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I was reviewing some originality reports generated by Turnitin for some first year undergraduate work today and it struck me that their database  has grown to such an extent that I no longer trust it. I thought that this would never be the case. I assumed that as the database of harvested web pages and student papers grew, the accuraacy of detection would increase. Bigger is better, right? I didn’t think about noise though. There is some filtering in the Turnitin system, but increasingly it seems it isn’t good enough.

An example, one student has a list of 6 different sources all matching to small parts of student essays deposited as ‘reference material’ on courseworkinfo.com and related websites all owned byt he same company, and in likelihood sharing the same database. Do I believe that this student copied from this site? I’m not sure. Do I believe that each of the essays on the site may have originally been copied from wikipedia? more likely. Do I believe that all content on wikipedia is original? Not really.

Recycling and repurposing of text online is becoming so ubquituous that the noise is casuing a problem in the interpretation of originality reports. They used to save us time in investigating cases of plagiarism, now I’m not so sure.

I was amazed today to see a piece in Cell about whether scientists should twitter. In it David Bradley compares his twitter following to that of two celebrity tweeters, ‘Richard Dawkins has almost 25,000 followers on his Twitter feed; the actor Ashton Kutcher has 3.8 million‘.

I wrote very excitedly about the appearance of @richard_dawkins back in 2008. I thought that his appearance on twitter would legitimise the medium for scientists and encourage others to experiment with it.  Unfortunately, I got a stock publicity comment on the blog from ‘dawkins’ and it was shown to be an imposter. So I checked back from the Cell article today and I was rather surprised to see that the account was still alive and had such a big following (25,879). I assume that this is the account to which David refers, since it has just over 25,000 followers. Interestingly @richarddawkins has almost as many followers (17,680). The latter links to richarddawkins.net the former to Richarddawkins.com. Neither twitter account has a ring of authenticity to it, no conversation, just broadcast. Both could easily be simple ways to make a lot of money on amazon click through ads, but my money is on @richarddawkins as the legitimate source (richard_dawkins follows some suspect peeps and as much as we would all like to see Dawkins following The Official Jesus, and God, I can’t quite see it happening).

So, two accounts, neither embracing twitter in any way other broadcasting.  What a shame and a wasted opportunity to engage.

Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (ESTICT) is a UK network of education practitioners and learning technologists interested in promoting good practice with classroom technologies that can enhance face-to-face teaching.

We are holding our first event on  Thursday 26th November 2009 at University of Leicester.

The aim of the day is to share best practice in the use of in-class technology, with a particular focus on the pedagogic uses of electronic voting systems (also known as ‘clickers’ audience response systems ARS, personal response systems PRS). This event is aimed at those both those with experience of EVS who wish to share their best practice and those with an interest in the technology that would like to know more.

Programme
Thursday 26 November 2009

09.30 – 10.00 Registration and coffee
10.00 – 10.15 Welcome and introduction
10.15 – 10.30 Networking event
10.30 – 11.15 Keynote : Dr. Steve Draper, Senior University Teacher, Dept of Psychology, University of Glasgow. Steve is an acknowledged expert in the field of EVS and has published widely on it’s use in Higher Education.
Title: Ways to improve learning with EVS: some deep procedures for teachers, and what
software features matter for these. Abstract.
11.15 – 11.30 coffee
11.30 – 12.00 Mark Goodwin, Teaching Fellow, GENIE CETL . ‘Teaching bioethics using electronic voting technologies’
12.00 – 12.30 Mark Russell, National Teaching Fellow and Principal Lecturer, School of Aerospace, Automotive and Design Engineering, University of Hertfordshire. ‘Tracking student progress with EVS’
12.30 – 13.30 Carvery lunch
13.30 – 14.30 Workshop : exploration of the pedagogical models which can be used EVS
14.30 – 15.00 coffee
15.00 – 15.30 Reports from workshop groups
15.30 – 16.00 The future and aims of the ESTICT community

To register for your free place on this event, join our Ning  community http://estict.ning.com/
where you will find full details of the event and a registration form. Deadline for registrations 6 November.

Since Alan has suddenly decided that he actually likes lists, I’ve decided to throw off my ‘bulleted-list-kindagirl‘ persona and attempt to use a mindmap for something useful.

I’m writing a review, looking at ‘dealing with plagiarism in the internet age‘. I’ve gathered my sources, read the majority of them and inwardly digested and cogitated. I needed a way to get my thoughts down quickly and organise them into a structure, so I used a good old fashioned pencil and paper and drew myself a mindmap.  It just sort of happened that way. It occurred to me (having been playing with google wave and wondering what on earth it was for) that it would be great to have a way to organise my papers within this mindmap structure. So, I redrew the mindmap on mindmeister and started going through the papers I had, adding them into the relevant sections of the map. I added notes to each citation to remind me why I’d put it there and what evidence or opinions I wanted to draw from the paper into the review.

This exercise has highlighted places that I need to do some more research and some papers have influenced the structure and content of the mindmap, but it’s getting there and has really helped me to begin to synthesize my thoughts.

Now, what would be really cool is a google wave robot that would crawl my mindmap, pull the citations and link them straight to the Citeulike bookmarks I’ve been keeping for this project and then direct to the DOIs (I’d have like IGOR to come and suggest/ pull up my citations as I was adding them too!) then when I pulled off the outline plan from mindmeister, I’d have an almost rewritten review complete with citations and live links to the references. Readers of the review would then have a clickable resource and a link to the Citeulike bookmarks to share and use.

Under the Higher Education Academy’s enhancing learning through technology work, Jon Scott and I have a funded project to look at the effectiveness and implications of electronic detection of plagiarism in Higher Education. This is  part of the 2009 evidence net series of synthesis projects.

We are in the process of producing a synthesis on the evidence of the effectiveness, use and implementation of plagiarism detection by electronic means ‘Dealing with plagiarism in the digital age’. To support and continue the project, all the references for the synthesis will be added to a group in citeulike.

The citeulike group ‘e-plagiarism’ is open for anyone to join. You can contribute to the collection of references in this area as well as benefitting from access to a shared bibliography. Searching for papers in this area is not straightforward, since the subject cuts across many different boundaries in education and much of the research has been published in subject specific education journals. Using social bookmarking will provide a resource that can be added to as more papers in this area are published.

If you have an interest in this area of research, or have a favourite paper that I haven’t included in the bibliography so far, please join the group and add your contribution!

Cameron Neylon came to talk at a  genetics departmental seminar yesterday. Alan and I have followed Cameron on twitter for a while and so it was an ideal opportunity to meet him through Mummi Thorisson who had invited Cameron to speak. Several of us amplified the event on twitter using #uolneylon.

Cameron talked about dealing with information overload in science and while the audience may have not been openly receptive to his thoughts, he certainly made me stop and think.

Alan, Mummi and I all went for a curry after the talk for some regular face to face networking. We talked about a lot of things, including, teaching science and how to encourage our colleagues to change their networking practices, the nature of science and how it should be conducted, open notebook science, open publishing, REF/ impact scores/ research IDs and FriendFeed.

I have struggled with FriendFeed since I first signed up back In February 2008. I get facebook, I live in twitter, I love delicious, I’m trying hard to be disciplined about using citeulike (but have to admit that it is reading papers that I struggle with not bookmarking them!). I like to think that I am web 2.0 savvy and will try any new service passing. However, FriendFeed leaves me cold. It took Cameron to make me realise what was wrong. I have the wrong network on FriendFeed. The people I’ve subscribed to were suggested by the system because they are in my twitter network. However, very very few of them are resident in twitter (@daveowhite has a lot to answer for in my massive overuse of that word, but it is oh so succinct ). Finally I get it. The conversations I am looking at on FriendFeed are mostly not happening IN FriendFeed, they are autoposts from elsewhere. I need to move into FriendFeed and talk to a different bunch of people. Just as I have my facebook peeps, I can have FriendFeed peeps. The light has dawned. I can find a third audience to converse with.

So, I am starting to unsubscribe from anyone who is posting only their twitter feed into FriendFeed because I can (and do) have a conversation with them on twitter. I suspect I will soon need some new people to subscribe to, that are resident in FriendFeed, so come and say hello! Finding a whole new group of people to talk to is going to be fun.

In my ’spare’ time I am an associate lecturer for the OU on S104 a first level 60 point course on general science. This is the second presentation I’ve taught and the course is just kicking off. The course has tutor-supported discussion groups with several assessed activities, all held in the crumbling edifice of First Class (an email-based system). The ‘tutor group forums’ struggle to take off, I have only 19 students at the moment, and even with latecomers won’t have more than 25. The forum’s success is very much dependent on the students we get, and while last year’s was OK, it never really had much spark and was mostly led by me.

At a staff development day it was mentioned that there were several S104 groups on Facebook. I’ve been off to have a look and there are several active groups, in particular one for this presentation, and one of my students is very active on there. I’m wondering whether I should go and say hello. I am pretty likely to be the only tutor on the group. However, I should think that this is most likely a place that students want to chat without a tutor looking over them (as OU student and colleague Andy suggests). I know the OU has created Facebook apps and promotes OU groupings on facebook and I know of one group that is specifically using a closed group for teaching, but I’m pretty dubious about engaging with my students in this way.

Seeing something to do with ‘work’ on Facebook has made me think about my own online identity. I have two main channels, Facebook and twitter (@jobadge).

I am pretty much ’social/personal’ me when I’m on Facebook, my network is made up of friends, old college mates who have known me under more dubious circumstances and other mums from school. It includes a couple of work colleagues but they manage to put up with me and I (hope) recognise the difference in context. My privacy settings are limited to allow access only to friends and so it’s slightly more private than twitter.

My ‘work’ persona is alive and well on twitter. My twitter followers and friends are colleagues, in the OU, at Leicester University and beyond. I may still twitter about baking bread and of course  there is endless #cake discussion, but it is primarily a work channel.

I doubt I’ll join my students on Facebook, but it would be nice to find some S104 tutors on twitter

I’ve had my head against a brick wall today with several technical problems. The main one being that in some of our blackboard courses, Turnitin is not functioning, you can’t view old assignments, modify them or create new assignments. It turns out that this is because we were at the bleeding edge of using turnitin and we’ve been expired!

It’s rather tortuous but can be fixed by Turnitin, so if this has happened to you, get your admin person to contact iParadigms.

Way back in the mists of time (well it was 2004), we at University of Leicester installed an early version of the plug-in that connected Blackboard and Turnitin (version 1.something, I think). When a Turnitin Assignment is created on a Blackboard course using this plug-in, a corresponding class is created in Turnitin. This class is the container for the individual assignments and is a related to the stand alone version of Turnitin which operates like a mini VLE. This class container is never seen by the Blackboard user (instructor nor student), as they operate at the assignment level. the Blackboard module is their ’class’ equivalent.  The old plug-in set expiration dates on these classes, and having been around long enough, our Blackboard courses that first tried the Turnitin integrated system back in 2004/5 have now expired and so cannot use Turnitin in any shape or form. This is also a consequence of us recycling our Blackboard courses, keeping the content the same but refreshing the student cohort each year.

The good news is that this can be fixed by the Turnitin support staff in the States, who can renew the classes and set them to never expire, but it’s not something your institutional admin can sort out. the bad news is that until they fix it, these Blackbaord courses can’t use Turnitin and term starts on Monday. Fingers crossed for a quick response from the States!

Update: Monday 28 Sept. No it’s worse than that – response from TII is: ‘iParadigms have told us that all classes that are created have a maximum duration of 5 years. after this point they will expire and will not be able to be extended.’ This is a major problem for anyone that recycles their blackboard courses year on year and uses TII integration. All your courses will have a 5 year life span and then they will have to be re-made to reset the expiration date.  If this affects your institution please raise a support ticket to TII to ask them to rethink this policy. Emailing directly to requktii@turnitin.com. If this does not work, you can use the form at https://submit.ac.uk/help/helpdesk.asp

bye bye paper note books? flickr:SSK

I wrote about electronic lab books just before the summer break. Since then my husband (@richardbadge) and I have just published a short communication about his use of wikis to support undergraduate students carrying out research projects in his lab.  The wikis reside within Blackboard (using the Learning Objects campus pack plug-in).

The article focussess on his use of the wikis to supervise the student’s work, as this was a pilot study just carried out with his two students. We considered asking the students how they found it, but the most fundamental question we wanted to ask was how using an electronic lab book compared to a paper one, however, neither of them had used a paper lab book, so it was a moot point!

You can read the paper in full on the Bioscience Education Journal.