betajames

On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the page, the proper amount of thumb space—and the micro—the right amount of leading, the evenness of the word spacing, the correct break of a line. On the screen, the rhythm of a text encompasses all of these things and more—the placement of a link, the shift from text to video and back again, the movement from one text to another. The rhythm becomes more complex as the orchestra gets larger, but the desire for rhythm does not subside.

In order to create this rhythm, the book must be designed and composed for the screen. A beautiful digital text can no more be arrived at by “converting” from a print design than a beautiful print book can be created by converting a Word file. The digital book will never come into its own so long as it is treated as a byproduct, unworthy of attention.

The research, published in The Journal of Educational Psychology, found that students tend to study on computers as they would with traditional texts: They mindlessly over-copy long passages verbatim, take incomplete or linear notes, build lengthy outlines that make it difficult to connect related information, and rely on memory drills like re-reading text or recopying notes.

Meanwhile, undergraduates in the study scored 29 to 63 percentage points higher on tests when they used study techniques like recording complete notes, creating comparative charts, building associations, and crafting practice questions on their screens.

Many of the advances in space travel have come from the hard-won experience of past failures, but NASA and its brethren also rely on paid volunteers, who subject themselves to all manner of surreal and bizarre experiments that attempt to replicate living in space. For instance, in 1962 NASA funded a motion sickness study in which twenty Navy cadets were harnessed to a chair mounted on its side, and then rotated, rotisserie style, at up to thirty revolutions per minute, approximately six times faster than the chickens turn at Boston Market. (Only eight of the twenty cadets completed the exercise.)

While the invention of writing itself could never have progressed without a highly structured and even authoritarian state to back it up, the coming of the modern alphabet is a completely different story. Written in Cuneiform we have the wonderful adventures of Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu, but most of the clay-tablets from the agricultural city-states are more mundane: lists, taxation, and commercial transactions.

Over the past eight years I’ve been studying the cognitive demands of physical work. That includes comparatively high-end jobs such as surgery and physical therapy, but mostly blue-collar and service occupations, such as plumbing and hair styling — the kind of occupations the people we just heard from hope to enter. Our society tends to make sharp and weighty distinctions between white collar and blue collar occupations, between brain work and hand work, “neck up and neck down” jobs, as one current aphorism has it.

But what I’ve found as I’ve closely examined physical work is its significant intellectual content. This content is no surprise if we consider the surgeon, but the carpenter and the hair stylist and the welder, too, are constantly solving problems, applying concepts, making decisions on the fly. A lot of our easy characterizations about work just don’t hold up under scrutiny. Hand and brain are cognitively connected.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

In the broader intellectual sphere, incidents of plagiarism skyrocketed in universities in the late 1990s, and some people reached for scapegoats like the Evil Internet. But others began to rethink plagiarism, not only what it was but what it meant that administrators and instructors reacted as they did. Rebecca Moore Howard, a professor at Syracuse University, sensed that her students were lifting sentences from published sources not because they were bad people or didn’t know how to cite things, but because they didn’t understand the texts they were reading well enough to synthesize them. Howard realized that what was monolithically labeled “plagiarism” by institutions was actually a bunch of activities. Some you could legitimately condemn. Some you could teach through. Others were culturally acceptable practices, even time-honored and literary ones. The students had simply done them awkwardly or badly. Howard advocated that policies on student authorship abandon the monolith and try to find students where they were, morally and cognitively.

if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale  (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless  you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself.  It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into.

People have been going to libraries and using books and then not citing them forever. I don't think there's anyone who hasn't plagiarized. When I was in elementary school, for instance, we'd go to the library with index cards and open up the encyclopedia and write down exactly what it said. The difference is that now we can type the things we think are plagiarized into Google and see what comes up. But in a sense more students getting caught is a positive thing, because it creates a real teachable moment for us, when we can explain very thoroughly why it's not OK to write like that.

Most of the students were quite awkward in their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a seminar on "Designing for Effective Change" for the Honors Program, but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class there was a need for them to unlearn much of their approach which had been finely tuned and was quite successful in their other classes. They needed to take more responsibility for their choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on which to write, I also gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so long as they could create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of the early writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other readers if they didn’t first please themselves

I have tried to maintain some semblance of the spontaneous nature of blogging, and an awareness of the many different ways bloggers can blog, by assessing blogs via portfolio.

Some students are punctual minimalists (dutifully answering a prompt, and then stopping). Others are eccentric geniuses (who will occasionally write long, thoughtful, passionate pieces, but won't write much at all unless they feel inspired).

Some prefer to blog after class (to post ideas they couldn't formulate on demand in a face-to-face setting), and others draft soliloquies in MS-Word and copy-paste into the blogging form. Still others do their best work in the comments attached their peers' blog entries, or by making lateral connections via hyperlinks.

While I do occasionally post specific prompts, in general all I ask is that students blog SOMETHING for each assigned reading (usually a brief quote from the reading, and a brief statement of what the student would say about their chosen passage, if called on in class). 

Students did acknowledge that certain websites—mostly those ending in .gov, .edu—were more credible than others because they weren't written by "just anybody." However, some felt the same way about .org sites, and were unaware that .org domains could be sold to anyone (and therefore have about the same credibility as any .com out there).

Still, the takeaway is that a large majority of students give more weight to the search tool they're using than the sites they're finding via those searches. The paper quoted numerous students professing their particular love for Google, or talking about how Microsoft's search services are credible because Microsoft is a "more professional" company—basically, search engine brands meant a lot to the students using them, and those students seem to place credibility on the automated search rankings provided by those services.

For me, interval training works wonders — this blog post, for instance, has taken me 70 minutes to research and write — ordinarily a blog post like this before I had this set-up would take me nearly a full day's worth of work. More importantly though, I'm able to do things like read long articles or even academic papers — things I never used to "have time for" which really meant "had attention for.

The biggest design issue with multiple choice tests is that writing a good, coherent multiple choice question is difficult because of the thin line between right and kinda right. Being adept at it means specializing both in the craft itself and having an encyclopedic knowledge of the field being tested. Most exams that I’ve worked with were written by very informed people who wrote frustratingly ambiguous questions. An example of a bad question would be one that distinguished the right and kinda right answer because one used the word “presumed” and the other used “inferred”. While the words certainly have two different meanings, spotting the distinction had nothing to do with the subject matter of the question. Professional exam writers are aware of this problem and now many exams will test a question out before actually counting it. Out of an exam of 100 questions, 10 will be experimental ones that see how many people get it right. Once they’ve got the rough percentage of how many people get it wrong on average, they factor it in with easier and more difficult ones. It goes back to the overall purpose of the exam being to exclude people but not too many people. A multiple choice exam is looking for a sweetspot of a certain percentage passing, not too high and not too low.