Plagiarism rewritten

I will start with an easy question: has the internet changed the demeanour of plagiarism? The answer is ‘yes, of course’. The scope of the seduction online and the ease by which it can be committed have skyrocketed. Motive and method seem to be written in the internet’s charter. And isn’t eLearning playing into its hand? Aren't we like the car owners of some countries who could get fined for not locking our car, luring guileless car thieves?

So let me pose a second, more difficult question: has the internet changed the essence of plagiarism?

If you are one of the many educators who have a clear stance on the issue, taking plagiarism to be theft, a crime, and antonym of learning, your answer will be no. But here’s a challenge: hasn’t the time come for plagiarism to be overhauled?

Let’s consider first the consequences of the increase of sources from which one can copy. We are not talking simple addition here, it’s exponential. Doesn’t the mere number of available texts make plagiarism unavoidable? There are after all only so many ways one can express an idea or fact. Some time back I visited a well-built site for primary school students, full of colours, images, texts and a page explaining plagiarism. I forgot which animal was used as an example, but let’s say it was a leopard. The ‘plagiarized’ text went along the lines: “the leopard is the smallest of the four big cats”[1]. ‘Wait a moment’, I remember thinking, ‘can a simple statement of a general fact be called plagiarism?’

The aims and objectives of teaching and their relation to learning styles is more material for discussion. Traditionally, education has favoured - to say the least - the verbal style. Knowing something was basically knowing how to write about that something. Little luck for those students who knew but could not fluently express themselves by words. With its seamless integration of multimedia, a learning platform can remedy this one sidedness and evaluate knowledge acquisition in creative ways.

Another strong argument against an all too strict ruling by plagiarism could be made by the social construction of knowledge.

Alas, one could object, will creative writing not be the unwarranted victim of plagiarism’s overhaul? I doubt it. More people are writing and being read on the internet then ever before. Although their essays are not being corrected by a teacher, their number of readers is probably as effective a style marker.

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[1] Wikipedia, who else?.

Copy proof

It’s June and the dark shadow of exams is hovering over the life of many muggle children and youngsters. Parents are suffering too. More than in the past do they copy their children’s insecurities and nerves. Worse still, the adult distortion mirror of hindsight and hopefulness often amplifies their experience.

New electronic learning tools have made little difference in these testing times. Used extensively for assignments and evaluations during the course of the learning process, they do not satisfy the basic requirements for a final examination. They are still not identity- and copy-proof.

Indeed, you can require distance students to turn on their webcam for the duration of the examination. But what if the device blacks out during the allotted time? Is the attempt invalidated? This question looms high over any technical setback during the test and holds legal repercussions.

The point of assuring the individuality and originality of the answers is, if possible, even more tricky. A webcam cannot detect a second laptop placed tactically outside its visual field, much less pages of a book or an all too helpful uncle. I have read about examiners who are scanning the students’ eye movements to make sure that no undue wanderings outside the screen occur. Imagine the stress involved in this level of control. No wonder many institutions have abandoned the pursuit of organizing exams online and returned to actual sessions.

Let me move on to the broad and more acute problem of plagiarism, present in all forms of education today and exponentially so in elearning. Of course, one can install plagiarism detection software that will cut each assignment nicely in two percentages, original and copy. It is probably an indispensable tool in higher education. But how to explain what plagiarism is to young people who always had this wealth of information at their fingertips? Is the concept of plagiarism itself not due for a revision?

Moodle's cookies

Today I will linger over a topic that’s hot, cookies. I am not too familiar with digital cookies, I admit. I am even not too fond of their sweet aliases. But here I am, new European legislation forcing me to give cookies some attention. Incidentally, this is a situation in which I commonly found myself since eLearning occupies my time: new subjects sprouting on my path, requiring some understanding, inviting me to learn. Isn’t that the calling of all teachers: unending learning?

Since Saturday, 26th of May, European websites are obliged to inform their visitors of the cookies that will silently be placed on their electronic devices during the visit. Good. This will keep eavesdroppers at bay. No uninformed and unauthorized tracking of my wanderings through the internet, no unallowed skimming of my identity, no profiling where the only profile I care for is the one written by myself.

Now, let’s return to our Moodle learning platform and continue with the job of teaching. But hear this. Although eWallah doesn’t track nor skim, and does not harbour second grade commercial intentions, we do use cookies and are subject to the law. Some of the cookies we place are even first-party session cookies. They’re necessary for our users to stay logged in when moving through the pages.

 

And there is more. Any learning platform administrator who respects himself and enjoys an original creation will have at least some plugins installed that do not belong to the core software of Moodle. Enter the third-party cookies. By showing our users the geographical location of one another, we open a line for Google maps to push their cookies to our users’ computers.  By allowing the use of repositories like Flickr, we take the lid of their cookie jar. Digital cookies are omnipresent, and they travel fast. The new legislation makes it apparently easier to know them and refuse them. It does not make them crumble.

Record and play

It has taken us some weeks of trial and error but finally we have come across convincing plugins to play and record audios on our Moodle platform.

Let me be clear about what I mean with convincing. For Renaat it is a series of technical vocabulary like free, stable, minimal and gitable. For me (let me be honest and ever so little ashamed), it is all that –taking his word for it–- plus the way the plugin looks on the page.

So we have settled for the Yahoo web player to play our audios and for Moodle’s own online audio recording assignment using Flash (10.1+).

The Yahoo web player has a sleek interface, familiar and contemporary, and offers some room for customization. You can minimize the player by ‘docking’ it in the margin the way Moodle docks its blocks. There was an issue at first with the docked player disappearing under the Moodle docking bar but Renaat found a solution, at least for the Chrome and Firefox browsers. IE will follow soon. There is little to add or improve on the online audio recording assignment. It is just excellent.

Of course, teachers who set this assignment, still have to grade the recordings of the student manually. With the current technology and digitalization of sound, it is perfectly possible to have a program evaluating the sounds and pronunciation of words and sentences.

That’s exactly what the language training site Babbel where I am currently learning Portuguese is doing. The words I utter into my microphone are immediately assessed and given a percentage. Less than 50% and I am not allowed to proceed. Imagine my pride when during the first lessons I regularly got a +80 when repeating the words pronounced by a clear slow female voice. After all, Portuguese is a hell of a language to pronounce. However, my pride took a serious dent during the more advanced modules, when my scores suddenly dropped to just above the pass mark. In these modules, Babbel uses different voices and let them speak at normal street velocity. But I noticed something else. I still scored higher when my familiar female voice was around. My results were worst when I followed a deep male bass voice. So I did a little test and imitated his low pitch. And yes, my scores went up. There are still some flaws to the automatic grading of sounds, it seems.

Blogging about blogging

This week has seen us busy installing the OU blog and fashioning it to our whims. I am sorry to say, but the standard Moodle blog was not quite good enough for our learning platform where students from various geographic, cognitive and linguistic backgrounds gather. The checkbox linking a blog post to a specific course was not robust. The pathways to finding posts of fellow participants were cloudy.

The OU blog plug-in developed by Open University promises improvement. It offers personal and course blogs, different access control levels, and a simple activity link to the relevant blog posts. So let me leave it to Renaat to settle the remaining technical issues of ousting Standard and crowning OU, and concentrate on the educative use of blogs.

Are there many educative uses of blogs, I ask myself? Are there pedagogical advantages specific to blogs, other than the writing and logic reasoning that are equally required for activities as essay writing, discussion forums and comments? Can self-inspection enhance learning or does it distract from it? Can it claim more than the beautifully shushing spelling of narcissistic?

My own long-standing reluctance towards impersonal diaries and mass letter writing is clogging my imagination and I would be glad if somebody could show me a few good examples. 

I do see potential in the setting up of a course blog for use as a journal, though, where only the student involved and the teacher have access to that student's personal blog. This could be a great tool for courses like poetry or psychology, where the content often touches deeper layers in the student’s mind (and why does this make me think of adolescence?).

I am also reminded of a recent discussion with a niece of mine who is a teacher in a primary school in Belgium. She told me that she had felt the need to change the established Monday morning activity of gathering pupils in a circle and letting them talk about their weekends. The same few kids who commonly overshadowed the talks were usually the ones who had the most exciting weekends, what seemed doubly stinging for the others. Instead, she now made them all write down a few sentences that afterwards could be read by the others. Many future bloggers to be...

Presentations?!

As a newcomer to the fairgrounds where Moodle militants gather, I am still under the charm of the novel words they use. “Let me stage my language stash before the MoodleMoot”, I may think and feel a whiff of magic energy.

This sandy enchantment made it all the more a surprise when, trying to learn about the outcome of the recent Dublin MoodleMoot, I bumped on a collection of down to earth presentations.

Presentations!

I abhor presentations.

One of the more rational reasons of my enthusiasm for eLearning is based on the conviction that its many features will liquidate presentations definitely, conclusively. Only to find out now that they have proliferated even at the heartland of Moodle.

I am aware I am part of a minority. In the university in Kampala where I worked, only two colleagues, neither one Ugandan, shared my aversion towards presentations. The most computer-illiterate lecturers managed somehow to make a passable slideshow. And the students seemed to love them.

What about critical thinking, social constructivism, thoughtful decision-making, multiple learning styles, the dual coding of memory? They didn’t seem to care. The numbing sensation that accompanies a presentation suited them fine as long as the slides were made available afterwards. They often printed them, and I felt sorry for the meagre amount of words lost in a big white paper world.

Now here’s eLearning, I thought. No more presentations when you have pages and logs, roles and activities at your command. Before an audience you still need a beamer of course, but you no longer shoot dumb-dumb bullets in the air. No more death by powerpoint.

I was wrong. I probably underestimated the bond that exists between presenters and presentations, the psychological comfort they offer each other.

Moreover, presentations could make a comeback even in my reluctant world. These last days, you see, I am charmed not so much by words, but by a rich media feature that combines video and, hm hm, a slideshow.

On Moodle and eWallah

So, here’s another blog on Moodle, making your list of feeds even longer then it already is. How will this space be different from the other, good ones, on the topic? For one, I am not writing from the gently pampered position inside an educational building of the West. I have come to know and use the learning platform on the other side of the digital divide.

(What reminds me of the Berlin Wall when still standing, with its observation towers in the East and the West barely ten meters apart. It was not difficult to imagine the view from the other angle. In fact, the view wasn’t that different at all. Still, it made a difference, being here or there.)

In 2008 Renaat and me set up a Moodle platform in landlocked Uganda, one of the lowest bandwidth environments of the world. Originally, all traffic went through satellites and was direly expensive. Then the cable arrived from Kenya, but the poor line has proved vulnerable to attacks from pirate ships and other mishaps ever since.

At the moment eWallah is working with organisations in various locations around the globe. Our server is located somewhere in the Cloud. I myself have moved to Brazil, a country whose name looms big in the list of Moodle sites but where I barely speak the language. All good reasons why, in some ways, I prefer to maintain the outlook of an outsider. I will voice issues considering the point of view of the student who benignly lies his way through the admission test but who barely knows how to move a mouse on introduction day. I’ll walk with the enthusiastic mentor whose students visit the platform only because they feel obliged to. I will be the overzealous apprentice administrator who questions and learns.