Posts made by Mary Pringle

I tried to annotate Ellen Marie's posting, but I got 'undefined'.  In response to  her saying ," Perhaps we can come up with a way for students to provide feedback?" I said:

I like this idea. Providing useful feedback to online collaborators is a transferable skill, part of 21st-century job literacy. I'd like to see the student feedback process framed as a meta educational activity.

Wayne Mackintosh wrote,

Copying can be good.

 

I agree wholeheartedly with you on this. I'm actually working on a "21st-century" composition course that begins by asking students to consider their roles as consumers, repurposers, and creators of data/information/knowledge. My concern is that students are cheating themselves when they don't learn how to attribute authorship as expected and even more when they don't do the work it takes to become a confident thinker and writer. In my own teaching, I've noticed that overburdened and underprepared adults often feel that this is their only recourse. Of course, the issue pretty much disappears when students are studying something because they want to learn about it, and there is no grade or credential attached. But since a credential will be attached, I like Gina's ideas about open, transparent, and unbiased assessment.

Here is one of my favourite comments on copyright:

 

Wayne Mackintosh wrote,

When you refer to plagiarism -- are you referring largely to the unauthorised copying of information?

Fascinating -- OER provides the solution -- using open licences our content encourages legitimate plagiarism - -that must be a win for the OERu wink

You are very focused on the cause, Wayne! I don't think using OER would deter plagiarism by students—as you know, rather than write papers themselves, they cut and paste from the Internet or use essay-writing services. This is mostly a problem in the humanities whereas the sciences have more of a cheating problem with copying/sharing solutions. Computer science, the discipline I work with mostly, has a plagiarism problem with students copying code rather than writing it themselves.

It is a problem in assignment design and also the focus on grades rather than the learning process that both students and teachers fall into. I like to see students working with the materials in ways that promote authentic learning and make cheating irrelevant. The best example I know of is the Wikipedia school and university projects, where a group of students might collaborate on writing or editing a Wikipedia entry with a goal such as creating a featured article. Students are able to develop many needed skills, including higher-order thinking, in a public way that makes plagiarism immediately problematic—an embarrassing situation to be avoided.

I know there are cultural differences with respect to how acceptable it is to copy, but I feel it is especially crucial in disciplines such as nursing and engineering that can have life-or-death consequences that students really learn the content and skills. If principles that support this could be built into the OERu system, it would be a huge gain. This would be a good time to generate ideas on how to do that.



I like your daydream, Gina. It makes sense to me. Mine is smaller, reflecting the fairly narrow sphere of my work life, but outlandishly big at the same time: the problem of rampant plagiarism and cheating reported in North American universities is to me a symptom of a bankrupt pedagogic paradigm and a clear call for a completely new way of doing things. I have seen students put as much energy into getting around the system as it would take just to to what is asked of them. Instead of being excited and motivated by the chance to learn, they are cynically doing what they think it takes to get "the piece of paper".

I would like enterprises like OERu to be part of a movement to redesign higher education so that the idea of plagiarism becomes mostly irrelevant, and cheating is a less viable option than just doing the work because the work is really relevant to the student's goals and virtual self-presentation. I know the pieces are out there, put putting them together will take a brain bigger than mine (probably a collective one).

I think a lot of this is already implicit in the ideas circulating around OER and PLA--I just haven't seen it spelled out in this context.
When I first started studying instructional design, we briefly dealt with the question of education versus training. I think the instructor concluded that it was no longer a relevant question. Maybe it isn't, but I like the idea that this program might be more weighted toward the traditional education end versus, for example, http://alison.com/, which is not a bad thing, but clearly on the training end of the continuum. If I were designing an OER e-learning program, this would be a great piece for the technical part of it, but not sufficient for an educational program IMHO.