Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
I am ringing the alarm.
We have now found >400 papers that all share a very similar title layout, graph layout, and (most importantly) the same Western blot layout.
This is a massive #PaperMill of (what we assume) fabricated data.— Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) February 21, 2020
https://go.edsurge.com/EdSurge-Live-How-to-Protect-Academic-Integrity-From-a-Cheating-Economy.html
Educators are in an arms race these days against an industry that seeks to profit by helping students cheat. Some websites offer to write papers for students, others sell access to past tests by individual professors, and others will even take entire online courses for students, as a kind of study double.
January 28, 3PM Live: How to Protect Academic Integrity From a ‘Cheating Economy.’ We’ll see you on Tuesday, January 28 at 1pm PT/4pm ET at this Zoom link or with the Meeting ID: 655-009-467.
Webinar:
question to Tricia: the aggressiveness of the Websites. radio silence by governments, universities.
is there a data on contract cheating: data from Australia, UK. 7 Mil students worldwide engaged in contsure
punitive vs preventive practices.
students being educated for that matter faculty.
stakeholders: students, faculty (accreditation), parents, administration. what the forces in place to keep in check the administration/
how does the education happen in a world where the grade is the king and the credit is the queen?
If i organize a workshop on cheating noone attends; overworked
not magic bullet. more communication and awareness. teaching and learning issue. in the business of certifying. integrity is essential to the certification program and teaching and learning, otherwise it cannot be graded. lost from the core mission.
clear and better policies: what is the role of the faculty in the process. when teaching and learning is not sufficient and needs to move to allegations.
Instructional designer: online is easier to cheat.
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more on cheating in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cheating
dthic
quote the former Buddhist monk Clark Strand here. This was in a review of your work. “None of us dreamed that mindfulness would become so popular or even lucrative, much less that it would be used as a way to keep millions of us sleeping soundly through some of the worst cultural excesses in human history, all while fooling us into thinking we were awake and quiet.”
corporate mindfulness programs are now quite popular. And as we all know, most employees these days are extremely stressed out. The Gallup poll that came out about four or five years ago said that corporations — and this is in the U.S. — are losing approximately 300 billion dollars a year from stress-related absences and seven out of ten employees report being disengaged from their work.
The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions rather than launching kind of a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large. That sort of dialogue, that sort of inquiry, is not happening.
An integrity bubble is where there is a small oasis within a corporation – for example let’s take Google because that’s a great example of it.
You have a small group of engineers who are getting individual level benefits from corporate mindfulness training. They’re learning how to de-stress. Google engineers [are] working 60-70 hours a week – very stressful. So they’re getting individual level benefits while not questioning the digital distraction technologies [that] Google engineers are actually trying to work on. Those issues are not taken into account in a kind of mindful way.
So you become mindful, to become more productive, to produce technologies of mass distraction, which is quite an irony in many ways. A sad irony actually.
mindfulness could be revolutionized in a way that does not denigrate the therapeutic benefits of self-care, but it becomes interdependent with these causes and conditions of suffering which go beyond just individuals.
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more on mindfulness in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindfulness
with Melanie Guentzel, Director of Graduate Student Services, mjguentzel@stcloudstate.edu
when: Tue, Jan. 22, 2 PM
where: Plymouth campus on Zoom: https://minnstate.zoom.us/j/438287799
who: new international graduate students at SCSU
students in Engineering Management, Regulatory Affairs, and Applied Clinical Research.
Access the library from a distance: https://www.stcloudstate.edu/library/
Research and Writing Tips
Digital fluency
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-10-08-three-things-teachers-need-to-spot-and-stop-plagiarism
According to the International Center for Academic Integrity, 58% of more than 70,000 students surveyed say they have plagiarized someone else’s ideas in their writing.
Plagiarism-detection software can address the most pressing needs of classroom educators faced with assessing students’ written work. Here’s how:
The Challenge: The larger the class is, and the more students that are in it, the longer it takes to review each written assignment—checking grammar, style, originality of ideas, etc. This is especially important when screening for plagiarism.
My note: this is NOT true. If the teacher is still lingering in the old habits of lecturing, this could be true. However, when a teacher gets into the habit of reviewing papers, s/he can detect as soon as in the first several paragraphs the discrepancies due to copy and paste of other work versus the student’s work.
In addition, if the teacher applies group work in her/his class, s/he can organize students to proofread each other’s work, thus teaching them actively about plagiarism, punctuation etc.
2. Evidence Must Be Reliable
The Challenge: When identifying plagiarism, teachers need to be confident in their assessment. Accusing students of academic dishonesty is a weighty claim; it can lead to their suspension or even expulsion from school.
My note: another myth perpetuated by industry searching for profit. Instead of looking at the process of plagiarism as punitive action, an educator will look at it as education and prevention. Prevention of plagiarism will never be successful, if the focus as in this article is on “suspension,” “expulsion,” etc. The goal of the teacher is NOT to catch the student, but to work with the student and understand the complexity of plagiarism.
3. Tools Must Be Easy to Use
My note: right, the goal is to make the teacher think as less as possible.
My note: PlagiarismCheck is the same as TurnitIn and all other tools, which seek profit, not education. Considering that plagiarism is a moving target (https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/01/10/plagiarism-or-collaboration/) and it is a concept first and secondly an action, the attempt to extract profits from the mechanization of this process is no less corrupt then the attempt to focus on profit (of education) rather then on education (itself)
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more on plagiarism in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=plagiarism
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/plagiarism-past-present-future-josh-howell
The proper solution to plagiarism in our nation’s schools is education and vigilance. Students should understand the role of academic integrity inside their own work, and be held accountable when they are not in accordance with academic policies and honor codes. Self-plagiarism, incorrect citations, no citations, or even word for word copying must be taught to students on a regular basis. Updates to both MLA and APA are ongoing as well; therefor, even graduates must stay current with how their citation methods change overtime.
My response to this LInkedIn entry:
Here is most of the information, I have collected on plagiarism, academic integrity, academic dishonesty. I added also Joshe’s opinion LinkedIn entry:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=plagiarism
My firm conviction through the years is that for-profit such as TurnitIn are a smoke-screen, opportunists, which are trying to bank on lack of organized approach toward educating students and ourselves about the increasing nebulous areas of plagiarism (due to the increasing digitization of our work). It is in their interest to use scare tactics and try to convince us that computerization is the answer. Anyone, who had proofread papers for more than two semesters can detect easily the change of style, the lack of punctuation and other little, but significant details in the writing process. Since, the instructor has to read the paper for content anyhow, it is just preposterous to seek multiple-thousand dollars software license to replace the instructor.
The literature shows that the predominant percentage of students committing plagiarism is doing it due to lack of proper explanation and education. I that sense, I support Josh’s choice of words: education and vigilance. My only addition is that the vigilance must be human based, not machine-based. Higher admin shouldn’t squander finances in purchasing more licenses and cutting faculty positions, but invest in well-rounded and capable faculty.
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more on plagiarism in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=plagiarism
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more on copyright in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=copyright
Cheating remains a stubborn problem at many schools. According to the Educational Testing Service and the Ad Council, who define cheating as “representing someone else’s work as your own,” cheating tends to start in junior high, peak in high school, and occur most often in math and science classes. Men and women cheat in equal measure, both sexes aided by the ubiquity of computers and the internet, and most cheaters aren’t caught. Both high- and low-achieving students find ways to misrepresent their work, explaining away their misconduct with familiar rationalizations: everybody does it, it’s a victimless crime, and getting the grade matters more.
while few cheat a lot—20 of the 40,000 involved in the experiments—many more—about 28,000—cheated a little bit. Most everyone has what he calls a “personal fudge factor” that allows for just a little dishonesty, provided that the conditions are right. For example, if people see others cheating without consequence, they’re more apt to do the same; social norms permit it. If cheating seems to benefit a “good cause,” even more feel comfortable deceiving.
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more on cheating and academic dishonesty in this IMS blog
http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/01/23/is-it-plagiarism-or-collaboration/
a recent PEW research study found that while educators find technology beneficial in teaching writing skills, they feel it has also led to a direct increase in rates of plagiarism and infringement of intellectual property rights.
We want students to do “group work,” to collaborate, and to discuss. However, we have very specific realms in which we want this to happen: the group assignment, the in-class discussion, studying for exams, etc. At the same time, many of us want to put up barriers and halt any collaboration at other times (during assessments, for example). When collaboration takes place during assessment, we deem it plagiarism or cheating, and technology is often identified as the instrument that tempts students into such behavior.
A student may produce an entirely wrong answer, but if how they got there was through logic, reasonable assumption, educated guessing (not just plain old “guessing”) – and they were effective in communicating that process – then there is evidence of learning that I can take into account.
More on plagiarism, academic integrity and academic dishonesty in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=plagiarism&submit=Search
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/tag/academic-integrity/
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/tag/academic-dishonesty/
Generation-Y literary remixing? or plagiarism?
I’ve typically come to the defense of Gen Y, to which I belong, when baby boomers and others accuse us of neglecting personal relationships in favor of social networking, or of growing so reliant on technology that we’re unable to operate an actual telephone book or read a paper map. I even make my living doing all kinds of Millennial-y things like blogging and writing for online publications. But I also went to a solid journalism school that instilled me with plenty of old-old-school values, many of which I don’t think are forgiving when it comes to lifting another person’s writing or insights without also admitting where you got them.
The current concept of plagiarism is based on a capitalist view of property and ownership. It assumes that everything of value can be owned, bought, and sold and that ideas, knowledge, and art are created by individuals who have the rights of ownership. This view is deeply ingrained in Western culture.
Traditional definitions of plagiarism are further challenged by the digital revolution.
This situation has caused the current Millennial generation to see knowledge ownership, acquisition, and distribution in radically different terms than in previous generations. Clearly,
academia is past due in reevaluating the concept and how we deal with it in secondary and higher
education.
https://hubbardbecky.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/plagiarism-and-millenialls/