Dynamic Subspace

Category: Kent State

  • I’m Quoted in the Youngstown Tribune on Electronic Cheating

    Bob Mackey gave my contact information to the future Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Sarah Sepanek for a story she was writing a week ago on student cheating and the Internet.  I responded to her email questions about my experiences with plagiarism in my comp classes and what I know about the possibilities of student plagiarism in the Internet age.  Now, you can read Sarah’s reporting with a bunch of quotes from me in the Youngstown Tribune here.  And, here is a short excerpt from Sarah’s article, “Electronic Cheating”:

    Jason Ellis, an English composition instructor at Kent State University, shared some strategies he and fellow instructors use to prevent cheating. He said that catching a student cheating is only the beginning. “The English department is very supportive of teachers who catch plagiarism and provide proof that plagiarism has taken place. However, I will also say that it is difficult to catch plagiarism,” said Ellis.

    Ellis said he combines many tactics, such as knowing a student’s writing style, arranging the students so that he can view their computer screens, and running lines of students’ essays and test answers through Internet search engines to see if they are cases of plagiarism. “I pay attention to the writing style and any formatting quirks that might flag that essay as containing plagiarized work.”

    To my future students:  I want to help each student become a better writer during each course, and I hope that you come to class with a desire to improve your writing for all of your future works during and beyond your time at KSU.  I’m more interested in each student giving their best effort in class rather than having a student represent another person’s writing as their own.  Giving your best effort will help you in the long run, while the latter is taking a chance on getting a good grade, failing, or expulsion.  Before you run afoul of plagiarism, come by my office and ask me about it if it isn’t clear enough in the syllabus.  I always stress to my students is that you come see me during office hours if you have questions or want extra time working with me on your writing.  It is up to each student to work hard on their own endeavors as well as make the effort to work with one’s writing instructor, who can guide the student through the writing process as well as develop a sense of one’s responsibilities as a writer.  One of a writer’s most important responsibilities is to not present another person’s work as their own, and to always cite the work of others when it is used in your own work.

  • Rebecca Wilson Lundin’s “Teaching with Wikis: Toward a Networked Pedagogy”

    At tomorrow’s Blogging Brown Bag discussion organized by Kent State University’s Office of Digital Composition, we’re going to discuss Rebecca Wilson Lundin’s “Teaching with Wikis: Toward a Networked Pedagogy” from Computers and Composition 25 (2008) 432-448.  I thought I would post some of my thoughts here before our meeting in the Satterfield Reading Room tomorrow.

    Lundin’s article is a great introduction to educators about the potential and promise of using wikis in the composition classroom.  In fact, I was jazzed about one day using a wiki in my own classes in the future after reading her essay.  I may be somewhat biased in my eagerness to use wikis in the classroom, because I am a contributor to Wikipedia, and I know how to install MediaWiki on a Mac OS X box.  However, I think that Lundin makes some persuasive points about the power of wikis in the composition classroom, so let me go into some of those in more detail.

    She begins by talking about a networked pedagogy (I’m thinking Foucault’s biopolitics) comprised of “writing as a networked activity,” and “teaching as a networked activity” (432).  These ideas of shared, distributed, and interconnected means of learning and teaching should be facilitated by technologies that reinforce those network oriented goals, such as wikis.

    Wikis are excellent examples of a collaborative writing and composing technology that obviously engages network culture, come close to embodying the original vision of hypertext, and the unique features of wikis including editability and page histories reinforce compositional goals of revision and collaboration.

    Lundin’s essay emphasizes how wikis challenge assumptions about the traditional composition classroom (i.e., individual authorship, workshopping papers, teacher facilitated discussion, etc.).  She demonstrates that wikis challenge these assumptions in four key ways:  

    1) New media composition in a wiki requires little if any expertise beyond the use of a word processor and the open design of wikis promise to unbound student creativity and expression by embracing multimodality.  

    2) Collaborative writing made possible by wikis breaks down the single author paradigm by allowing all wiki participants to write, edit, and comment on any wiki pages including those of other students and those created by the teacher.  Furthermore, the transparency, as Carr et. al. describe it, of wikis through page histories facilitates reflection on the individual’s writing as well as the group collaborative process.

    3) Critical interaction by a real audience of a student’s peers along withfeedback from the teacher should enable a more authentic engagement of students’ work.  Instead of writing for the teacher, students will write for one another, and give criticism to one another.  I think that this aspect holds a lot of promise, but as Lundin admits this is one of the more difficult aspects to engage students with when she discusses her creation of a “class of lurkers” (441). Additionally, she notes problems with flame wars between students.  This part of her essay particularly intreged me, due to my own work on trolls and flame wars in academic discussion lists.

    4) Online authority, particularly on wikis, is decentralized and virtually anonymous.  Instead of merely subverting authority, Lundin makes a valid argument that instead authority in the traditional teacher-student sense is complicated by wiki work.  This could serve to undermine what power the teacher may hold over the classroom dialog and guiding of student work, but the very nature of wikis does empower all users, teacher and student alike, through page histories and what Will Richardson calls soft security, or participant policing of the wiki.  Additionally, student anonymity could help some students contribute in writing through the wiki when they are hesitant to contribute verbally in the classroom.

    Concluding, she indicates that wikis, through their social and networked interaction, promote student social context awareness, because despite the appearance of anonymity, they are engaging one another as social writers.

    I find Lundin’s essay compelling, and I plan on considering ways in which I can implement wikis in future classes.  I like how wikis will make writing regularly so much easier, and most wikis will pragmatically make teacher evaluation of writing easier by selecting to view all contributions by a particular writer/student. As Lundin noted, some teachers would be reticent to have a fully open wiki, and I would fall into this category as well for the simple fact that it might be better for all parties concerned not to allow for too much tomfoolery.  However, a little tomfoolery might be a good thing, and turn into a teachable moment.  I will have to think more on this point as I figure out how to design my class around a wiki/network paradigm.  Also, I am concerned about the flame war aspect of online communication for the composition classroom.  This will inevitably happen, and my primary concern is potential alienation of some students as a result of one or some students non-reflective acts.  Again, this is something that I will have to think further about.  

    If you are a teacher, I definitely recommend you find this article (details listed above), and read it–my notes do not do it justice!

  • Why Is the Digital Future Only Found in Books?

    Awhile back, Mack Hassler and I were talking about online personas and the differences between created personas in traditional print culture and the new electronic media.  Mack pointed out that the real interesting personae come through print culture and he named examples including Swift, Greg Egan, Philip K. Dick, and David Foster Wallace (think “Lyndon”)–all of whom employ internal controversies and different voices.  Philip K. Dick is an interesting example particularly if you consider his last published novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).  It strikes me how much his supposedly strong female protagonist, Angel Archer, is like the author.  After reading Sutin’s biography of Dick, Divine Invasions (2005), there are unmistakable parallels between Archer and Dick, and I draw the conclusion that Archer is a voice for the author–a persona of her creator–PKD.

    What does that have to do with the divide between print and computer media cultures?  There’s something to be said about the complexity and the richness of layers, all of which are probably tempered and strengthened by the publication process including acceptance and editing, present in print media–novels and short stories–that facilitates strong persona creation unequaled by electronic media as yet.  We all create online personae through email, social networking, or blogging (among other personal broadcast technologies). Those who interact with us electronically do so via cyberspace, that shared consensual hallucination, and we meet with only what we bring us–our words and stray bits of data including images, sounds, videos, and our reputation.  It is these things that others use to create an image or avatar of ourselves in their minds in order to make sense of our interactions–that’s just what our brains do with the available data at hand.  However, as Mack observed and I agree, the new media has permitted a proliferation of persona creation, but it is by-and-large thinned out in comparison to what we find in print media.

    This then leads to my personal conundrum.  Mack said to me, “You’re serious about print, but you’re not serious.”  I am heavily invested in computer technology.  I built a PC specifically for online gaming–not that my grad student responsibilities allow me any time for that–and I recently decided to invest in Apple due to the economic downturn, which netted me their latest and greatest machined aluminum MacBook with a solid-state hard drive.  Despite the hardware underpinnings of my digital life via email, Facebook, and my blog, I rarely read or encounter stories online.  Yes, I read a lot online, probably more than I should considering my other duties, but the one thing that I don’t read online are SF stories.  The stories, the SF, that creates, imagines, and interfaces with the future is largely nonexistent on the medium that those stories take as its object of interest.  If I want to read about cyberspace, I don’t look online, I turn to pulp, paper, and the book for that imaginative immersion.

    Where does that leave us in regard to the new media and books?  Considering my recent conversation with Stephen R. Donaldson, there is change in the wind, but obviously no one has the one answer to what that change may encompass.  I’m curious to hear the thoughts of Robert H. Jackson next Tuesday when he presents on the future of books at the Kent State Library.  I know he won’t have all (if any) the answers, but perhaps the face-to-face interaction will be illuminating in ways that online persona interaction is not.

  • Stephen R. Donaldson at Kent State University

    Stephen R. Donaldson, the well-known SF and fantasy author of the Thomas Covenant series, visited his alma mater today, Kent State University.  Before the glitz and glamour of professional writing, he was a graduate student at Kent State.  He earned his MA in English Literature here, and he began his PhD in which he was studying the works of Joseph Conrad.  Now, he’s an award winning author, and Kent State library curates his manuscripts and papers.  

    This afternoon, Mr. Donaldson met with about 10 to 15 students and faculty in the NEOMFA office in Satterfield Hall.  I made a point of driving into campus today just for his visit, and I was very happy that I did after listening and taking part in the enjoyable conversation.

    During the conversation, Mr. Donaldson talked about how he made a point of studying authors whose works he liked and respected in order to figure out how they did things rather than going into a creative writing program to hone his writing skills.  In particular, he commented on his studies of Joseph Conrad and Henry James.  When asked about The Mirror of Her Needs (1986), he mentioned some of his influences in the writing of that novel were Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which has a great respect and love for but not Arthurian legends in general, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.  

    When asked if any of his books might be made into movies, he didn’t think that would happen.  He said that he would get an ego boost if it did, but then feel let down when the film didn’t replicate his work honesty.  He went on to say that movie adaptations of books are reinventions or recreations of the works that they take as their object.  In his case, a director that makes one of his books into a movie would be creating something that was theirs, and that’s okay.  As an example, he talked about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Essentially, Peter Jackson created something new that isn’t the same thing as Tolkien’s novels–that if you read the novels you will feel something different than what you feel when you see the movies.  Why is that so?  It has to do with the differences in media.  In books, you can get into the head of a character, which you cannot do in a movie.  On the other hand, movies are able to combine sound effects, special effects, visuals, cinematography, and music–all overlaid one another–to create something different than what you get in the linear word-by-word world of books.  It’s not to say that one is better than the other, but rather they have different strengths and weaknesses.

    When asked about completing a book, he remarked that, “It’s a lonely place at the end of a book.”  I knew that there was a lot of housekeeping tasks including copyediting, proofreading, etc. that take place after the manuscript is finished, but Mr. Donaldson said that there was a real “so, what have you done for us lately” attitude by publishers to authors when I book is done–meaning, when’s your next book going to be ready?

    I asked him what his thoughts were on the recent court case between a Harry Potter lexicon writer and J. K. Rowling and her publisher.  Mr. Donaldson said that he wouldn’t take the time to deal with something like that if it came up in regard to his own work, but he talked about why Rowling and her publisher got pissed off in the first place.  Had the lexicon author, Steve Vander Ark, approached Rowling’s publisher with the idea rather than skirting them and approaching another publisher then there would have been the possibility of his lexicon coming out.  As it was, there was a broach of professional courtesy and the attempt at circumvention of the rights of the author and publisher.  Also, the money issue, which is a non-issue for Rowling and her Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of money, but it would have been a more real issue for her publisher.  So, had Ark made the proposal to the publisher with a stipulation that the author could give final approval of the factuality of the lexicon entries then he would have been on much stronger ground than putting it out through another publisher, RDR Books.

    His last thought before leaving for his next scheduled stop around campus was that, “storytelling is our number one survival skill.”  Stories take on many different aspects of our lives from the mundane to the more fantastic.  I think this is even more poignantly made clear in the documentary that I recently saw called Darkon, which is about live action roleplayers, or LARPers, in their game and “real” lives.  I agree with Mr. Donaldson’s idea, because it’s the stories that we tell that make meaning for and about our lives.  And, it’s for that reason that I feel that I’m drawn to the study of SF and the stories that we tell about the only literature that, as Mr. Donaldson pointed out, “presupposes the future.”

    I didn’t have an opportunity before his alloted time was over to mention this, but his elucidation of the decline in book sales across the board reminded me of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with Mack Hassler.  I am definitely integrated in a technological circuit, but I turn back to books to find the stories that I’m interested in.  Furthermore, the stories about technology are in books–pulp–paper.  Mr. Donaldson didn’t have an answer about the future of narrative forms and media (who could?), but the fact is that it appears, particularly with Border’s recent announcement to decrease SF and Fantasy stock in its brick-and-mortar stores, the current SF/Fantasy boom-bust cycle is on the bust side of things.  I don’t know how much this has to do with changing reading habits, non-reading habits, online and gaming culture, or the economy’s continuing nosedive trend.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see, or if I’m feeling entrepenureal, perhaps I’ll take it in the next big direction.

    Many thanks to Mr. Donaldson for taking the time to speak with us today, and thanks to the folks that made his visit possible.  We sorely need more author visits to Kent.

  • David Foster Wallace, Philip K. Dick, and Transgressive Parody

    Mack Hassler set with an interesting task this week after the unfortunate death of David Foster Wallace. He asked me to consider two questions:

    1) Is PKD like Wallace in respect to the concept of “transgressive parody,” which Patrick Novotny defines in his chapter to Hassler and Wilcox’s Political Science Fiction (1997) titled, “No Future!  Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration,” as, “Parody in the postmodernist aesthetic is the transgression of aesthetic and representational norms” (100).

    2) How does PKD move beyond parody?

    In response to the first query, Philip K. Dick operates in a similar fashion to David Foster Wallace in terms of transgressive parody.  Both authors use their medium of choice, SF for Dick and the non-fiction essay for Wallace (unfortunately, I have not yet read his fiction including Infinite Jest), as the means for their transgressive parody.  Dick parodies the streamlined and perfect futures of Clarke and Asimov through the introduction of kibble, entropy, and the disintegration of reality–a theme that Novotny elaborates in his study of cyberpunk and postmodernism, and Dick obviously is a predecessor of the cyberpunk authors and enjoyed the potential of postmodern play.  On the other hand, Wallace apes the professional essay format and bends it to his own ends through the use of play (there’s that word again), such as through his hyper-footnoting (the best parts of many of his essays are in the footnotes, and his footnotes have footnotes), and his employment of catechresis, or taking the story or argument from one context and applying it elsewhere–much in the vein of Derrida.  Dick and Wallace parody the norms of the writing that they are doing, but they transgress those norms for their own ends rather than making a comic attack on the parodied norms.  The way to think about it is that they take the postmodern sensibility of “whatever” to heart.  They appropriate the norms of the fields in which they work and reshape them, not to make a direct satire of what’s come before, rather to create something new of their own design for their own creative endeavors.  Dick brings the entropic breakdown of the real world and the inner, psychic world to SF, which had largely ignored that important aspect of reality.  Wallace brings a truly reflective mind and sensibility of open curiosity to apparently mundane and boring writing assignments–he grasps those boring moments as a place to begin thinking about more important matters that are, on the surface, only tangentially connected.

    PKD moves beyond parody by using his works as a means of exploration of issues of self, identity, and subjectivity in an increasingly complex world.  On the surface, many of his works parody the cornerstones of the post-pulp era of SF.  For example, Ubik parodies aspects of SF such as space opera, but it does so only on the surface.  This isn’t Dick’s real target.  Instead, he uses the novel as a means to critique the nature of reality and the forces of entropy–two issues largely disregarded in SF until the New Wave.  Another example would be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  In that novel, Dick parts ways with Asimov and gives his androids a real soul and a sense of self-preservation.  However, he isn’t parodying Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw, but instead, he’s appropriating an element of the SF mega-text for his own purposes, which is to work through his own questions about reality, soul, and memory.