As a Writing Center tutor and instructor of first-year composition and research writing classes, I often deal with cases of unintended plagiarism. Most students who commit this “crime” do not do so because they are intent on stealing someone’s work, but because they don’t grasp the concept behind citation.
Two recent readings may help me explain the concept in a simple way. Siva Vaidhyanathan, in his book Copyrights and Copywrongs, writes about the idea/expression dichotomy. According to Vaidhyanathan, copyright law is based on the notion that ideas and their expression are two different things. The principle is that ideas belong to all, but the expression of those ideas is protected.
Though copyright is different than plagiarism, the concepts behind them are similar. If a student writes a paper arguing that the school curriculum should be changed, he may do so without worrying that others who have made similar arguments will accuse him or her of plagiarising the concept. That is because ideas, once they are spoken, belong in the common domain. If, on the other hand, that student expresses the idea the same way as another writer (whether word-for-word or in a paraphrase), he needs to give credit to the source of that expression.
Another way to explain the notion of crediting sources is through a file sharing analogy. Danielle Nicole DeVoss and James E. Porter, in their article Why Napster Matters to Writing: Filesharing As a New Ethicof Digital Delivery, point out that peer-to-peer file sharing of music has always credited sources. The fact that a piece of music is authored by a certain group or artist is what makes the file so valuable There is never an attempt to take credit for the work, and the original artist is always given credit.
In his book Datacloud, Johndan Johnson-Eilola points out that today’s workplace involves jobs requiring symbolic-analytic work. This type of activity consists of gathering information, circulating it, reorganizing it, seeing patterns in it, and gleaning concepts from it. He argues for computer interfaces that support such activity and computer education that fosters it. Both areas currently fall short, he writes.
His point is well taken. The process involved in immersing oneself in large amounts of disparate information and creating sense of it always involves a kind of messiness that Microsoft Word does not allow. For example, several weeks ago I was required to create a Learning Record for a graduate class I am taking. The record was to include samples of my work which reflected five interdependent dimensions of learning (confidence, skills and strategies, prior knowledge and emerging experience, content mastery, and reflection) as they related to course objectives such as technology, reading, and writing. The task required assembling large amounts of data and looking at it from multiple perspectives simultaneously.
As Johnson-Eilola notes, computer applications are linear and do not support this kind of activity easily. My work involved having easy access to the following: 1. various Word files where I had documents relating to a computer usability project and a series of ongoing observations about learning. 2. screen shots of e-mail communications and posts from an on-line collaboration site. 3. posts from an on-line Weblog. 4. hard copies of text and articles I had been reading. 5. written notes and drafts. 6. handouts from the instructor.
As happens in Johnson-Eilola’s examples, my work spilled over into multiple windows and extended far beyond the computer monitor. As I worked, I used the floor space to manipulate the documents around as I tried to uncover not merely categories, but themes. I pushed and pulled the information into all sorts of configurations, writing on it, sorting and resorting it until I had produced, quite messily, the final Learning Record.
Johnson-Eilola is correct that this kind of activity is not easily engaged in without support for retrieving, viewing, and manipulating various kinds of data. I look forward to using such interfaces as they emerge.
This morning’s Today Show featured a segment about a New York actress who vents about her impending divorce on a YouTube video. She shot the video in her kitchen. Standing against her countertop, she dishes about the shortcomings of the couple’s sex life, offers up juicy details about the pre-nup, and angrily vents about what it’s like to get dumped. She even phones the office live.
Her public revelation of personal details is indicative of the 21st Century cultural phenomenon of exposing one’s painful personal difficulties on-line. While it raises interesting questions for the legal profession (she is in essence attempting to litigate via the Internet), it raises even more troublesome ones for society in general. According to psychiatrist Keith Ablow, who appeared on the segment, making the details of private matters public crosses a boundary that is important not just for healthy intimate relationships, but for a healthy self-concept. When the line between what is public and what is private gets blurred, the concept of self is compromised. When people turn their lives into television shows, they are not expressing themselves as individuals; they are stripping themselves of their individuality.
“This is desensitizing them from their own life stories,” Ablow said. “It suggests to others this isn’t real. This is a show.”
This past weekend, I had the chance to see the box-office hit 21. The film is the story of a group of college students from MIT whose professor recruits them for an elaborate card counting operation. The group frequents Las Vegas on weekends and racks up big winnings. All is well until their goings-on arouse the suspicion of the security expert viewing them from behind a bank of computer monitors. If one accepts the ideas of Martin Kevorkian, author of Color Monitors: the Black Face of Technology in America, it is no acident that this character is portrayed by an African American.
According to Kevorkian, it seems the new stereotype for African Americans is the helpful technology expert. Kevorkian provides countless examples of films where the black man is cast as the person behind the computer monitor who saves the day by cracking the code, manipulating the data, solving the puzzle through his technical know-how. While some may see this as evidence of the great strides in the country’s racial relations since the days when the roles for African Americans were limited to minstrels, Kevorkian makes the case that today’s technological stereotypes serve as a new kind of racial injustice. By placing the black character safely behind the computer terminal, he is portrayed as the person doing the distastetful work of society.
It’s not just the drugery of much computer work that makes it so unattractive. It’s the notion of technology as a dehumanizing force, something to fear. By reinforcing the image of the African American behind the monitor, is white society reflecting its fear? Such a notion should not be dismissed. As Kevorkian writes, “Efforts to move beyond old stereotypes should be applauded, but such efforts do not preclude the mergence of new stereotypes, curiously comfortable and highly specific defaults for ‘positive representations’ of blacks” (17).
Back when I was schooled in journalism, the reporters typed copy on sheets of yellow copypaper. The copyeditor used a pencil to designate corrections and indicate font, italics, boldface, etc. At that point, the copy was sent to the production department where another person would set the type, another would make the plate, and another would operate the press. Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, in their book Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication, point out how these kinds of boundaries are rapidly fading in a world where technology has blurred such divisions.
As these divisions of labor have fallen, so have similar divisions in the ways in which meaning is expressed and conveyed. Kress and Van Leeuwen point out that textbooks which formally relied on language alone to convey their material now consist of mixes of text, charts, pictures. They claim that the notion that language alone is the sole way of making meaning is incorrect. Meaning, they say, is created through multiple modalities through discourse, design, production, and distribution.
As multimodal expression becomes more accessible for everyone, people will need to speak the language of these various modes. Paul Hammond, Director of Digital Initiatives at Rutgers University, recognizes this. In his classes, students are each given a $100 video recorder which they use to create multimedia compositions. Using software that lets them edit and produce quality short movies, student arguments use images, sound, video, pictures, and words to make their points. One argument incorporates images from the Civil Rights Movement and Hurricane Katrina while Martin Luther King narrates his I Have a Dream Speech. When presenting the assignment, Hammond tells his students to “think about what you want people to see in your mind’s eye.”
As the technology involved in producing these kinds of assignments becomes less expensive and more user-friendly, Hammond foresees more and more classrooms using multimedia assignments in place of traditional ones such as research papers. He says the point is to use multimedia to engage students in “idea driven conversation.”
Recent forum posts have discussed the frustrations computer users have had with the latest download of Adobe Reader. Consumers complain that once they download 8.0, their computer freezes when the licensing agreement comes up for the first time. When the box prompts them to click Accept, the computer simply will not allow them to do this.
Having experienced these frustrations myself, I have spent the last several weeks hunting around for help. One forum post informed me that the problem was a bug in Adobe’s latest reader and recommended dowloading an older version of Adobe. Recently, I located a 7.0 version through a Google search and downloaded it. The new version allowed me to accept the licensing agreement and I have had no problems since. Others with similar trouble may want to explore this link.
What is the future of humanities in a technologically driven world? According to Paul Hammond, Director of Digital Initiatives at Rutgers University, “The future of humanities is in technologies.”
Hammond gave the keynote address, What’s New About New Media: Multimedia Composition in Today’s Classroom, at the ninth Annual Conference of the New Jersey Writing Alliance at Georgian Court University April 4. The conference, What’s the Buzz: Innovations in teaching Writing, brought together writing teachers at the high school and college level from throughout the state in order to share strategies, pedagogical philosophies, and concerns.
Hammond cited figures which indicate a decreased interest in reading by young people and pointed out its subsequent impact on writing. “If people aren’t reading, then they aren’t writing,” he said. he refered to the report by the Association of American Universities (AAU), Reinvigorating the Humanities. The report notes the role of humanities as one of cross linking, disseminating and making information more accessible. He pointed to a Rutgers learning community on writing as an example of an opportunity for a “lived experience” with the humanities. The point is to get students to “slow down and engage in the world around them.”
Hammond began his talk with a multimedia presentation, an example of the kind of assignment he might challenge students with. The point of the video, he said, was not merely to produce it, but to “enter into a conversation.” That conversation is the ongoing discussion among educators about the future of writing in an electronic world and the challenge to engage students in it.
One way to engage students is through multimedia composition. Multimedia allows students to express thoughts in ways that regular composition does not allow. Though students in today’s classrooms are technologically savvy, they are not savvy in a “thought-driven” way, Hammond said. Students may know how to use the technolgoy, but they need to be taught how to think. “Students think technology does it for them,” he said.
Hammond warned educators not to be lulled into using technology “for technology’s sake” or using it in a reactive way. Technology use in the writing classroom must be centered around what the teacher’s goals are, Hammond noted. He warned educators, “The answer is not to buy more computers,” but to look into new uses of technology that supports what we as educators are doing. The question to ask before acquiring new technology should be, “Does it do what we want it to do?”
“Perturbations that appear quite minor to an observer may trigger changes that propagate on an enormous scale and result in global changes to the system.”
Anyone who has attempted to comprehend the book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact(students of Rowan University’s wec class take note) will appreciate the astonishment I experienced when I found myself actually using it in real life.
The other day I held a conference with a student in my research writing class.The student, a history major, was writing on the topic of the JFK assassination. She had just read a book on the subject that she liked very much and was about to fall into the tempting trap of paraphrasing the author’s argument rather than crafting one of her own using a variety of sources.
The student showed me the book and told me she didn’t need to pursue any other sources from the databases because the book was so thorough. She explained that it summed up all the theories involved and was filled with all the “facts” she needed.
Thinking back to Fleck, I said, “There are some who would argue that there is no such thing as a fact.”
When I was in high school, my humanities teacher assigned us the task of creating our own musical instrument from scratch. We were given a month to complete the project. At that point, we were to bring the instrument into school and “play” it for our classmates for a grade.
At 10 p.m. the night before the project was due, I realized I had forgotten to do it. With no time to create something decent, I took an old shoe box and covered it with wrapping paper and brought it to school the next day. When the teacher asked me to play my instrument, I brought it to the front of the class and proceeded to shake it. As I started to return to my seat, my classmates all shouted in protest.
“We didn’t hear anything!” they complained. I explained to them that they had to be really quiet, and then they would hear it. Then, I shook it again. “We still didn’t hear anything,” they yelled. “Oh, I explained, “that’s because my instrument makes the most beautiful sound of all…the sound of silence.”
I received an A on the project, but that’s beside the point. The experience illustrates society’s reaction to silence as nothing, instead of something. Car interiors must be filled with radio sounds, studying must be accompanied by television audio, supermarkets must be enhanced by elevator music, and offices must by infused with white noise. Today, as an adult, I still contend that to be still without noise is to really hear.
