Comments on: Changing Definitions to Avoid Responsibility

By: t h rive

t h rive — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:46:19 +0000

I think you’re quite right, actually. Especially your point to Steven, “…kids who don’t have a clearer sense of what they’ve lost…”. Then again, what they’ve lost, hell, they might not need. Soon computer spell-checkers will be able to catch the difference between “your” and “you’re”, and “there”…etc…

Nothing kills me more than that (on a tangent).

By: Britt

Britt — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:50:05 +0000

@Steven: You’re dead on. Kids aren’t the only benders of the rule, and they’ve seen people in authority get away with a wrist slap for behavior that carries the threat of expulsion. We’ve even changed how we treat “taking responsibility.” Consequences seem to be few and far between. In a way, I feel sorry for the kids who don’t have a clearer sense of what they’ve lost. I’m not convinced that what they’ve supposedly gained is better.

@t h rive: Playing devil’s advocate, are we really past the point of having no control over the Internet as it relates to our individual behavior? To me, there’s a difference between the “copy & paste” issue and lifting someone’s work and slapping your name on it. Are we really ready to say that there’s no more original thought to be produced, that all we have left is a mash culture?

By: t h rive

t h rive — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:30:17 +0000

My thought about this (cheating or not cheating) is that we should let the technology win out; it’s more like us, it’s what people do. By that I don’t mean CHEAT, but yes, we must change our perspective on what it means to be using the internet to copy and paste. Everything has been said before, done before, and the internet lets us know that. High schoolers just aren’t ignorant.

There’s a guy I work with (speaking of being 40, your most recent post) who has just joined Facebook for the second time: he kept getting in trouble with his girlfriend for having friends she didn’t know about. He’s rejoined, but deleted much of what happened on his “wall” because, well, messages from a girl he used to date. My take on that was that he should probably either avoid FB completely, or let the online communication win. Furthermore, its his mistake that it takes his “wall” for his spouse to discover things.

Overall: the internet owns us. Deal.

By: Steven Maher

Steven Maher — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:26:12 +0000

Thanks Britt. You’re right, its tough to tell kids they can’t represent someone else’s work as their own when Jayson Blair, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose profited from it. Could it be that the stigma from wrong-doing is deteriorating everywhere? It seems all to easy for people to just step forward, state they take “take full responsibility” and then go back to their lives as if nothing happened.

We have had some success with turnitin.com, but found that some students if given the chance, may even use the service to check their essays. They use it as a gauge for paraphrasing, which seems like more work in the long run.

Thanks again for your comments, something tells me the directors used me for a purpose other than what I understood it to be.

By: Britt

Britt — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:46:21 +0000

@Steven: Thank you for taking the time to comment. One of the hazards of liveblogging is overlooking actual transcripts. After reviewing your full interview(), I agree that your take was much less extreme than I had originally determined. In fact, your interview as a whole was more enlightening than a good 50% of the original show. I hope you’ll forgive me for basing my original analysis on what was clearly a very small portion, and a highly edited one at that, of your interview.

One of the things that worries me, and this issue was only addressed briefly in your interview, is this idea that we need to make it harder for kids to cheat. I’d love to see a conversation about how the stigma of cheating appears to have lessened significantly. When, if that’s the case, did this shift in attitudes happen? Why did it happen?

By: Steven Maher

Steven Maher — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:57:17 +0000

Please read the complete teacher interviews included at the PBS Website and you can see how careful editing resulted in a confused message. Maybe this was helped by a little inarticulateness on my part as well.

Perhaps the problem here is the difference between cheating in the form of handing in work that was written by someone else, and cheating in the form of looking up facts. I would suggest that carefully constructed assignments would require the latter while making the former obsolete.

As I wrote in defense on my own blog:

“Yes, I do want students to have experience finding, evaluating and critically thinking about information. It is a skill more applicable to their real lives in the real world. How many professions insist on denying resources to their workers when they are doing their job?

Sure if I am producing a film, I want the screenplay to be original. But if I am defending a copyright infringement, I want my lawyer to have read dozens of other briefs and legal arguments before we walk into court. Do you want your doctor to “cheat” and use some other doctor’s medical procedures if they have been proven successful?”

Please take a look at the column written by John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems at Forbes.com. He points out that in order for education to valid, “we may need to explore things that make us uncomfortable.”