Add new comment

So I came across this article called Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual Classroom (the link generates an error at the time of this writing). I didn't actually read it; I just read a synopsis of it in a book. It's apparently about teachers fears that online classes somehow increase students ability to plagiarize and about electronic measures that we can take to catch people who turn in stuff that they didn't write. I think that the words that caught my eye were "academic integrity." It goes on to talk about how we can give time-limited quizzes that are proctored to keep people from cheating on them too.

To me this game of cat and mouse completely misses the point. If the things that we ask our students to do seem so pointless that students would rather to spend time searching for something that looks like what they were supposed to do, then something's fundamentally wrong with the assignment. I see a couple ways to solve this problem.

Solving Problems

There's more stuff to know now than there was when we designed schools. I love to talk about how Socrates objected to people relying on the crutch of the written word. If you have to write it down or look it up on a piece of paper, you don't really know it, now do you? (Of course we wouldn't know that if his student Plato hadn't, uh, written it down.) And the cool thing was, that in his day, you could probably just know everything that there was to know.

The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. (From Phaedrus, though this link isn't working now either.)

Einstein ostensibly said that it was silly to memorize things that you could easily look up in a book. Now these are both pretty smart guys, but I'm inclined to think that Einstein's take has more bearing on the nature of learning today. It used to be that you could learn the tools of your trade, be it carpentry or engineering and be pretty well prepared for a lifetime of productivity. Today we're not so lucky. There's lots more stuff to learn and lots of it really isn't worth remembering. Twenty years ago when I solved a problem with a computer I made sure that I understood why the problem existed and how to avoid it in the future. Today I don't bother. The complexity of the various systems and how they interrelate is such that you probably can't really know what the problem really is. And with the next patch, revision or update, the problem won't exist anyway.

I think that schools need to focus on producing people who can solve new problems because that's what they'll need to do. If you can find out when the war of 1812 is using the Internet (or, dare I say it, Wikipedia), then that might just be good enough. It's not clear that memorizing that information is a particularly useful thing to do. Maybe we shouldn't ask people to.

Generating Stuff

What we need to do in schools is give students meaningful tasks, tasks that they have no reason not to do. We see lots of people creating lots of content on blogs, YouTube and so on. They aren't plagiarizing. And if they are re-using people's work, it's OK, because they're doing new stuff with it. They (mostly) aren't trying to pass off other's work as their own. They're posting this stuff for a few reasons. The one that I think is most important is that people want to create stuff that other people will see. And they don't just want them to see it, they want people to be affected by their work. How people are affected varies widely. Scientists want people to adopt their theories of how the world works. At breakfast this morning I heard that two guys in the same building came up with the idea of quarks at about the same time, but one of them called them quarks and the other called them, uh, something that sounded much more scientific but much less memorable. I argue that the goal of these scientists was not so much to understand the nature of matter, but to get other people to adopt their understanding. And kids (and other humans) who are posting things on YouTube and blogs and these other social networking sites are really doing the same thing. They are trying to get other people to adopt their way of thinking, or at least pay attention long enough to think about it, or better still, communicate about it.

Judith Fackler, my high school English teacher told us that if she could read everything that her students wrote, then her students weren't writing enough. She had us write five pages a week in a journal. On Friday's she'd count the pages we'd written. At first, I wrote really big, so as to have to write less. As time went on, however, I started writing smaller, and I kept a journal through college. (And much to my surprise, writing is pretty much the most important part of my job.) Having students produce works that will be seen by other students is a very effective technique for two reasons. First, it has them create more stuff, just like my journal for Ms. Fackler. But having an audience for the work makes it more meaningful, because sometimes someone will read something that they wrote and be changed by it. I have my students post their assignments to a forum. I require that they respond to two people's posts. Last semester, I realized that I mostly didn't read any of these posts. To my surprise, my students reported that the forums were one of the most useful parts of the class. If they'd turned them in to me and I'd given them grades, it would have taken much more of my time and they would have gotten much less out of it.

Oh well, I didn't quite tie this up as neatly as I'd hoped, but I've spent too much time on this already. #