Fast forward ...

Darn. The semester has gone by and what do I have to show for it in this blog? Blogging hasn't yet become habitual enough for me. I have been using blogs with EDTEC 296 this semester and I guess that's where I've contributed to the blogosphere.

I do hope to go back and think through some of the highlights of the semester: TaskStream and AACTE conferences in DC, SITE conference in Phoenix, working through the classroom website research, investigating Wenger and virtual communities of practice, applying for and getting the associate director of Instructional Technology Services position at SDSU. I still have much to do in the next two weeks before this big push is behind me...

Right now I'm sitting in at the beginning of a 4-day workshop/conference for SDSU faculty through the pICT (People and Information and Communication Technologies). Bernie Dodge presented this morning to a somewhat skeptical (my take) group on blogs and wikis.

Meta-reflection: Real-time blogging

Thoughts on blogging while sitting in yesterday's workshop. My first "real-time" blog. On the one hand, I'm intrigued about the process of critically sifting through the ideas being generated and reflecting on them in the blog, as the event is ongoing. As always, I find having a wireless connection to explore resources and concepts on the Internet during a discussion/conference quite helpful - and blogging allows me to save the links (to del.icio.us) along with the train of thought, as it is being generated rather than waiting to try to re-create it all later.

But: did my blogging also generate some distance between me and the community? True, I did not actually participate verbally while I was blogging. Once my battery gave up, I asked the question from the previous post. Was it a matter of technology removing me from the conversation space? Or, was it simply coincidental in terms of the discussion topics at the different times? I need more experiences like this.

And: it raises for me the question of real-time blogging as a pedagogical tool. What would happen if everyone in a classroom had access to their blogs, and were asked to blog-as-they-go during class? Would it kill the conversation altogether? Would it result in deeper understandings? What if you could periodically have people read (and respond to) each others' real-time blogs as a way of bringing more voices into the conversation?

Digital generation and plagiarism

After the previous entry, and after my laptop battery gave up, I asked ethicist Dr. Larry Hinman a question. He was discussing the "What's wrong with cheating?" question from the point of view of different ethical theories/systems. He brought up different cultural views on this, and had earlier mentioned a change in our culture (where students brought up on cheating charges used to be primarily ashamed, now they are more often angry).

Anyway, my question: In the age of open source, mash-ups, wikis, etc. is the very idea of intellectual property changing? Given the collaborative approach of many young people and the affordances of technology for sharing ideas, fostering creativity, and bricolage (mentioned in previous post), are the academy's standards of intellectual property up for debate?

Dr. Hinman didn't exactly answer the question, though he acknowledged its import and discussed the surrounding issues at length. He did refer to Dr. Larry Lessig at Stanford as a leading thinker in this area. I'll have to check out his site - looks interesting.

Academic Integrity, Plagiarism, and Turnitin.com

I'm sitting now in a USD seminar on academic integrity and digital plagiarism. Yesterday's focus on the issue was eye-opening: the numbers of college students admitting to some form of cheating runs between 50 and 80%, depending on college classification (significantly higher in public and parochial schools than private schools). Only 55% of students think cut-and-paste without attribution is cheating.

An important point is that most who are caught in plagiarism claim that they didn't know that what they were doing was wrong. Is it possible that our K-12 schools are really doing such a poor job of preparing students in the basics of research? Is this a by-product of the mash-up culture so used to digital reappropriation (bricolage, in John Seely Brown's terminology)? Or are students simply good at feigning innocence, and college professors are prone to conflict-avoidance, people-pleasing, permissive parenting, and fear of retaliation (all hypotheses from yesterday's conference).

So today: a focus on turnitin.com. SDSU has been using it (on a limited basis) since 2003, yet their plagiarism detection statistics are unchanged. Faculty find the overhead daunting; SDSU requires all-or-nothing submission of papers. I was intrigued in my initial exploration of turnitin to find tools for online feedback on student writing, peer feedback, and an online gradebook. To me these, along with the tighter WebCT integration, represent a significant value-added for faculty, though initial discussion here was lukewarm.

Discussion here is turning in a good direction: toward turnitin as a teaching tool: have students turn in rough drafts and provide opportunities for discussions. Alternatively, cheaper tools similar to turnitin (such as Eve2) do not generate a database and search only the internet, providing a less comprehensive but still significant plagiarism filter.

Now the best turn in discussion so far: changing pedagogy to make class work more unique, less cut-and-paste-able. Assignments tied in with local issues, community service learning, problem-based learning are less generic, more interesting to students. Is thinking in this direction a "constraint" on teaching (and along these lines turnitin as an enforcer/deterrent seems like the answer), or is it perhaps liberating and transforming of pedagogical practices to bring them into line with the realities of learning in the digital age?

A good place to start

As a doctoral student in educational technology, I suppose it is high time I enter the blogosphere as contributor.

This semester I will be teaching undergraduates for the first time - freshmen, no less - in a very interesting course at SDSU created by the illustrious Bernie Dodge last spring. The course in a nutshell (from the syllabus):

This is course about the intersection of three fundamentally human activities. We acquire skills and knowledge; we build tools and processes; we create the communities and cultures in which these activities occur. The common ground among these three realms provides a starting point from which to learn about and live effectively in a technological society. We'll explore this domain as problem-solvers looking for gaps between what's real and what's ideal.

Preparing for this course has thus far been an enjoyable experience traveling down a road I already had planned to take: the folksonomy path. Thus I have been delving into flickr and del.icio.us. In the wider realm of managing information streams, I have just begun to work with bloglines, though I have enjoyed the simple RSS management offered through my.yahoo.

This semester I will be taking an independent study class at USD to explore how technologies can be used in the service of reflection to enhance the learning process, and, vice versa, how reflection can enhance learning with and about technology. The whole social software realm, which I previously conceived of primarily in terms of blogs and wikis, certainly also encompasses the emerging folksonomy tools, and I look forward to exploring the convergences and divergences ... certainly fertile dissertation ground!