Students Not So Web-Savvy?

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus reports that sociologist Eszter Hargittai has discovered that students are not as web-savvy as professors might think. Some of her findings seem intuitive. For example, whether someone is web-savvy is related to his or her socioeconomic status. Also, students have difficulty evaluating the credibility of information on the web (e.g., not understanding why Wikipedia doesn't substitute for meatier sources). However, I don't necessarily agree with her definition of "web-savvy." She said that not being familiar with things like "phishing" and "BCC" is not being web-savvy. I'll have to think about that. Here's my favorite quote from the article:

At the beginning of my classes, I tell my students, “I know you don’t think
I know as much as you because I’m older. I assure you, I know way more than you
guys about this.”

I don't know that I'd put it just that way . . .

New Orleans Day 2 (4/21)

Today is an ICW day. The ICW is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is, of course, that I get all my citation teaching done during breaks by keeping the ICW up-to-date with new exercises and answers each year (along with my co-author Christine Hurt). The curse is that, while we have three sets of 18 exercises that we rotate through on a three-year cycle, inevitably either the Bluebook (for which I didn't get one of their offers of free online access -- hmph) or the ALWD Manual (which always remembers me with a free review copy) comes out with a new edition, requiring a scouring of the problems and answers for changes to be made. This year, the scouring is taking place over the newer edition (3d) of the ALWD Manual. The next time we use this set of exercises, I'm guessing we'll be updating for the 4th edition of the ALWD and the 19th edition of the Bluebook. Good times . . .

So anyway, on Day 2 of the NOLA III trip last week, we all split up into our teams and headed out to our placements. I was at Common Ground with a colleauge and four students. Our first day was spent the way many first days at SHN placements are spent: figuring out what they need and how best to accomplish it. With law students coming in and out year-round for one-week stints, it's easy to keep losing some of your institutional memory. Considering the disconnect that the various agencies experience with this revolving door of help, it's amazing how much SHN has managed to move the ball forward on the legal issues affecting New Orleans.

We were told about a couple of issues that Common Ground needed more information about. Many of them seemed to fall under the general category of "New Orleans schools." It seemed like there were issues with charter schools having admissions criteria that made them inaccessible to most students, public schools being far away from many students' homes, and students being expelled for the slightest infraction. It certainly sounded bad.

Sidebar: I was never a big fan of The Bramble Bush. However, during times like Day 2, I'm reminded of Karl Llewellyn's advice that you have to scratch your eyes out and then scratch them back in again. I suppose more modern learning theorists would tell me that we needed to educate ourselves in the particular language and rules of the discourse community of New Orleans education so we could figure out what needed to be done. But it felt more like scratching my eyes out.

So we spent a day trying to figure out the byzantine system of New Orleans schools. There are charter schools and public schools. Some are operated by the Orleans Parish School District; others are operated by something called The Recovery School District (set up in 2003 to help the city's schools recover from low test scores; obviously, "recovery" had taken on a whole new meaning after 2005). Orleans Parish school district operates the handful of high-performing public schools as well as another handful of charter schools with admissions criteria that include prior academic achievement, prior behavior, and parental involvement. The Recovery School District operates everything else. Attendance at all schools is on an "open enrollment" basis, which means that students are not necessarily assigned to schools based on which are closest to their homes. Although students in the Recovery School District get to choose which school they go to, selection for particular schools is done by lottery and requires that the parents navigate a maze of applications and deadlines. Parents who need help can consult the online parents guide that spans 110 pdf pages. I can imagine that a family planning on returning to New Orleans might get easily discouraged after stumbling onto the parents guide and its explanation of the school system. Don't get me wrong: it's a good guide. But it's 110 pages. And it describes a school system unlike any that my team had encountered before. It helps to have not only the guide but also a live person sitting next to you saying, "Yes, this really is how it works."

So we decided that what parents could use was a one- or two-page brochure that made the process more manageable. Fortunately, right around this time, my teammate and colleague Marjorie Silver connected with a local judge, David Bell. Judge Bell is the Chief Judge of the Juvenile Courts in New Orleans and knew a lot about the school system pre-Katrina and post-Katrina, and he could also shed some light on some of the juvenile justice issues Common Ground was concerned about. To our utter amazement and delight, he agreed to come address everyone in NOLA III after our check-in meeting that evening. Judge Bell described innovative programs in the New Orleans juvenile justice system (Google: judge david bell). After he spoke to us about the aftermath of the levee breaches and the changes that had been made in the schools and the juvenile justice system, he offered to set up tours of a variety of schools for the next day. Bingo!

Now we had a mission (create the back-to-school brochure) and a source of first-hand information (school contacts and tours). At the end of Day 2 we were ready to scratch our eyes in again!

Facebook is Taking Over My Life!

I've now had a Facebook profile for about 10 days or so. If you ever wonder if your students will find your Facebook profile, should you decide to put one up, the answer is a resounding yes. Every law professor I've found on Facebook so far has at least a handful of student "friends" associated with their profile. I've picked up quite a few in the last week, owing mostly, I think, to spending nearly a week with a number of them in New Orleans.

I had two goals in setting up the Facebook profile, and I think both have been satisfied already: the first was to provide another way for students to reach me (I like being accessible to them, and I've read that they don't use e-mail as much as they do Facebook for quick communications); the second was to just see what the allure was to providing so much personal information about oneself in such a public forum.

It seems that you have to be that odd combination of computer dork and social butterfly to appreciate Facebook if you're not a Millennial. If you're a Millennial, the skills required to master Facebook don't put you in the "dork" category -- it's just what people know how to do. My husband is a bona fide computer dork -- he makes his living programming electric engines for hybrid dump trucks. But he's not a social butterly. So Facebook doesn't appeal to him at all.

I'm a different story. I love to learn people's stories, and I love sharing mine. Facebook provides a way to be known by someone really quickly. And it provides a way to keep up with everyone in your network really easily. You can literally get up-to-the-minute information on everyone. If one of your friends is reading a new book, enjoying a good meal, making new friends, joining a new Facebook group, contributing money to a cause -- you name it -- you can get all that information in a News Feed on your page. Of course, they get the same information about you. So as you get more information about your friends, Facebook taunts you to include more information about yourself. My friends have a list of books they're reading on their page? Hey, I want a list of books I'm reading on my page, too!

If you thought the Internet could suck time out of your day, you should try Facebook. The amount of information that you can access about others and provide about yourself is limitless. It's addictive.

For the most part, I have to say that I'm impressed that my students' Facebook profiles contain appropriate information. If they were drunk in any of the posted pictures, it's not apparent. Granted, my sample size is exceedingly small and composed primarily of students who just spent their spring break doing volunteer work in Louisiana. So I'll concede that it may not be representative of Millennials on Facebook in general.

This coming fall, I'm planning on providing my Facebook profile to students as a way of communicating with me outside of class. Periodically, I'll check in with how I think that's going and whether it seems to be worthwhile. I'm also thinking about what kind of analogies to Facebook my be helpful to students as they learn to do legal research. I used to use an analogy between legal research and the phonebook. I start with, "How would you find contact information for someone if all you know is her name?" The last time I asked that question, "Facebook" was the answer.

In the meantime, I have to go add more widgets to my Facebook page.

New Orleans Day 1 (4/20)

I was in New Orleans for four days and change; now I've been back for four days and change. And I've only just made it to a place that I can start to unpack from my head the significant experience that was the Touro Student Hurricane Network's NOLA III trip. For Touro, this is the third time (thus NOLA III) that it's sent its SHN network down to New Orleans. Each time, between 20 and 30 enthusiastic students have gone on the trip.

As someone who grew up a stone's throw from New Orleans, I have wondered, truthfully, how much of the enthusiasm was about doing good and how much was about Bourbon Street and the French Quarter. The further you live from New Orleans, the more likely you are to regard Bourbon Street as a genuine vacation destination. Granted, I always traveled in a particularly dorky circle, but New Orleans seemed like too much effort to just end up sleeping on the bathroom floor at the end of the night. In college and law school, I thought I'd demonstrated sufficiently that I could do that from the comfort of my own apartment. So that's the bias I carried with me to New Orleans.

The other bias I carried with me was that no one who hadn't experienced Katrina and its aftermath firsthand could ever fully understand what happened and how intentional -- or at least reckless -- some of the destruction and diaspora-creation was. I had been at the Astrodome as bus after bus of Gulf Coast evacuees came in, and I saw how devastating the flood caused by levee breaches had been on the residents (to say that this was the result of a hurricane doesn't put responsibility where it goes -- to me, this will always be the 2005 Levee Failure, at least where New Orleans is concerned).

I was wrong, wrong, wrong about the students on both counts and am reminded once again that I should have donated my righteous indignation to a worthy cause before I left Houston -- I have very little occasion for it in New York. While students definitely wouldn't hit you over the head for offering them a drink, that wasn't their primary motivation for coming to New Orleans. That became abundantly clear as 30 students (and three faculty members) showed up in the early mornings to assemble with their teams, bleary-eyed at times (not the faculty), but ready to go do some good.

I should have known better when I realized that my plane ticket, arranged for by Touro's SHN and paid for by my generous dean, had me leaving with the rest of the group from JFK at 7:35 a.m. We clearly weren't trying to get there just in time for happy hour. In fact, the leader of Touro's SHN, Ray Malone, had arranged for us to tour the Lower 9th Ward and check in with Common Ground to see what progress had been made with their legal clinic specifically and with other operations generally. Only after we had the lay of the land would the students be set free for some down time.

First, Daniel -- Malik Rahim's assistant -- took us down the Lower 9th Ward to see the current state of the levees down there. There's definitely some new levee building down in the Lower 9th, but not exactly what's needed from what we saw. As long as the next rush of water asks politely in which direction it should go will the levees hold back the water. Daniel took us to a platform that had been built so people could get a better view of the levee system that "protects" the Lower 9th as well as a better view of the Lower 9th itself. You'll notice in the pictures large expanses of undeveloped land. Those are lots that used to hold houses. They've since been razed, and

Common Ground is working hard to make sure that the landowners for those lots are able to come home and rebuild.

The students were appropriately appalled as they heard stories about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the levee breaches. Students who had been to New Orleans on previous SHN trips were able to talk about the difference in New Orleans since the first trip last year and the second trip earlier this year.

About 1/3 of the group would be there until Thursday; the rest would be there until Saturday. We were divided into teams for a variety of projects. I was in the team assigned to Common Ground's Legal Clinic in the Lower 9th, an organization that had previously occupied a converted school bus. Everyone who had worked in the school bus was excited to see a bricks and mortar building to work in, even if didn't yet have air conditioning (which was already necessary in Louisiana's oppressive "spring" heat). We also had two teams working on a mapping project in St. Bernard Parish, the purpose of which was to determine who lived in the houses that were habitable and who lived in the houses that were in various states of repair or disrepair. This is part of a concerted effort to bring residents back to New Orleans. We had a team working on various legal issues at New Orleans Legal Assistance Center and another at the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

In addition to the dedicated students on the trip, Prof. Marjorie Silver, Prof. Louise Harmon, and I were there to do what we could. It was good for us to be able to sit back and let the students take the lead. We were the rookies for a change; it was definitely the students' show.

Up next: Day 2 in which we get started at Common Ground and find a "charge" for the week!

Blogging from New Orleans

I'm blogging from New Orleans this week, where I'm spending 4 days with the Touro chapter of the Student Hurricane Network. My assignment is at Common Ground. We stopped off there briefly after we got in from the airport. Common Ground is an inspiring operation that's working to rebuild New Orleans on many fronts at once. It's able to do what it does in part because of the Millennials' volunteering spirit. Most of the contingent from Touro is made up of Millennials, but we have a few Boomers thrown in for good measure (on both the student and faculty sides).

From just the little time that I've spent with the students already, I'm impressed with their many admirable qualities: good-natured, collegial, appalled at injustice, and ready to do some good.

Pictures from the first day!

Silly Rabbit, Tricks are for Kids

You've probably discovered by now that the U. of Chicago classroom Internet shutdown story is legitimate. They actually shut down the Internet in the classrooms. So far, the administration seems satisfied with the trick they've played on the students (see report from the IT Director below).

Why do I call it a trick? Because it's an illuuuuuusion that the Internet can be turned off. I won't number here the many, many ways that students will come up with to get around the shutdown. But I will say this: U. of Chicago is fighting the wrong battle on the wrong front. This is going to turn into a tit-for-tat back-and-forth, and it's likely that neither administration, faculty, or students will be happy with the resolution.

What really stands out to me in the IT Director's informal report is this sentence: "The fact is that, while we're ready if and when it does happen, the faculty have not yet found a compelling pedagogical use of the internet in our classrooms, so there is really no need to have it present." Hello? The Internet has been around long enough and has been used effectively at all levels of education and in the practice of law that I don't know that, as a law professor, I'd be willing to throw in the towel so easily and admit that I just cannot, for the life of me, find "a compelling pedagogical use" for it.

What's more, if students have been using the Internet in your class in sufficient numbers that it warrants turning the network off, then you have a bigger problem than the Internet. It's time to face the difficult facts: you are either boring, ineffective at controlling a classroom, and/or unimaginative. Turning off the wireless network isn't going to remedy any of those problems. Banning laptops isn't going to remedy any of those problems. Nothing you do on the student side is going to remedy those problems.

Here's the report from the IT guy at Chicago:

Well, if many are so curious......

As those of you reading are probably aware, wireless and wired network access was turned off in the classroom wing (not elsewhere) just before the Spring quarter began here at the U of Chicago Law School in accordance with the Dean and faculty's wishes. This was done, with everyone knowing full well, that wireless broadband existed as well as wireless bleed-in from other areas in the Law School.

After several weeks here's how things have played out: Despite very vocal outbursts from a small number of people it has mostly been a non-event. Some of the students are quite unhappy about it and not shy about letting the administration (and the world) know, some are unhappy but silent, some just don't care, and quite a significant number seem to be pleased with the policy. The Dean hosted a town meeting largely addressing this issue last week and dealt with numerous comments from those wishing to vent about the policy. Most of the comments, while presented somewhat better and much more verbosely were basically, "I'm an adult and if I want to surf the web in class and ignore the lecture, I should be able to." Only one person made any attempt at an academic complaint and that was that sometimes people "zoned out" and needed to send emails to their peers for them to fill them in on what they had missed. I found it rather ironic that he failed to realize that his
emails were certainly a distraction away from the lecture for the recipient (perhaps they could email another friend, starting a chain reaction?). The fact is that, while we're ready if and when it does happen, the faculty have not yet found a compelling pedagogical use of the internet in our classrooms, so there is really no need to have it present. The wired connections in one room were left active for Lexis and Westlaw training and there is plentiful wired and wireless access in the rest of the Law School for the times when people are not in class.

Our central campus networking group is currently working on a system to allow the wired connections in each room to be turned on or off at the professor's preference. This system will likely also be applied to the wireless for the whole wing since isolating wireless to a single room is problematical.

When this was first proposed many people expressed opinions to me that the decision would be quickly overturned due to an overwhelming cacophony of complaints. That has not been the case at all. The Dean feels even more strongly now that it was the right thing to do and the cacophony never really materialized. While those reading the abovethelaw blog, and now Slashdot (we're famous!), might think otherwise from those sources, it has pretty much been business as usual, with a lot less email and web browsing in class. I've also had several queries from other Law Schools indicating that their Deans were watching this carefully because they were interested as well. Based upon things here so far, don't be too surprised if we're not the last Law School to do this.

Ted Ressell
Director of Information Technology
The University of Chicago Law School

Message to the Deans who are "watching this carefully because they were interested as well": Be better than this. Expect more from your faculty than this. Provide a more innovative education than this.

Istanbul Legal Skills Conference

The Istanbul Legal Skills Conference will bring together professors from the United States and European Union to discuss legal analysis and writing skills with Turkish lawyers and law students. Bahcesehir University's Institute for Global Understanding in Law in Istanbul offers programs to Turkish lawyers that expose them to trends in law and legal education around the world. The Legal Writing Institute is the second-largest American organization of law professors, with members in 48 countries. LWI has offered programs to law professors, judges, and lawyers in the United States, London, Prague, and Nairobi.

The site contains registration information for both the conference and the August 1-3excursion. Over the next few weeks, I'll be adding bios and pictures for all speakers as well as more information about places to see in Istanbul.

Taking the Facebook Plunge

I did it. I joined Facebook. I put together the profile, added the pictures, the whole nine yards.

As it turns out, I set up an account over a year ago. I have only a hazy memory of doing it, but I seem to remember that it was in response to some nastiness that some students had written about a colleague. I was outraged and, in a moment of haste, thought I might bust up the party with some dramatic pronouncement (I was thinking of something along the lines of "gotcha!" -- clever, right?). But the process of joining Facebook turned out to be a lot of effort, or at least it seemed like it at the time, convincing me to abandon the process pretty much after I'd selected a user name and password.

So I forgot the Facebook account until several people invited me to join them as "friends" on Facebook. The one that got my attention was my first boyfriend's sister. It's a powerful network that can track down you brother's ex-girlfriend from 20 years ago. You used to have to need a private investigator -- and a reason -- to do something like that. Hearing from the ex-boyfriend's sister "inspired" me to Google the ex-boyfriend. He's fine, by the way. He apparently didn't die of grief that we broke up in 1991 after dating off and on for seven years, which is fine. It's fine. Really. Fine. Cad. But I digress . . .

Then there was this interesting confluence of events. I searched my e-mail to see who else had wanted to add me as a Facebook Friend. One of the requests came from my best pal from law school. She's 15 years my senior and is on Facebook. Really. Next, someone posted a message about Facebook on a law professor's listserv, indicating that it was good to be on Facebook. As it turns out, a lot of people 15 years my senior are on Facebook. People who are not at all creepy. People who are on SSRN. I succumbed to the peer pressure, pulled up my old Facebook account (whose password I remembered courtesy of a savant-like talent I have for odd combinations of letters and numbers), and started filling in details.

So there I am. Something about having a Facebook profile honestly makes me feel a little exposed. I feel like I'm hitchiking on the information highway in my pajamas.

And I have to admit that I do sympathize with the students a little more, having gone through the process of setting up. It is hard to remember that it can be accessed by my students, my Dean, my friends, my children, and my mother-in-law. That's such a broad audience that it almost defies the brain's ability to imagine it. Admittedly, this blog can be accessed by all those people as can my faculty profile on Touro's home page, but the blog and faculty profile reveal far less information about me than the Facebook profile forms ask for. I want to be personable, but I don't want to be stalked or inappropriate.

Modern life is so complex.

The Best of Both Worlds

Not the Hannah Montana song. This is "hybrid" or "blended" classes -- those that are taught using both online and in-class instruction to teach. There's some anecdotal evidence from a University of Houston professor that students learn better with the hybrid format than with in-class learning alone.

Brian McFarlin, a professor at the University of Houston’s Laboratory of Integrated Physiology, decided to conduct an experiment in one of his classes to observe the strengths and weaknesses of hybrid courses. The project was partly funded by a faculty development grant from the university’s office of educational technology.

McFarlin found that final student grades were 9.9 percent higher (an increase of one letter grade on a standard grading scale) when the course was administered in a hybrid format.

A total of 658 final grades were used to evaluate the effect of the course-delivery format on academic performance. All exams used the same question bank for each course format.

“When I started, I just wanted to make sure that students did as well in the hybrid version of the class as the traditional. I quickly learned that technology is powerful when used properly,” said McFarlin.

Though the sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions, it raises some interesting questions to explore more fully.

Law School Admissions 2.0

Law schools are already in the distance learning business to varying degrees, and most law schools -- if not all -- allow students to apply online, but it'll be interesting to see whether they coordinate for this recent trend of the online college fair. This piece from the NY Times is very revealing about how students will likely search for law schools, including extensive use of both the Internet and their parents.

Cyberfamilias
Doing the Campus Hop

By MICHELLE SLATALLA

HERE is how I helped my oldest daughter apply to colleges last year. I turned the dining room into a command center and deployed a multipronged battle plan as ruthless as the one General Patton used in Europe. I put color-coded labels on folders. I devised a secret formula to calculate my daughter’s likelihood of being admitted to any four-year college in America.

“Don’t forget that you licked all the stamps,” my oldest daughter recently reminded me. “You liked that part, even after you got a little whacked out from the glue.”

Those halcyon days are a distant memory. Now it is my second daughter’s turn to apply, and she won’t let me help at all. That is not to say she isn’t thorough. She devised a system to classify glossy college brochures. She decided which SAT II subject tests to take and, for some reason, declined my offer to prep her like a politician for interviews.

Yes, it hurts to overhear her discussing with her father how to handle “people who are too controlling.” Especially when those people have so much to offer.

After I learned the other day about an unusual kind of online college fair where students — and parents! — can chat with admissions officers in real time and attend live question-and-answer sessions on topics like financial aid, I rushed over to CollegeWeekLive.com to register.

To prove that I wasn’t sneaking around, I also urged my daughter to sign up. I pointed out that by attending the free two-day fair — which is to go live again in September — she could quickly gather a lot of information, without bankrupting me with expensive trips to visit all 150 of the participating college campuses (which, believe me, she would like to do).

She did not sound terribly excited. What is with these people who think they no longer require a mother’s help?

Clearly, she didn’t know about the cool ways colleges now try to connect online with applicants. Had she never visited the MySpace page of Oregon State University’s mascot, Benny Beaver? Did she not know that the admissions department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes more than 30 bloggers at http://www.mitadmissions.org/blogs.shtml? (Topics range from “Living Off Campus” to “Consider a Gap Year.”)

“Before Web 2.0, that personal communication existed only through word of mouth, through actual human contact,” said Ben Jones, the communications director who oversees the admissions blogs for M.I.T., and checks Facebook several times a day for messages from prospective students. “Now, with the blogs, which are completely uncensored and unfiltered, we try to create a connection so that that personal communication can occur on a much larger scale.”

Today’s students think it’s normal to talk casually and immediately with nearly anybody through the Internet so much so that they consider forms of communication that are not related to the Web nontraditional, Mr. Jones said.

M.I.T. had an information booth at the CollegeWeekLive fair. But Mr. Jones said that because this is “absolutely the worst, busiest time of year,” no admissions representatives were available to conduct live chats.

When I logged in to the fair, however, I found plenty of college booths with admissions officers available from an eclectic mix of public and private schools from Emerson College in Boston to Arizona State University.

Suddenly I felt nervous. What if I typed the wrong thing and prompted someone to note “super-creepy parent” in a file? I decided to wander the virtual aisles first. I was in what looked like an open auditorium filled with crowd noises, as if a lot of people were milling around. Loudly.

“What are you doing?” my husband said crankily from his computer nearby.

“I am trying to get your daughter into college,” I replied by instant message, while straining to hear the on-screen guide.

Frankly, it was a little eerie in the auditorium, because I couldn’t see or hear any other real participants. Unlike a live college fair, where you can follow the clamoring crowd to the booths of the most selective colleges, here there was no way to gauge whether more attendees were flocking to Bryn Mawr College or Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. (Later, I was told that 12,000 parents and students had attended the fair.)

The first thing I did was to pause nostalgically at the Indiana University booth to listen to the strains of my alma mater’s song. Next, I next tried to attend a presentation featuring a live speaker discussing “How to Make College More Affordable.” God knows I am fascinated by the topic. But unfortunately, a pop-up window kept blinking on and off preventing me from joining the presentation. When I tried to type a question into the query box, it disappeared.

I returned to the (still deafening) main auditorium, where by now I had worked up the courage to chat with representatives from Bryn Mawr, Northeastern University and Colorado College.

It felt exciting to be talking almost simultaneously to three people at colleges hundreds of miles apart, all of us intelligently discussing such topics as the philosophy behind women’s colleges, co-op work programs and block schedules, where you take one class at a time intensively.

But I confess that when I reviewed the transcripts that evening, it didn’t look as if I’d learned much more than I would have from visits to those schools’ Web sites. Certainly, others at the fair later told me that they found the experience useful.

Julie Richardson, a Virginia mother of two elementary-school-age boys, attended as a preliminary way to research colleges, she said, since she “didn’t know the difference between a Harvard and a Michigan.”

Ms. Richardson, who attended live presentations and visited several college booths, said, “It was an easy way to see what’s available without having to make a lot of trips and to get some inside information on how admissions officers make decisions.”

Viewed from the other side of the chat window, Nancy Thaler, the assistant director of admissions at Bryn Mawr, said the fair was an opportunity to talk to students more informally. “I think kids were more comfortable than in person, because I didn’t have to do any probing to get them to start talking,” she said. “They would ask a question right upfront.”

The next day, though, I had even less luck at the fair. Returning to the Colorado College booth, I tried to initiate a chat in response to a greeting from a representative: “Rep anna jaquez-herron whispers hi michelle do you have any questions.”

But the window started blinking whenever I typed. Later, Robert Rosenbloom, the chief executive of PlatformQ, which produced CollegeWeekLive, confirmed that the site experienced technical problems. But all I knew was I couldn’t make out a thing. I put my cursor on the spot where I thought the query box was, and typed, “Sorry I am having trouble seeing this screen are you able to see it”

“Yes I see it”

I replied: “Sorry, I will log out and try again. Bye.”

I was about to give up altogether when my daughter, who had visited the fair on a school computer, e-mailed me. She listed her impressions, both “positive” (“information sections of each college are really extensive, easy to navigate, well labeled”) and “negative” (“really hard to figure out the chat feature, no reps would respond to any questions, chat rooms seemed empty”).

Over all, she concluded: “I would prefer to go to a real, live college fair, but this seems like it could be an informational alternative for those who can’t. P.S.: You can lick the stamps for my envelopes.”

I wonder if her father told her to write that.

The Women on the Web

Wow o wow.

One thing that Xer and Millennial women definitely benefit from is having Boomer mothers and grandmothers who broke a lot of glass ceilings and forged a lot of paths. So I'm especially tickled about the unveiling of The Women on the Web. It's a web conversation about all kinds of things by women (mostly Boomers from the looks of it) who were responsible for a lot of firsts, including two of my favorite things in the world: comedy and news.

It has an impressive group of participants, including Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Lesley Stahl, and Judith Martin (Ms. Manners).

What I love is that it includes things like a report of what kind of hair day it is side-by-side with discussions about Iraq and recession, as well as a poll asking whose disappearance has you worried. Check it out.

New Approaches to Plagiarism

This piece from Inside Higher Ed describes some interesting approaches to teaching about plagiarism. Law schools have a lot to learn and a long way to go in teaching Millennials about plagiarism and cheating. The section on "restorative justice for plagiarists" is where I think we ought to be going. Millennials have very different views about plagiarism and cheating than previous generations, so solutions that teach the accused and/or convicted are going to do more good than "nuclear options" that will just get us a backlash from the student body.

Some of the comments to the article -- by professors and students -- over at Inside Higher Ed are worth reading.

Winning Hearts and Minds in War on Plagiarism

It’s come to this: Writing professors are so desperate for new ways to teach
undergraduates about academic integrity that they are assigning them to plagiarize.

That’s what Kate Hagopian, an instructor in the first-year writing program at North Carolina State University, does. For one assignment, she gives her students a short writing passage and then a prompt for a standard student short essay. She asks her students to turn in two versions. In one they are told that they must plagiarize. In the second, they are told not to. The prior night, the students were given an online tutorial on plagiarism and Hagopian said she has become skeptical that having the students “parrot back what we’ve told them” accomplishes anything. Her hope is that this unusual assignment might change that.

After the students turn in their two responses to the essay prompt, Hagopian shares some with the class. Not surprisingly, the students do know how to plagiarize — but were uncomfortable admitting as much. Hagopian said that the assignment is always greeted with “uncomfortable laughter” as the students must pretend that they never would have thought of plagiarizing on their own. Given the right to do so, they turn in essays with many direct quotes without attribution. Of course in their essays
that are supposed to be done without plagiarism, she still finds problems — not so much with passages repeated verbatim, but with paraphrasing or using syntax in ways that were so similar to the original that they required attribution.

When she started giving the assignment, she sort of hoped, Hagopian said, to see students turn in “nuanced tricky demonstrations” of plagiarism, but she mostly gets garden variety copying. But what she is doing is having detailed conversations with her students about what is and isn’t plagiarism — and by turning everyone into a plagiarist (at least temporarily), she makes the conversation something that can take place openly.

“Students know I am listening,” she said. And by having the conversation in this way — as opposed to reading the riot act — she said she is demonstrating that all plagiarism is not the same, whether in technique, motivation or level of sophistication. There is a difference between “deliberate fraud” and “failed apprenticeship,” she said.

Hagopian’s approach was among many described at various sessions last week at the annual meeting of the Conference of College Composition and Communication, in New Orleans. Writing instructors — especially those tasked with teaching freshmen — are very much on the front lines of the war against plagiarism. As much as other faculty members, they resent plagiarism by their students — and in fact several of the talks featured frank discussion of how betrayed writing instructors feel when someone turns in plagiarized work.

That anger does motivate some to use the software that detects plagiarism as part of an effort to scare students and weed out plagiarists, and there was some discussion along those lines. But by and large, the instructors at the meeting said that they didn’t have any confidence that these services were attacking the roots of the problem or finding all of the plagiarism. Several people quipped that if the software really detected all plagiarism, plenty of campuses would be unable to hold classes, what with all of the sessions needed for academic integrity boards.

While there was a group therapy element to some of the discussions, there was also a strong focus on trying new solutions. Freshmen writing instructors after all don’t have the option available to other faculty members of just blaming the problem on the
failures of those who teach first-year comp.

What to do? New books being displayed in the exhibit hall included several trying to shift the plagiarism debate beyond a matter of pure enforcement. Among them were Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, just published by the University of Michigan (and profiled on Inside Higher Ed), and
Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies, released in February by Boynton/Cook.

Like Hagopian, many of those at the meeting said that they are focused on trying to better understand their students, what makes them plagiarize, and what might make them better understand academic integrity. There wasn’t much talk of magic bullets, but lots of ideas about ways to better see the issue from a student perspective — and to find ways to use that perspective to promote integrity.

What Students Are Saying

Roy Stamper, associate director of the writing program at N.C. State, gave a presentation about a discussion he followed (for purposes of understanding, not
enforcement) on the Wolf Web, a student discussion board. Students at N.C. State post anonymously, and while Stamper said he didn’t know if all of the students were posting with accuracy about their situations, he still found plenty of truth in what they had to say.

The discussion was kicked off by a student asking for advice about certain term paper companies and whether they sold good work. The student, apparently fearful of how this would make him look, talked about how he was “completely and utterly fried and overloaded” and didn’t have enough time. But he also said he didn’t want to get caught plagiarizing.

While some of the responses rated various term paper sites, there was also a strong, intense reaction from other students — much of it critical. “The less time you spend posting on here the more time u get to work on your paper,” wrote one student. Another student wrote: “It’s called college. Grow up and get your shit done.”

As other students joined in, offering suggestions on time management, Stamper said he was struck that the argument being put forth against plagiarism wasn’t honesty, but efficiency, and that has its dangers too, as was brought home to him by this posting: “I say that if you can get away with doing 30 minutes worth of plagiarism as opposed to a few days of work ... then you my friend are efficient, and not necessarily a bad person.”

Yet another student argued that term paper mills could promote efficiency without
turning one into a plagiarist. This student said that he used term papers obtained online to gain ideas, but that because he then rewrites these ideas himself, it’s not plagiarism. “My work, with a little help,” is how he characterized it.

This prompted an angry outcry from another student, who wrote: “This shit is plagiarism by any definition. If you were caught and turned over to the office of student conduct, your ass would be nailed to the cross.”

Stamper said that he shared the anger of that final student (if not the idea that the plagiarist deserved to be compared to Jesus), but that once he got past the anger, he found that his lurking online raised many questions. For instance, Stamper said that while he does not believe being overworked justifies plagiarism, he has found himself wondering about whether an intense workload puts an emphasis for students on efficiency as opposed to quality. “Good writing takes a lot of time and thought. I’m not sure I’m always giving them enough time,” he said.

The other thing that the online discussion demonstrated, he said, was that many students do have a strong sense of right and wrong when it comes to plagiarism and the idea that every student born in the last 30 years believes everything online is fair to use is a stereotype. Students clearly are educable, he said, and perhaps the best approach may be peer pressure — the plagiarists on the N.C. State site were clearly embarrassed and looked to justify themselves. Should writing instructors be looking to peer teaching — and specifically peer pressure — as a new tool to promote integrity, Stamper asked.

“Patchwriting” vs. Plagiarism

Several of the speakers discussed ideas related to differentiating plagiarism of the sort that involves buying a term paper or submitting another student’s work with more common, and not always intentional, writing behaviors used by many students that meet textbook definitions of plagiarism but that may raise different moral and educational issues. Many cite the work of Rebecca Moore Howard (co-editor of one of the new books on plagiarism and a contributor to another), who is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University.

Howard talks about “patchwriting” as a common undergraduate technique of grouping together various sources of information, frequently with only minor changes in wording and without appropriate attribution. For her own classes, she uses a policy that says such writing will generally lead to a poor grade, but not to sanctions that would go to someone who bought a term paper.

Along these lines, R. Gerald Nelms, an associate professor of composition and rhetoric at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, spoke of how plagiarism must be seen as “an educational problem that requires an educational response.” Much student plagiarism, he said, is unintentional, as students don’t know how to take notes, how to summarize ideas, how to attribute ideas or quotes, and what paraphrasing means (and doesn’t) with regard to plagiarism.

In a handout, Nelms wrote that patchwriting is “developmental plagiarism,” or “behavior that is caused by the effort of the writer not fully integrated into the community for which she or he is trying to write to imitate the behavior of that community.” Such plagiarism, he said, shouldn’t be viewed as acceptable, but also shouldn’t draw punishment. Students who engage in patchwriting need to be taught, he said, not brought up on charges. Nelms recommended a series of teaching subjects for instructors trying to show students how to write original work.

Students need to be taught to take notes, he said in his handout — so notes aren’t just direct quotes or synopses, but also include students’ reactions or potential use of information. In this way, students are starting to learn how to use information, not just how to repackage it. Similarly, he said in the handout, “integration involves more than citation,” and must include efforts to show students how to mix various sources, how to attribute, and how to include original ideas.

“Restorative Justice” for Plagiarists

Christy Zink, an assistant professor of writing at George Washington University, used the controversy over the play Frozen to teach her first-year students about plagiarism. The play — about a psychiatrist who examines serial killers — was a Broadway hit, but also led to charges of plagiarism against its author by a psychiatrist who said that writings about her career were used without her permission for the drama.

Zink is an advocate of using “restorative justice” to deal with plagiarism. “Restorative justice” is an approach to criminal behavior that involves repairing the harm done by an act, but not focusing on punishment for the sake of punishment.

One of Zink’s students — even though the course was focused on a discussion of plagiarism issues — plagiarized her work for an assignment. Zink said she was a bit stunned that in such a context, a student would engage in blatant plagiarism (she
stressed that this wasn’t a borderline case). But the student appealed to Zink’s
commitment to restorative justice, and said “isn’t that why I’m here? To learn
from my mistakes?”

While Zink worked out a punishment herself with the student — involving new work and a grade punishment — she also decided to try to apply the restorative justice ideal to the situation by talking to all three sections of the class about the situation (without identifying the student) and seeking their views on what to do. Zink’s announcement to her clases that “we have a plagiarist among us” prompted a range of reactions from students.

Zink said that her students were angry at first, but that they then argued that many other considerations should go into consideration of sanctions. To most students, “intentionality matters,” Zink said. Students wanted to know if the plagiarism was “an honest mistake” or deliberate. At the same time, given that the class was so focused on plagiarism, the students were doubtful that the student couldn’t have known what she was doing was wrong. So the students were both interested in motivation, and not willing to accept any excuse.

The lesson, Zink said, is that while “we need the law,” we also need to make
decisions on more than just legalistic approaches. As another example, she described very much not wanting to like the play Frozen, in part because of the plagiarism issues. But she found herself deeply moved nonetheless.

An Unusual Sort-of Plagiarized Essay About Plagiarism

Catherine Savini, director of the Undergraduate Writing Center at Columbia University, described using an unusual essay to prod students to think in new ways. The essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” appeared in Harper’s last year. In the work, Jonathan Lethem makes an impassioned plea against traditional concepts of copyright and plagiarism, and he does so with words and phrases that are almost entirely plagiarized — with no credit while making the argument, but a key at the end fessing up to his writing thefts. His technique drew attention and controversy.

Even Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford University law professor who is a prominent critic of copyright restrictions, wrote in to express his discomfort at finding one of his own sentences used in the essay. “The freedom that Lethem depends upon — the freedom to integrate and build upon the work of others — does not need the license the plagiarist takes,” Lessig wrote in a letter to the magazine. “The rules against
plagiarism, after all, require only that words borrowed be acknowledged as borrowed.” (Lessig also applauded the essay’s creativity and expressed hope that
it would prompt further thought by those who seek to regulate the use of others’
works.)

Savini said that this text is at once “dangerous” and provocative for students because it appears to glorify plagiarism and yet goes so far — and copies the work of such noted authors — that students are taken aback. “Is it a model? Is it fodder?”

When she assigned students to write about the essay, many were afraid of a plagiarism trap. “How do I cite Lethem?” was the question she received from many students, anxious about whether citations should go to Lethem, to those whose works he borrowed, both or neither. Students were so puzzled by the situation, Savini said, that many went to unusual lengths to avoid quoting from the essay they were writing about.

Then Savini told the students she wanted them to consider sharing their writing with Lethem. This further challenged students, she said, because they normally don’t think about audience in writing, placing their instructors in some other category. Thinking about people as being affected by their writing was another step in viewing writing as more than completing an assignment, Savini said, but as something with ethical issues involved. “It’s a difficult leap of the imagination” for many students to think about anyone other than their instructors reading their work, but they need to, she said.

“Suddenly, students were asking questions without easy answers,” Savini said, about fairness, about the obligations of authors, and the relationship between authors and readers. “It’s a morass I want my students to be in,” she said.

U. of Chicago Law School Wireless Ban?

Does anyone know if the reports of the U. of Chicago Law School wireless ban are true or not? I've seen it reported on one law library web site and a number of law student sites, but nothing authoritative yet. Based on what I've read so far, I'm skeptical that the ban is genuine and that its source could really be the dean of a law school.

Writing Skills of Law Students: Second Verse, Same as the First

While this story from the New York Times doesn't point to the kind of dramatic increase in writing skills that law professors would like to see, it does give cause for hope that we will soon be getting students with better basic writing skills than we've seen in the past few years. Although only anecdotal evidence, my older daughter, a Millennial, does far more structured writing (as opposed to just journal, stream-of-consciousness writing) in elementary school than I, an Xer, remember doing.

Students Lack Writing Skills in Test
By SAM DILLON

About one-third of America’s eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to results of a nationwide test released on Thursday.

The test, administered last year, showed that there were modest increases in the writing skills of low-performing students since the last time a similar exam was given, in 2002. But the skills of high-performing eighth and 12th graders remained flat or declined.

Girls far outperformed boys in the test, with 41 percent of eighth grade girls scoring at or above the proficient level, compared with 20 percent of eighth-grade boys.

New Jersey and Connecticut were the two top-performing states, with more than half their students scoring at or above the proficient level ( 56 percent in New Jersey, 53 percent in Connecticut). Those two and seventeen other states ranked above New York, where 31 percent of students wrote at the proficient level.

Authorities in the federal government’s school testing program said they were encouraged by the results, especially since they seemed to counter other recent indicators suggesting a decline in Americans’ writing abilities.

“I am happy to report, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that the death of writing has been greatly exaggerated,” said Amanda P. Avallone, an eighth-grade English teacher who is a vice chairwoman of the board that oversees the federal testing program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card.

Still, some experts questioned whether the test, which asks students to write brief essays in a short time, gave an accurate measurement of their writing ability.

Ms. Avallone said the differences between girls’ and boys’ scores may result in part from lower literacy expectations for boys in public schools.

“These days I seldom, if ever, hear the message that math and science do not matter for girls, yet I do still encounter the myth that many boys won’t really need to write very much or very well once they leave school,” Ms. Avallone said.

The national writing test was given to 140,000 eighth graders and 28,000 12th grade students, selected to form a representative sample of all students nationwide in those grades. Each student wrote two 25-minute essays, designed to measure student skills at writing to inform, persuade and tell stories.

Overall, 33 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficiency level, which the test designers defined as competency in carrying out challenging academic tasks, while 88 percent scored at or above the basic level, defined as partial mastery of the skills needed for proficient work.

While 33 percent of eighth graders writing with proficiency may not sound like a lot, it is the best performance by eighth graders on any subject matter tested in the national assessment program in the last three years. Smaller percentages of eighth-grade students have performed at the proficiency level in reading, math, science, civics or history tests. Only 17 percent of eighth graders managed a proficient score on the nationwide history exam in 2006, for example.

“These results pleased and encouraged me,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which represents the nation’s 60
largest urban districts. “A lot of cities have introduced explicit writing programs. You go into urban schools and you see hallways lined with samples of student writing. Writing programs have gotten better.”

There were large differences in scores from state to state. Mississippi ranked last, with only 15 percent of students writing at the proficiency level.

The encouraging overall results contrasted with some other recent indicators of Americans’ writing prowess. A survey of 120 corporations conducted by the College
Board in 2003, for instance, concluded that one-third of employees at the nation’s blue-chip companies wrote poorly, and that businesses were spending billions of dollars on remedial training, some of it for new hires straight out of college.

“Overall, American students’ writing skills are deteriorating,” said Will Fitzhugh, the founder of Concord Review, a journal published in Massachusetts that features history research papers written by high school students. He expressed skepticism that the national assessment accurately measured students’ overall writing skills because, he said, it only tests their ability to write very brief essays jotted out in half an hour.

“The only way to assess the kind of writing that students will have to do in college is to have them write a term paper, and then have somebody sit down and grade it — and nobody wants to do that, because it’s too costly,” he said.

Mr. Fitzhugh cited findings of a 2006 survey of college professors, in which a large majority said they thought most high school graduates came to college with limited writing skills.

Toward a New E-Etiquette

The Ann Arbor News reports that the debate about banning laptops is making its way beyond the classroom. And rather than tie laptop bans to beliefs about whether or not people are absorbing information, the complaint in boardrooms and elsewhere is that laptop use is just rude.

Going laptopless: It's just decent exposure

Multi-tasking no excuse for rudeness
Thursday, April 03, 2008

Especially during the days of the dot-com boom, we'd frequently hear calls for Ann Arbor to become the Silicon Valley of the Midwest - emulating the California tech hub's economic vibrancy and entrepreneurial culture.

Though the shine of Silicon Valley has dulled somewhat since then, there's at least one trend there that could catch on: going "topless.''

Laptopless, that is.

As the Los Angeles Times reported this week, a growing number of companies are banning laptop computers and other devices - including BlackBerrys, iPhones and other communication devices - from meetings. Here's why (and it's a big surprise): Employees get bored at meetings and start e-mailing, texting and surfing the Internet instead of paying attention to what's happening in the conference room.

Let's face it - this isn't limited to the corporate world. We've all seen elected officials look at their laptop screens more than at the people talking during public-comment sessions. Teachers, too, fight for attention with their electronic rivals.

Some would call it multi-tasking. Others call it rude.

One thing's for sure - we'll likely be seeing more of this behavior, not less.

And like any trend, this phenomenon is being studied by academic researchers.

"It's increasingly difficult to get people's undivided attention,'' Stanford University professor Pamela Hinds, who studies the effects of technology on groups, told the Times. "People would argue they are attending to the most important information without any loss of participation, but in fact they aren't fully there.''

There are two things at play: 1) the often mind-numbing irrelevance of what's done and said in meetings, and the unwillingness of people to waste their time; and 2) the use of laptops and other electronic devices to avoid doing things (like listening to your boss, teacher or constituent) that aren't always pleasant or entertaining.

The old cliché is true: There's a reason why it's called work.

Banning laptops is certainly one solution, but it should be coupled with a closer look at why people are turning away from what's happening in the room. Are the meetings necessary? Are the classroom lessons engaging?

As for public-comment sessions, well, elected officials are just going to have to gut it out. There's no way to dress up constituent complaints - nor, really, should there be. Sometimes going topless is just the right thing to do. In this case, it's called listening.

While the pendulum is currently swinging to the extreme of banning laptops, text messengers, etc., when it settles back in the middle, we'll likely find ourselves with some new etiquette rules for incorporating all this techology into our daily lives in a way that leverages the benefits without sending the wrong message.

Law School as Second Life

Gordon Smith over at Conglomerate is blogging about a deal between IBM and the makers of Second Life:

IBM and Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, have entered into an alliance "to create an enterprise-class version of Second Life behind a corporate firewall." According to the IBM website: "IBM is helping clients and partners to conduct business inside virtual worlds and to connect the virtual world with the real world through a richer, more immersive Web environment."

And Linden Lab is encouraging other organizations to get their own "grid."

Second Life Grid is a platform that enables your organization to create a public
or secure private space using the leading 3D online virtual world technology.
Discover how your organization can create its own space for communication,
collaboration and community engagement. Use the Second Life Grid to hold virtual
meetings, construct product simulations, provide employee training and lots
more.

Already some law professors are thinking of ways to use Second Life in roleplaying exercises. This could be a great tool for those who teach interviewing, counseling, ADR, and transactional skills courses, just to name the obvious.

Maybe it's time to start working on your avatar.

Submitting on time

Students with Gmail accounts now have a new temptation to wrestle with. Gmail now allows account holders to set the time that their e-mail is received and to show up chronologically within the recipient's e-mail box. Because of the potential for misuse, each user is only allowed 10 of these time-shifted e-mails per year. Gmail's acknowledgement that the feature could be misused raises an interesting question: what would an appropriate, honest use be? It seems like the feature is useful only to gaslight someone.

Take that, Microsoft

Google Docs Moves Offline

Google yesterday announced that it will offer offline capability for Google Docs. That means users can use the free word-processing program even when they’re not connected to the Internet. Last month Zoho also began allowing users to use its word processor Writer while offline.

Some colleges have already started outsourcing e-mail and other software applications to free services like Google Apps Education Edition and Microsoft Live@edu.

Will more extended offline offerings encourage other campuses to forgo traditional e-mail and word-processing programs and instead adopt these hosted freebies?

Intro to Millennials

There's a nice, thorough Intro to Millennials post at Mike's Doc Blog. If you want to save yourself a summer's worth of reading in understanding Millennials, this is a nice place to start.