A newspaper editor comments on the word-for-word plagiarism of one of a number of opinion pieces he published.
The pieces were plagiarized by a local school superintendent who has now resigned his position.
“I do remember the article; it was one of the more thoughtful submissions on education funding,” said Herb Pinder, the newspaper’s Opinion page editor. “We just wish, of course, that the work had been wholly original.”
… you start to get militant. Here’s the Boston College student newspaper editorial board.
[A]n overload of technology in the classroom has become a hindrance rather than a help to the learning process and that a return to the basics of teaching and note taking methods would benefit all.
All too often, laptop screens flash Facebook news feeds, the latest from “The Sports Guy” on ESPN.com, or the newest headlines on The New York Times. These online activities are a distraction not only to the participants, but also to those in the surrounding seats.
The issue of technology abuse is happening both in the desks and behind the podium. Increasingly, professors are relying heavily on teaching aids such as PowerPoint instead of the classical and traditional method of lecturing. A professor’s use of technology in the classroom, if not utilized properly, can create a teaching crutch that may be indicative of a larger wound. Appropriate teaching with technology is possible, but it can only be undertaken and utilized by the professors who are already skilled and excellent communicators.
Concerns about the overuse of technology in the classroom have created a new and vocal “teach naked” movement spearheaded by educators like Jose Bowen at Southern Methodist University. Additionally, research presented in both The Chronicle of Higher Education and the British Educational Research Journal suggests that students are more disengaged when computers are used in the classroom, and it is the lively debate and round-table discussions with peers that they found most valuable and memorable.
If this is an issue for students watching a PowerPoint, just imagine the additional negative effects of retreating behind a personal computer screen.
Some may argue that taking notes with a computer allows one to be more thorough, as most of us can type faster than we write. In reality, however, laptop note-taking prompts students to mindlessly type word-for-word what professors say or project in a presentation. With a notebook, students are forced to process what the professors say, to fashion ideas in their own terms, to paraphrase. Computer note-taking provokes regurgitation; manual note-taking provokes thought.
[W]e as students need to consciously make the decision to set aside our Facebooks or “farms” during the time we spend in lectures.
It’s a sad sad situation… Though I’m sure we’ll be able to find some stuff to laugh about… Like…
Like the fact that many universities have committed gazillions of dollars to high-technifying every second of class time — making laptops mandatory onaccounta they’re so great; making everybody buy cartloads of clickers — and now students are in rebellion.
Like the fact that universities are going to have to start trotting out their technospecialists on staff to give speeches to the students about how it’s actually obviously in their best interests to be taught by technoids instead of people… Latest thing and all… you won’t be ready for the big bad world out there if you’re not a technoid too…
But the students won’t listen and they’ll keep getting more naked in the classroom and insisting on their professor being naked and the school will keep issuing the professor more techo-clothes and putting the professor in more how-to-teach-like-a-technoid workshops…
When all that technology outlay turns out to be wasted money… When students become human beings and professors become technoids… Well, it’ll be fun to watch is all I’m saying.
At the end of the day, [comments Missouri athletic director Mike Arden,] is it still concerning for people to see expenses continue to go like this (he gestures upward)? Absolutely. But at least it’s being done in an open and transparent environment…
… about student laptop use in class are here.
… of the large lecture course.
Watch a professor at the University of North Florida smash a 2X4 over a guy’s head when the guy asks for payment for recent construction work.
To a university classroom near you.
From Seton Hall University’s announcement of this year’s faculty retreat series:
The Heart of the University Retreat Series gives faculty and administrators of all faiths the opportunity for quiet reflection guided by four members of the University’s priest community. The series is co-sponsored by the Office of Mission and Ministry, and the Center for Vocation and Servant Leadership.
The second retreat, given by Rev. Paul Holmes on the theme We Teach Who We Are: Authenticity in the Classroom, will be held on Wednesday, December 2, 2009, from 9 to 11 a.m., in the Regents Suite, Presidents Hall.
“Deep in the heart of every university are the hearts of its teachers, and as we explore the university’s identity, we naturally need to explore ourselves. Ultimately, whatever our discipline, we teach who we are – `professing’ our worldview, our ethics, our values, as well as our hopes and dreams.”
Agree or disagree.
Here’s a blog post, plus a long comment thread, on the glories of PowerPoint use in the classroom.
I get nothing out of [one particular] class. The instructor uses Web CT for grading, submissions, and announcements.
His lectures are all Powerpoint presentations. He didn’t write the presentations. He downloaded them from the same place I did, the textbook publisher’s website. No new material that is not in the book or on the Powerpoints is introduced. The only reason I go to class is because he will display a screen shot of what he wants done in the programming assignments.
As a tuition paying student I should get more out of class than what I would get if I just phoned in … my assignment.
The irresponsibility and cynicism of the professor described here is so flagrant that the student ends up looking like a dupe. Do you let scam artists into your home? No – the minute you see them slithering down the street, you lock your door. You should know, after one class session with a professor of this type, to drop the course.
The post has fifty-one comments so far. Take a look. Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the post itself — more explanation from a student as to why Powerpoint is designed for lazy professors.
…[M]any textbooks now come with ready-made PowerPoint lectures for each chapter. The problem is that when the professor does not make the presentation, they run the risk of sounding like they don’t know what they’re talking about. My current Operating Systems professor suffers from this. As each new slide comes up, he takes a second to read it and then starts with, “Okay, what this slide is talking about is …” or “What they mean by this is …” As opposed to explaining the material himself, it sounds like he just expects us to read the slides, and then let him elaborate. The primary instruction comes from the slides, and he just backs it up…
Could these two comments be any sadder? Any more scandalous? What are they saying? They’re saying that these professors aren’t teaching at all. A disgusting situation, for so many reasons. Here’s a pragmatic one: It can’t go on. Universities full of assholes who don’t teach will go out of business. Students will catch on to the scam. Simple as that.
Clifford Orwin on the actuality of ethics courses and oaths.
… I’m not suggesting that business students are bad people, or that those who would teach them to be good are any less competent than the rest of us. It’s just that the whole notion of teaching ethical behaviour rests on a fundamental misconception – namely, that ethical behaviour can be taught.
Now I’m a pretty good teacher, or so people say. Yet, give me Mr. Madoff for one, two or three courses of ethics instruction and he would still be Bernie Madoff. Would he have learned anything from the experience? Yes, he’d talk a much better game of ethics. Thanks to my teaching, he’d be an even greater menace to society.
This year, I’m teaching 500 students about justice, and I’m not making a single one of them a better person. Those who already aspire to justice may refine their understanding of what it is. (They may also come to see that everything has its problems, even justice.) Those already minded to be good citizens may become more thoughtful ones. I believe strongly in what I do – I just don’t think that what I do is to improve the moral character of my students.
Students indifferent to justice just aren’t going to be won over to it by anything that I could say. Or that anyone else could say. A university course is not a revival meeting. I don’t cure palsies and I don’t plead with students to come forward to declare themselves for ethics. And if I did – and if they did – it wouldn’t mean a thing. Talk is cheap. Talk consisting of high-minded oaths and declarations of one’s moral seriousness is even cheaper.
By the time a student arrives at university, and a fortiori several years later when he ambles on to his MBA, his ethical character is already firmly set. Whether virtue can ever be taught was already a thorny question for Plato. Whether it can be taught to adults, in a classroom, shouldn’t be a thorny question for anyone.
… What can ethics education accomplish, then, beyond informing of professional standards? It can serve as an exercise in self-celebration. Look at us students, how earnest we are in avowing how earnest we are. Look at our institution, how bent we are on making our students better people.
The relation of such palaver to actual conduct is doubtful, to say the least. Take Stanford University, where the student body avows itself as green as Kermit the Frog. Buttressed by a stack of PowerPoint graphs, a friend likes to demonstrate to his students that, as they have grown ever more Gaia-friendly over the years, their consumption of energy in the Stanford dorms has grown ever more mind-boggling. It’s those shiny gadgets of theirs. My friend does this for the sheer delicious malice of it, not because he expects a single student to unplug anything. He knows that, among any student body, ethics is primarily a fashionable pose.
Are there genuinely ethical businessmen, doctors, lawyers, police officers, plumbers? Sure. But not because of anything that I or any other professor taught them. Modesty, colleagues, modesty.
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Stanley Fish says something similar, less amiably.
Margaret Soltan says something similar.
… to absorb into itself a law school not far removed from a diploma mill continues.
Some people in the Massachusetts government, and at the University of Massachusetts, want to expand the university to include the Southern New England School of Law, an unaccredited institution whose pass rate on the bar — around 43% — is unconscionable. No school with that low a pass rate should be in business; it’s simply stealing money from students.
Two University of Massachusetts trustees say what needs to be said in a Boston Globe opinion piece. They’re not diplomatic.
When someone offers to “donate’’ a fourth-rate, unaccredited law school to a great state university, taxpayers should guard their wallets. [Donates is in quotation marks because although backers of the idea claim it won’t cost the state anything, it will of course cost a shitload. Not merely in money; in reputation.] …[A]bsorption of Southern New England School of Law would pose significant financial challenges and prove to be an academic embarrassment to the university.
… Upgrading facilities and services to achieve American Bar Association accreditation will cost tens of millions of dollars. Even accreditation won’t guarantee quality worthy of the UMass name. The law school does not have a single distinguished faculty member. Indeed, the quality of the education is so poor that in a recent administration of the Massachusetts Bar Exam,only 6 percent of Southern New England Law School grads passed.
… It is difficult to see how we can salvage this mess and create a law school to rival Boston’s excellent private law schools… Our economy does not need more ambulance chasers educated at taxpayer expense…
When your university president’s a sports-mad, nepotistic, crony-loving knave who failed as president of two universities before he got to yours, you can certainly expect a lot of bad things to happen.
To its credit, the beyond-demoralized faculty at the University of New Mexico has done no-confidence votes up the wazoo. Hell, everyone on campus makes noise about the wrecking-ball they’ve got for a president (UD took this post’s title from one of many such sentiments in the wake of UNM’s latest travesty, Psycho Soccergirl).
A letter-writer concludes in the same issue of the student newspaper, “It’s yet another example of poor judgment by coaches at the University of New Mexico. One also has to wonder what is going on with the athletics administration and their obvious ineptness in running clean, championship-caliber sports programs. What a sad time this is for UNM sports.”
Not sad. The proper response to your campus having become a house of ill-repute is not sorrow. It is anger.
… has been murdered, apparently by his mentally ill son. His 37-year-old daughter was also killed.
The NSW website announces his death here; subsequent pages about him on their site do not open, probably because they are overwhelmed with traffic.
#1:
… [W]hen I arrived at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2005, I didn’t identify myself as a Gopher. I came to study and get my degree, not to frolic in the flamboyance of our college sports teams and most certainly not to fund a $288.5 million TCF Bank Stadium. Yet this was an identity that was forced upon me. It was built into my tuition. It was assumed, because I lived within the University community, that of course I was a Gophers football fan and that I would have no qualms about chipping in for the sake of sport. It is a ridiculous and insulting assumption … We should be fighting for the separation of university life from collegiate sports. … Yes, TCF Bank Stadium has already been built, but we still have time to rethink the future of university sports. The recession affords us the opportunity to look critically at the institutions we have designed, modify them and maybe even start over…
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#2
Look up Ashley Nord, the latest Rhodes Scholar from the University, one of only 32 such individuals selected from the United States and a former Gophers track athlete.
While you are at it, you could talk to Hassan Mead, a five-time All-American in only four seasons of competition. He has a fascinating story of coming to America knowing no English and is now thriving as an athlete and a student. Talk to the director of student-athlete welfare to see the multitude of community service programs Gophers athletes engage in.
The unavoidable truth — perhaps an inconvenient one for many writers — is that the majority of University student-athletes pursue their athletics with passion while simultaneously outperforming their non-athlete peers in the classroom. Please, writers, the next time you write about the University imposing crushing financial burdens to pay for the stadium, remember to give credit where credit is due.
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From a comment on #2:
Did you mean for this letter to be published on the same day as articles about basketball player and football player thuggery?
Hassan Mead is absolutely a great runner. How does that contribute to the academic success of this university? … This is a research university, and I’ve seen 15 articles about Eric Decker but can’t remember the last article about research. I know they have some, but it’s obviously not a priority of the administration or the MN Daily.
Athletics do nothing but take away from this university, financially and otherwise.
Since 1972, Columbia Professor Lionel McIntyre’s people to people skills have deteriorated.
A prominent Columbia architecture professor punched a female university employee in the face at a Harlem bar during a heated argument about race relations, cops said yesterday.
Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges.
McIntyre and Davis, who works as a production manager in the school’s theater department, are both regulars at Toast, a popular university bar on Broadway and 125th Street, sources said.
Both of them were tanked up, I guess… Started arguing… Things got out of hand…
But really. McIntyre’s going to have to do better than this by way of a statement:
“It was a very unfortunate event,” he said afterwards. “I didn’t mean for it to explode the way it did.”
It, it, it… He needs more personal pronouns.