… the Central Michigan University math professors not guilty of plagiarizing a grant they took part in have begun to identify themselves.

One of the seven mathematics faculty members listed on the original National Science Foundation proposal that was found to be plagiarized confirmed she did not participate in writing the proposal.

Mathematics associate professor Lisa DeMeyer was one of the seven faculty members on the investigative staff for the grant proposal and was a senior staff member on the project.

She said in a letter e-mailed to Central Michigan Life she did not participate in writing the grant proposal.

“I assisted the co-principal investigators developing course materials, that was going to be my job but the project was stopped before the work was complete,“ DeMeyer said…

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Update: The plagiarists have been revealed: Manouchehri — now sharing her gifts with another university, Ohio State — and Lapp.

Manouchehri, now a professor at Ohio State University, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

You bet.

Her winning grant proposal to the NSF was plagiarized, as was its research. The school she just left, Central Michigan University, has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars back to the NSF, and, as one faculty member put it:

“We are under budget constraints, and this is a lot of money… I’m concerned that colleagues of mine committed what is a major breach of academic integrity. We tell our students all the time that they shouldn’t plagiarize in their papers, and here we have colleagues who should know better.”

Now at Ohio State she lists on her webpage cv the very grant.

2005-2007, Co-PI (with Douglas Lapp): CONCEPT: CONnecting Content and Pedagogical preparation of Teachers. National Science Foundation.

Here she is. Ohio State’s picked a winner.

Central Michigan University’s newspaper says many important things about PowerPoint use in the classroom. The article is very strong, but the student comment AFTER the article is even stronger.

Let’s take a look.

For Robert Bailey, using PowerPoint slides for his class lectures hinder a student’s learning capabilities.

Bailey, a professor of biology, teaches three entry-level biology courses and said he tries to keep PowerPoint use to a minimum.

“I used anywhere from 30 to 50 slides per class when I first started teaching and would give students print versions of the slides, but it didn’t take long for attendance to come down,” he said. “Before Thanksgiving break one year, only 10 students showed up for our final unit on human genetics. I knew I had to do something.”   [Point One, among many obvious points: Provide the same information online and students won’t come to class. UD is absolutely certain there are professors who welcome this outcome. Most do not.]

Bailey said students cannot seem to decide what is important from a PowerPoint presentation and think everything posted is golden.

“It’s convenient to use PowerPoint slides for large lecture classes, but students get caught up in trying to write everything down and spend their time writing instead of listening,” he said.   [Point Two, equally obvious: Too much information. The student who comments below will elaborate on the point.]

It can be useful, however.

“We just need to remember that less is more. Slides should contain the most useful information. I try not showing more than 10 slides per class. I believe active, not passive, learning is the most beneficial,” Bailey said. “By active learning, I mean group interaction, where we all can get a better understanding of what the issues are and solve them.”   [Point Three, yet more obvious. Turn people into confused sheeplike herds and they’re unlikely to learn anything.]

… [S]ophomore Brett McMahon said he does not like when PowerPoint slides are used in his classes.

“I like when teachers physically write on the board what they feel we need to know. PowerPoint presentations don’t make classes harder, just confusing. I never know what to write down and how much,” he said… [Point Four: Not only some discussion is crucial; clear signals about what the professor considers important to know are crucial. The things we go to the trouble of writing on the board with our very own fingers are the important things, not the twelve bullet points some book has provided for your slide. Physically writing on the board is also letting the students watch the professor’s brain operate right there in front of them. PowerPoint of course makes professors just as passive as it makes students.  Everyone reads off of a nice neat packaged page. Writing on the board is messy, human, dynamic — thought in motion. Active.]

[F]reshman Erika Schrand said knowing what to copy is easier when professors write directly on the board.

“Sometimes teachers put too much information on the slides and I can’t sort what is important from all the other excess information,” she said.

[Now to the comment.]

One Response to “Some CMU faculty moving away from PowerPoint presentations in classroom”

Antonio says:

Professors trying to use Powerpoint for their lectures has been my biggest pet-peeve while attending CMU. It’s a waste of paper, ink, and time, and only increases tuition to cover the cost of the paper and ink wasted when students print out full slides of black background presentations.

No offense to the professors, as I’ve had many great ones over the years, but I’ve never had a professor who provided notes correctly by use of a computer. (Ok, maybe one). Most of the time, the idea of outline organization has been non-existent.

I do realize professional seminars and events such as TED seminars often use Powerpoints, but the environments there are completely different than a classroom.

To the professors: Anyone can remember and regurgitate information given to us on pre-made Powerpoint presentations, but if it’s information we could have critically and actively filtered through while simply listening to you speak, why make a Powerpoint for it? Why not just give us the ideas and concepts you want us to understand without dividing our attention away from listening to instead focusing on a big projector with the SAME thing you just said, just in different wording?

This makes even less sense when you take into account how much professors usually dislike all the new technology, anyway. Why give us Powerpoint notes, base exams solely on those notes, and then mark us down for not coming to class? What do you honestly expect to come of that?

The only bigger interest killer I’ve seen is when professors spend 5-10 minutes trying to project a piece of paper that everyone already has. Why do we need to see it in two different places? We know how to follow along.

Contrary to popular belief, it is very possible to give a lecture without all these external visual aids. Every time a new semester begins, or there is some problem with the computer network, up to 5-10 minutes or more is wasted trying to figure out the technology, and if it doesn’t work, the professor acts like he/she doesn’t know what to do. For some reason, it seems academic administrations have forgotten the simple tool of speaking outward to a classroom without all this technology mumbo jumbo.

Conclusion: Step away from trying to fumble with the technology and tell us what you want us to know. If the technology is absolutely necessary for your lecture, figure it out beforehand instead of during class time.

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Teach us something.

Speak to us.

Outwardly.

BE.

THERE.

NOW.

From The Morning Sun, a Central Michigan newspaper:

The Genealogical Society of Isabella County is presenting a Victorian Funeral Tea and Cemetery Walk at 1 p.m. at Centennial Hall in Mt. Pleasant. Tickets may be purchased in advance. Cost is $20. Contact Sherry at 772-0155. Kim Parr of Crocker House Museum will be the speaker. Sponsored by Helms Funeral Home, Berry Funeral Home and Clark Funeral Chapel. This is one of the county’s sesquicentennial events.

… but UD‘s hometown abundantly – maybe even uniquely – caters to your every political whim. So UD has for awhile been taken up with the issue of global female genital mutilation (half a million women in the United States have been cut, or are at risk of cutting, 50,000 of them in the Washington region; Maryland, where UD lives, is one of eight states with the highest rates), and a couple of nights ago she had merely to walk a few hundred yards from her university office in order to take part in a spectacular global forum about it.

She was able to ask one of the lead DOJ attorneys on the Jumana Nagarwala case in Detroit if we’re actually going to be able to put this Johns Hopkins University med school graduate in prison for a long time.

“We do not,” she replied, “take cases we are not confident we can win.” (Applause broke out at this.)

UD looks forward to Johns Hopkins University publicly rescinding Nagarwala’s degree, on the grounds that medical schools in the United States are not butcheries.

Linda Weil-Curiel, a heroic French attorney with a heroic family history, described her years of successful prosecution against cutters. “My most rewarding moment? I was sitting in a courthouse, looking over some notes, when three large and menacing men surrounded me. ‘You’re the reason our women no longer obey us,’ they said.”

Here she talks about the central, overwhelming importance of a secular state with a commitment to universal human rights. Lately she’s been trying to get all of this across to hapless England, which has a scandalously huge FGM problem, about which it seems unable to do anything. But of course French laïcité gives them an advantage, in this as in so many other matters.

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Speaking of visually compelling, Pierre Foldès, the surgeon who pioneered reconstructive surgery for those who’ve been cut, was also there, and he treated us to many large graphic images of the whole shebang: mutilation, rehabilitation. Ol’ UD wasn’t expecting this, and she doesn’t mind telling you she underwent a certain interval of heebie-jeebies until she settled in to the whole clinical observation thing.

… when it’s all about screens, it’s only a matter of time before the classroom and the stadium disappear. Why go to class if it’s about playing on your computer while some fool at the front of the room plays with PowerPoint? Why go to a football game if it’s about forced, game-long watching of football-field-length mega-screens (the famed Adzillatrons) screaming ads for used cars at you, while you wait for the people who control the home viewer’s television screen to decide those ads are over and play can resume? Why would any rational, self-respecting person continue either of these degrading and pointless activities?

Let’s be more precise. Let’s look at fabled sports school University of Michigan.

This spring, the Michigan athletic department admitted what many had long suspected: Student football ticket sales are down, way down, from about 21,000 in 2012 to a projected 13,000-14,000 this season.

The department has blamed cell phones, high-definition TV and student apathy sweeping the nation. All real problems, to be sure, but they don’t explain how Michigan alienated 40 percent of its students in just two years — and their parents, too.

Forty percent in two years. Wow. Let’s see how they did it!

1. Since the game-day experience is so wonderful, you raise “the price from $195 for six games in 2013 to $295 for seven games.”

2. “Because just about every major college game is televised, ticket holders have to endure about twenty commercial breaks per game, plus halftime. That adds up to more than 30 minutes of TV timeouts — about three times more than the 11 minutes the ball is actually in play.”

3.

While TV is running ads for fans at home, college football stadiums too often give their loyal season-ticket holders not the marching band or — heaven forbid — time to talk to their family and friends, but rock music and, yes, ads! To its credit, Michigan doesn’t show paid advertisements [most other universities do], but the ads it does show — to get fans to host their weddings at the 50-yard line, starting at $6,000, and their corporate receptions in the skyboxes, starting at $9,000 — Michigan fans find just as annoying.

Yes, advertising in the Big House does matter. Americans are bombarded by ads, about 5,000 a day. Michigan Stadium used to be a sanctuary from modern marketing, an urban version of a National Park. Now it’s just another stop on the sales train… Fans are fed up paying steakhouse prices for junk food opponents, while enduring endless promotions. The more college football indulges the TV audience, the more fans paying to sit in those seats feel like suckers.

(By the way, all of this will be okay when the University of Las Vegas builds its new football stadium with the world’s largest Adzillatron. Las Vegas is Suckers Central.)

4. While waiting for the ads to finish so those precious eleven minutes can begin to tick, fans can contemplate the AD’s “$1 million salary, almost three times what [the previous AD] paid himself — and yes, the AD does pay himself — plus [the current AD’s] $300,000 annual bonus, which contributes to a 72-percent increase in administrator compensation; not to mention an 80-percent increase in “marketing, promotions and ticketing”; and a 340-percent increase in “Hosting, Food and Special Events.”

… (or anyway that’s the famous phrase we all like) characterizes quite a few American universities.

Some of these village idiots aren’t in rural settings at all – echt-provincial Suffolk University (Boston), St. John’s University (New York), Yeshiva University (New York), and St. Louis University (St. Louis) are four urban cow towns whose brainless money grubbing (self-righteous money grubbing at that, if, like Yeshiva, St. John’s, and St. Louis, they align themselves with synagogues and churches) this blog has chronicled.

All American universities have closed, small-town aspects to them; here, we’re talking about truly tribal fortresses with certifiable martinets.

To turn a university (think of the word itself) into a banana republic, you need — call it structural cronyism. The president, the board of trustees, the coaches, the big-time donors — in order to make an intellectual institution deadhead central, all must be in synch.

You see the model at work at Oakland University in Michigan, whose women’s basketball coach was married to the school’s president. (Yes, yes, UD believes people should marry whoever they want.) Power seems to have gone to the coach’s head to the point where she did a sort of Mike Rice on her players, who report – among other cult rituals – bizarre physical and religious tests. Things got so weird that the Ceausescus of Oakland have now been toppled; but you’d think schools would learn, from one story after another of this sort, the difference between cherishing their particular identities and becoming rural idiots.

Boyce Watkins on the latest Michigan scandal.

… One can hardly blame Michigan Coach Rodriguez for pushing the players too hard, since universities make it clear that winning percentages matter far more than graduation rates. The University of Kentucky’s decision to pay nearly $30 million dollars to John Calipari, a coach known for both corruption and a lack of academic integrity, sends a message about the importance of winning games over educating athletes.

We know that corruption rolls down hills and at the bottom of this pile are the players, their families and the entire African-American community. NCAA athletes in revenue- generating sports are typically kept in special dormitories, forced to live on rigorous athletic schedules, and pushed to place football ahead of everything else. All the while, the administrators on central campus, as educated as they are, turn themselves into unenlightened blind mice when confronted with the reality of athletic exploitation.

… Massive reform is needed not only within the Michigan football program, but also within all of college sports. Congress must step in and challenge the NCAA for anti-trust violations, as well as its tax-exempt status. NCAA revenues during March madness rival that of the NFL and NBA, so it’s time to note the NCAA for what it truly is: a professional sports league that artificially restricts the wages of its employees…