Plagiarism uptick

In spite of the fact that we’re doing a unit on history writing in my class, I’ve noticed a distinct uptick in the number of plagiarized assignments on the class wiki this week.

Like, all but one of them. Most of them were cribbed directly from Wikipedia.

Except, of course, that something even weirder than that is happening. The students are plagiarizing from numerous websites, apparently. It’s just that the websites they’re plagiarizing are themselves plagiarizing from Wikipedia.

It’s like the text of Wikipedia has become the defacto standard boilerplate text for whatever historical subject you want to write about or discuss on your website.

Anyone else noticed this sort of thing? When did it happen?

Continuing Alex the Great

It turns out that a lot of students in my ninth grade class have no idea how to read our textbook in such a way that they can extract information about the various historical lenses.  So I made this guide to the first few pages of the section on Alexander the Great.

The textbook photos are not particularly good, unfortunately.  I’ll have to figure out how to correct that in a later edition, and do it right the first time the next time around.

I had a lot of students write about Macedonia, Alexander the Great, or his father Philip II for homework last night.  But it was clear that most of them didn’t know how to extract ideas about the Macedonian economy, or about the country’s culture or environment from the text.

Reflection

I think about how much easier — or how much harder — this could have been with a digital textbook.  I might have been able to make a digital photo from a ‘flat’ page, with ‘perfect lighting’, and then added highlighting more directly than I did here.  I might have been able to call up links to dictionary definitions of difficult words, or included links to photographs — we have a teacher here whose nickname includes the word ‘rugged’, and including a picture of him might have been a good way to get a laugh and a notice of recognition that they know what this word means.

It also might have been much, much harder. There could have been copy protection in place, so that I couldn’t photograph the text (and as it is, a lot of my kids could barely read my on-the-fly photos.  I might not have been able to export the images from the textbook to another program, so I could ‘deface’ them with highlighting, red circles and squares, and arrows.  The copy protection system might have locked out the projector capabilities of my computer, so I couldn’t show pages from the textbook.

As it is, maybe I’m on shaky legal ground by including photographs of part of this textbook; I don’t know.  I do know that to get a class to understand how to read a text from multiple angles of approach was a hard sell, particularly since some of them are originally poor readers.

How is this going to work in the age of digital textbooks?  And how did teachers do this before?  Could they do it solely through having students read aloud, copy sentences, and engaging in mass recitals of text?  How does doing this sort of thing change our schools, for better or worse?

My first contact

My first contact with a student yesterday was when a kid leapt up on me in the hallway outside the science lab, while I was on my way to the class where I had him as a student.

I reacted poorly.  And it made me edgy and angry all day. Just as any physical challenge from a student makes me edgy and angry.

I’ll admit that I took it out on the kids on my dorm rather more than they needed it.  But why, oh why, am I so attackable?  And how do I get it to stop? Please?

Krugman on the Euro

In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman holds forth on the hubris of the Euro.

And we discover that the world economy may be really farther up the creek than previously imagined.  Because Krugman warns that the the Euro is too big to fail. We’ve heard this before, and it turned out to be false.  Yet Paul warns that trying to re-introduce the national currencies that make up the Euro will only trigger the “mother of all financial crises,” and that the only way out is for Europe to forgo national soverignty in favor of greater and deeper union. That Spain and Greece are only going to navigate their current financial crises by coming to rely on Brussels to a greater degree than they do already.

OK.  I don’t follow this stuff too regularly, and I’m probably wrong on a lot of things. But I do know my history.  And I know Galbraith’s rule, which is that whenever someone begins suggesting that a particular model is a sure thing, it’s time to head for the exits.

And I wonder which European Union state is going to make a break for the exits first.