Posted: December 20, 2008 | Author: dpod | Filed under: Digital Humanities, Essays, Research, Reviews, Teaching | Tags: Computers, digital humanities, digital pedagogy, education, pedagogy, universities |
I recently had a discussion with the head of a humanities
organisation who wanted to move a website. The website was
written using Coldfusion, a proprietary suite of server-based
software that is used by developers for writing and publishing
interactive web sites (Adobe nd). After some discussion of the
pros and cons of moving the site, we turned to the question of
the software.
Head of Humanities Organisation: We’d also
like to change the software.
Me: I’m not sure that is wise unless you really
have to: it will mean hiring somebody to port everything and you
are likely to introduce new problems.
Head of Humanities Organisation: But I don’t
have Coldfusion on my computer.
Me: Coldfusion is software that runs on a
server. You don’t need it on your computer. You just need it on
the server. Your techies handle that.
Head of Humanities Organisation: Yes, but I use
a Mac.
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Posted: December 20, 2008 | Author: dpod | Filed under: Language and Linguistics, Teaching, Tutorials | Tags: answer keys, exercises, grammar, linguistics, morphology, students, study tips, syntax, Tutorials |
Here are possible answers to the exercises in
Grammar Essentials 2: Parts of speech. In some cases more than one right answer might be possible.
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Posted: December 15, 2008 | Author: dpod | Filed under: Digital Humanities, Essays, Teaching | Tags: Computers, digital humanities, digital pedagogy, grading, plagiarism, student engagement, students, Teaching, testing |
I have recently started using plagiarism detection software. Not so much for the ability to detect plagiarism as for the essay submission- and grading- management capabilities it offered. But the system was, of course, originally designed to detect plagiarism—which means that I too can use it to check my students’ originality.
To the extent that one semesters’ data is a sufficient sample, my preliminary conclusions are that the problem of plagiarism, at least in my classes, seems to be more-or-less as insignificant as I thought it was when I graded by hand, and that my old method of discovering plagiarism (looking into things when a paper didn’t seem quite “right”) seemed to work. This past semester, I caught two people plagiarising. But neither of them had particularly high unoriginality scores: in both cases, I discovered the plagiarism after something in their essays seemed strange to me and caused me to go through originality reports turnitin provides on each essay more carefully. I then went through the reports for every essay submitted by that class (a total of almost 200), to see if I had missed any essays that turnitin’s reports suggested might be plagiarised. None of the others showed the same kind of suspicious content that had led me to suspect the two I caught. So for me, at least, the “sniff test” remains apparently reliable.
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