an educational use of a technology isn’t independently beneficial unless the use engages the meaningful or “native” features of the medium enabled by the technology. Instructional technologists, if they are to be advocates for the most effective uses of tech in learning, should therefore be advocating for native uses.

Here’s the tension. “Native” uses of ed tech – uses that are typified by a real engagement with the features of the technology that set it apart from different media – are, at least prima facie, exactly the kinds of uses that instructors will and should resist. Most instructors I’ve talked with see the instructional goals of their class as primarily disciplinary. Broader benefits, like the kind of media literacy I’ve urged here, are nice, but distinctly secondary, considerations. And the problem with the desire to teach your discipline first is that your sense of what counts as good disciplinary instruction is determined by the state of your discipline in general. Take philosophy as an example. With few exceptions, what constitutes quality philosophical work is linear, text-only, relatively long-form prose. The bodies which are de facto responsible for setting the standard for philosophical legitimacy – journal editors; tenure, promotion, and hiring committees; graduate school professors; etc. – reward this kind of work nearly exclusively. The ramifications for the philosophy instructor are that (a) in the absence of alternative motives, the production of traditional philosophical works is the end goal when training budding philosophers, and (b) the means for achieving the goal of traditional philosophers will mirror the results that we desire to achieve – in other words, the only way to produce a student who’s good at writing traditional philosophy is to have them write traditional philosophy.

What it boils down to is that the instructor who focuses on disciplinary goals is, at least at first glance, beholden to the traditional disciplinary methods to get there. And since those traditional methods are necessarily at odds with “native” uses of instructional technology (because in order to be native, a use must engage in a critical way with a feature of the medium that sets it apart from traditional media), disciplinary instruction seems almost incompatible with new media literacy instruction.

I have a few ideas about how the cycle might be broken. One is that the de facto standards of excellence in a discipline are de facto only, and if we examine what we really value in (say) a good philosopher, we’ll see that the traditional medium is not critical. Another is that traditional disciplinary excellence can and should be taught by methods other than simply aping the greats – in other words, it might not be the case that writing a lot of traditional philosophy texts is not the best way to make a better writer of traditional philosophy texts. Whatever the response to the tension I’ve described above, it is crucial to respond to it if instructional technology is to be able to fulfill both its goal of enabling disciplinary ends and striving for increased student facility with new media.

Related posts:

1. SOPA, Media Conglomerates, and the Moral Obligation to Boycott
2. Social Media and General Education: My Queens College Presidential Roundtable talk

My gut feeling is this: Turnitin, SafeAssign et al make big bucks off of their database. More papers scanned means a bigger database; bigger database means (in theory) better plagiarism detection; better detection means (in theory) more value and more profit. Forcing students to relinquish their papers to this machine feels exploitative.

John Stuart Mill – Awesome Guy | cc licensed flickr photo shared by netNicholls

But I wonder why this bothers me. I have no problem feeding different kinds of information-gathering machines. Take Google. I use Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, and google.com extensively. The more I use these services, the more information they gather about my online activities; bigger database means better ad targeting; better targeting means more value and more profit. My “stuff” – information about me, writing I produce, records of my activity, etc. – is not sacrosanct. I’m willing to give it up in some cases.

So what’s the difference? Most obviously, I am choosing to use Google’s products in a way that students are not asking to use Turnitin. I will grant that there are different levels of “forcedness”, as @LanceStrate points out. Students can opt out of a class, or out of school in general. And if instructors make the Turnitin requirement explicit in the syllabus on the first day of class (or earlier), students will be reasonably well-informed about what they will be “forced” to do. But no matter how you conceive of the spectrum of requirement, the fact remains that my use of Google is far freer than students’ use of Turnitin.

That a professor requires students to do certain things that they wouldn’t otherwise do is not, in itself, an indictment of the requirement. I doubt that my own students would write about the Nicomachean Ethics if their grade didn’t depend on it. But, in this case, I as an instructor am obligated to exercise my power in a responsible way. (Heavy is the head that wears the crown.) Requirements should not be arbitrary, but should serve the goals of the class and the best interest of the students. Requiring a paper on Aristotle has negative effects on students – it takes away from the time and energy they could be spending on other things that are valuable to them – and it’s my responsibility to ensure that these negative effects are outweighed by the benefits bestowed by such an assignment. A well thought-out term paper assignment will, in the long run, have positive utility for the student.

Is the same true for plagiarism detection? Are the negative effects of such technologies (being forced to enrich a corporate entity, losing control over one’s intellectual property, feeling a presumption of one’s own guilt in the absence of supporting evidence) outweighed by some benefits? It’s at this point in the thought process that the pedagogical implications of Turnitin should be considered.

• Is Turnitin good at detecting plagiarism? My experience says: Not really. While Google’s database doesn’t include as many student papers as Turnitin’s, Turnitin is in turn pretty awful at identifying plagiarism from the open web. Thoughtful reading and Googling has been more effective for me. I’d like to see data on the larger trends, though – for example, what percentage of student copying comes from the open web (Google’s domain) versus for-sale paper databases.
• How much harm does “plagiarism” really do? This is really the more important question. Even if it turns out that Turnitin is very, very good at plagiarism detection, there is very little benefit from the software’s use if it turns out that plagiarism, as defined, isn’t really that harmful. This question is tough to answer, though. For one thing, there are lots of different kinds of plagiarism, certain kinds of which are more harmful than others. A student who copies a paper wholesale from Wikipedia is doing more harm than one who synthesizes a coherent paper from a bunch of different sources, or one who fails to cite a paraphrased argument. Surely the second and third students are getting more out of the assignment than the first. Furthermore, I have an untested gut feeling that the most harmful types of plagiarism – where a student steals wholesale – are easier to detect without using Turnitin, since they’re more likely not to be even approximately in the student’s voice or level of expertise. If this is right, then it might be the case that Turnitin is most necessary for the least harmful varieties of “plagiarism” – varieties whose ethical implications, some might argue, ought to be reassessed in light of how new technologies are affecting knowledge creation. (Too big a topic to address here, but you get the idea.)
• Are there less troubling alternatives to Turnitin? Let’s grant that Turnitin is very good at detecting plagiarism, and that plagiarism is hugely pernicious. All things being equal, if we could avoid plagiarism by means that have less of a downside, we should choose those other means. In my experience (again, I have no comprehensive data to back this up), the answer is yes, there are far better ways. @KelliMarshall suggests assigning unique paper prompts, making plagiarism more difficult. I’ve found that the scaffolding of assignments – such that students write early, write often, and write in a low-stakes milieu – is extremely effective at lowering the tempation to plagiarize. To be more specific: When students are writing in journals or blogs – spaces where they are not harshly graded – and when their formal assignments allow students to pull from and build upon the ideas that they’ve already put to paper(/bits), cheating simply doesn’t happen very often. That initial moment – when a student sits down at the computer the night before the due date, not having written a single word, not knowing where to start, and copying out of desparation – is averted altogether. In the semesters I’ve used blogs and structured assignments in this way, I’ve had to deal with plagiarism maybe once per semester (out of 70+ students writing hundreds of papers). Another thing that’s worked really well for me is having frank discussions with students about why plagiarism is so demonized in academia in the first place (perhaps this conversation is a little more justified in an Ethics course). When they understand the motivations, and are not simply handed seemingly (and perhaps actually?) arbitrary rules about the Evils Of Plagiarism, they’re more likely to grok.

On balance, then, it seems to me that there is very little, if anything, to be gained from Turnitin et al that cannot be gained through other, less harmful means. Now I have to work up the guts to start sending links to this post whenever a faculty member asks me how to do plagiarism detection! But I suppose my lack of intestinal fortitude is a topic for another blog post.

Related posts:

1. Why punish plagiarists?
2. Doctorow on ethics and copyright
3. Hub-and-spoke blogging with lots of students

On this note, I’m planning some faculty development for the spring semester related to the idea of paperless teaching. I need to do some brainstorming as to what this means. So here goes:

• Readings that have, in the past, been photocopied and distributed, should be distributed electronically. There are some procedural challenges here, though. Digitization itself is increasingly easy. More and more, I think faculty members are getting things from online databases, so that no digitization is needed. When the original is on paper and needs to be photocopied, more and more of our copy machines have scan-to-PDF functionality. So faculty need some guidance on using this functionality.

  Where to upload things for distribution? This is one area where Blackboard has some real advantages. For one, Bb courses are set up automatically, and so there’s no real setup on my part. Access is limited to those enrolled in the class, which is (lamentably, perhaps) required by copyright considerations.

  In cases where faculty members use Blackboard to distribute readings to students, it should be made explicit that printing is not required. A brief discussion early in the semester regarding the readings and how best to approach them is a good idea in any class, and considerations of paper vs. non-paper reading could be part of that.

• Assignments comprise another class of tree-killers. Faculty who adopt wholly online assignments like blogs and wikis for the pedagogical benefits get paperlessness as a bonus. More traditional assignments – essays, journals, and the like – can be collected electronically in a variety of ways: with a Blackboard Assignment, Turnitin (or SafeAssign or whatever it is in Blackboard 8), as attachments to email, as postings to a blog or discussion board (where privacy is not an issue). Faculty members might need a little bit of help dealing with the different kinds of file formats coming in, but many will already be used to downloading and viewing various kinds of documents.

  Grading these electronic assignments can be a little bit trickier. I personally like grading papers with the Track Changes feature in Word or Record Changes in OpenOffice.org or whatever. The big downside of this is that, in order for your students to be able to read your comments, they’re going to need this particular software, or at least a compatible reader – which is a dangerous supposition when you use commercial software like MS Office at a demographically diverse public university like ours. Tablet computers offer an alternative, especially for those faculty members who like to mark papers full of circles and arrows. The problem with tablets is the overhead, though – they aren’t cheap.

How are you trying to move away from paper in your teaching, or in your faculty’s teaching? How do you convince individuals who have been trained to use paper over their entire careers that there are practical benefits to going electronic? Is it even possible to move our current kinds of curriculum, which are so deeply rooted in paper, to the digital realm? Or will the change only happen when the course materials and assignments move away from the old paper metaphors?

Related posts:

1. Pitching the Kindle
2. The ethics of Turnitin, or How I Learned To Stop Detecting Plagiarism

Of particular interest to me is the explicit invocation (here and here, among other places) of the distinction between research and teaching, and between departments where one or the other of these practices is emphasized. What’s the connection between the two?

Practically speaking, someone who wants to do philosophical research and is not independently wealthy must, in the vast majority of cases, teach as well. Likewise, someone who wants to teach philosophy to undergraduates must, in the vast majority of cases, go through a very research-centric graduate education and, if he wants eventual job security, engage in research for the purpose of publication. Are these connections de jure or merely de facto? Are there principled reasons why there should be such intricate links between teaching- and research-based careers, or are the connections the result of historical and economic accident?

I thought I’d try to articulate some of the ties between teaching philosophy and doing philosophical research. Feel free to jump in if you can think of any more.

Why researchers must teach

• The most obvious explanation is that philosophy (alas!) doesn’t pay: original philosophical research typically doesn’t make the NYT best-seller list, and the market for philosophers to the royal court is depressingly lackluster. Universities need people to teach philosophy, and practicing philosophers are a captive work pool. If this were the only explanation for why philosophers teach then we would certainly say that the combined vocation is an economic accident.
• I’ve had a few classes in graduate school that were built around a draft of a book being written by the professor. The class works like a testing ground for the draft. The philosopher thus gets to use his teaching in order to advance and improve his work. So this is a reason why teaching might be useful to a practicing philosopher.
• More generally speaking, it might be argued that teaching – including the process of explaining something you know well to a bunch of people who don’t know it all that well – enhances one’s own understanding of, and ability to articulate, what one knows or believes. This explanatory skill is important for the writer of philosophy.
• Philosophical researchers presumably care about the health of the discipline of philosophy, and in particular the future health of the discipline. The future of philosophy is dependent on future philosophers, and future philosophers come from the general student pool. Thus philosophers have a vested interest in making sure that at least these students get a decent philosophical training. (The big premise here is that philosophers care about the discipline as a whole. I wonder how true this actually is.)

I might note in passing that these last three reasons explain why philosophers ought to want to teach, while the first reason explains why philosophers are required to teach. If the benefits gleaned from the “ought to want” category could be guaranteed in a different way, then it’s hard to see how there is any necessary connection between research and teaching in this direction.

Why teachers must research

• In order to teach effectively, you must have a certain mastery of your subject (or, at least, there has to be a certain differential between your mastery and your students’). Mastery in philosophy comes down to the ability to read texts, understand problems, construct arguments, and so on. These skills are best developed through the kinds of research that philosophers do. So research is good job training.
• One of the reasons why philosophy is taught widely is to locate and train the next generation of philosophical researchers. Instructors with no knowledge of how philosophical research is done won’t be able to spot potential philosophers and hone them for the field.
• More broadly, doing philosophy in a classroom is not really that different from doing philosophy in the armchair. You’re still reading those texts and still constructing those arguments. The practice of teaching philosophy might be a somewhat watered-down version of “real” research, but it’s not fundamentally different. If you want to be able to teach philosophy, you need to be able to do philosophy, since teaching and doing philosophy are essentially the same thing and, you know, the indiscernability of identicals. (The immediate problem I see with this is that teaching old arguments is crucially different from developing new arguments, at least from the point of view of the teacher’s epistemic states. Contributing something new to the debate, as researchers do, is generally something altogether over and above the argumentation that is done in classrooms.)

It’s hard to draw a definitive conclusion from these considerations. All things being equal, the more de jure connections you can point to between philosophical research and philosophical teaching, the more justified the de facto connection between the two vocations becomes. On the other hand, it remains an open question whether there might be other models for philosophers: a way for individuals to do research outside of the university, a way for individuals to teach philosophy without the rigors of a research-based education. Since people come to philosophy for different reasons, wouldn’t it make sense to have different career paths?

Related posts:

1. Planning an Introduction to Philosophy course
2. Tensions between disciplinary and media instruction
3. Why punish plagiarists?

via victoriafee

My discomfort with the whole thing comes from a couple sources. For one, I don’t particularly like the idea of selling the technology. The blogging initiative is housed within the Writing Across the Curriculum program, and with good reason – student blogs are only valuable insofar as they provide some benefit to the goals of the course, which usually ends up having something to do with writing. So there’s a sense in which I’d like the email to say “Do you want your students to accomplish academic goals x, y, and z? Here is a tool for you!” But this kind of pitch feels disingenuous, making the tech tool sound like a magic elixir that will simply, you know, “get the job done”.

At the same time, if I scale back the rhetoric and talk in more measured terms about the kind of benefits that students might get from blogging, I’ll probably limit my audience. Faculty members get a ton of requests to try new things, and if my request is riddled with conditionals and hedges, it’s not clear that it will shine through as something worth doing. The only people who will be persuaded by that kind of talk are people who are already warm to the ideas I’m pushing – the “low-hanging fruit”, as a colleague of mine once called these faculty members. And while there’s nothing wrong with this low-hanging fruit, I want to broaden the base of bloggers a bit each semester.

In the end, I rationalize the smarmy sales pitch to myself as follows. The point of the pitch is to get them in the door, thinking about what blogging is, and maybe giving it an earnest try in their classes. The benefit for their teaching, if there is one, will make itself apparent, regardless of whether this benefit is as Incredible and Amazing (or perhaps totally Different From) what was “promised” in the original pitch. I don’t think this makes me cynical, I think it makes me pragmatic. Or at least I hope so.

No related posts.

Much more interesting to me, though, is a different kind of worry, this one tied to the educational goals of the academy. The communication that happens in Facebook, the argument goes, is brief (think status updates), unnuanced, unsensitive to audience, overly informal. The communicative style that we want to teach our students, on the other hand, is nuanced and professional, both because this kind of communication is intrinsically better (whatever that might mean) and because it’s the kind of communication that they will have to be fluent in in order to flourish in the real world.

The motivation here seems right: we want to teach our students to be communicators who are sensitive to voice and audience and thus more likely to be successful. That said, there’s nothing inherent to Facebook that precludes this kind of conduct. I might even argue that the fact that students typically use the medium in non-academic ways makes it even more valuable as a teaching tool. In the “real world”, the division between professional and non-professional communication does not fall neatly along the lines that delineate media; telephone calls, emails, and face-to-face interactions are all used both for talking shop and for informal purposes. What students need to learn is not that certain media are appropriate for certain kinds of exchanges, but rather how to adapt to different kinds of exchanges regardless of the medium. Using Facebook to communicate with students is a potentially fertile ground for these lessons.

The distinction between “professional” and “non-professional” exchanges is bunk anyway. Even the idea that there is a continuum from totally formal communication to totally informal communication oversimplifies the matter. Relationships differ along all sorts of various dimensions, and to paint a caricature of this to students is both dishonest and self-defeating.

This isn’t to say that spaces like Facebook don’t provide any new rhetorical challenges. It’s hard to find a non-web-2.0 analog for status updates: brief, frequent messages that are sent to an entire network of individuals with whom you have different kinds of relationships. But this too is a teaching opportunity. Students should understand the quasi-public nature of these messages, and the technological means of making them less public if they wish.

It’s an open question whether it’s a good idea for any given professor to use this medium to communicate with students. But to rule it out across the board doesn’t seem right either, at least not for the reasons I talk about here.

Related posts:

1. Facebook and content
2. The meat of Facebook
3. What the Facebook debacle says about sharing