Posts by Joe Wylie
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Joe, that's astonishing about Turnitin being used as default grading labour!! Cheaper than paying grad students to do it, I guess, although how exactly does it mark the essays, other than "dodgy" or "not dodgy"?
In my experience my grad student tutor in that particular department was a thoroughly decent and hardworking person. I don't think she ever set eyes on any of my essays though. Although assignments were carried out during each tutorial there was simply an overall grade at the end of the semester. Lack of resources was the standard excuse for why these assignments were never returned with individual marking to students. Strangely enough, a presumably similarly resourced department had no problem returning the previous week's work with a detailed assessment.
When essays were returned there were no comments relating to specific passages, or even a comment on the essay in general, just an overall grade. Work was uploaded in Word format to Turnitin's system, and a hard copy was also required. I should add that it's the only department that's ever managed to irretrievably lose one of my essays. As I said, a culture of lax academic standards. There are plenty of unresolved ethical and legal arguments about Turnitin, but I really feel that submitting all student work, regardless of whether plagiarism is suspected, is just plain wrong.
My guess is that Turnitin is primarily optimized to detect wholesale copying of entire essays, not the sort of work that borrows a sentence here or a paragraph there.
During the initial seminar where Turnitin's features were explained, students were shown projections of on-screen displays where specific passages were highlighted and matched to identical text from within the system's ever-expanding database. Naturally I did a bit of online reading about the system, and while I found some advocacy for prefacing one's essay with a disclaimer that it remained your intellectual property, I felt that might be interpreted as being a little provocative.
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Ihimaera's naivety seems more than a little surprising. In the age of SparkNotes and Turnitin, it would seem that he's not particularly tech-savvy.
Regarding Turnitin, I've had experience as a student with one university department that implemented this anti-plagiarism service. At the seminar where the system was presented to students an IT guy explained that reiterating concepts and ideas didn't constitute plagiarism. For example, there was only so much that you could say about Hamlet, and after all this time it had pretty much all been said. If someone from the English department had displayed such intellectual bankruptcy it would have been grounds for tarring & feathering, but when such things are dumped on IT people they deserve to be cut a little slack.
I couldn't resist asking if the reason this particular department, and not others, had decided to use anti-plagiarism software was because they'd experienced a higher than average rate of student cheating. This was vehemently denied.
In practice, it turned out that all student work was submitted to Turnitin's checking process, not just those that were suspected of plagiarism. This has become a way of semi-automating the marking of assignments. The department in question has effectively admitted to this by claiming lack of resources as a reason for introducing Turnitin. As the system can catch students cribbing off one another, in a culture of lax academic standards it's too tempting to turn student assessment into a form of policing.
Thanks for the superb post Jolisa.
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1989 wasn't a high point in NZ music by any means, but Urlich's Safety In Numbers was a perfectly reasonable and inoffensive pop album of the time. Dated, sure, but wasn't the point that people were pleased that a NZ pop singer of any description could get radio play and do fairly well in Australia?
Fair enough, but to plug her album Urlich was interviewed on TV3 by a rooster puppet. When your fan base is mainly 8 year olds you do what you must.
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...and BTW i seen another 4 wheel drive launch their boat off a trailer by driving across the estuary at low tide. it's not a good look eh
Even if Velikovsky were still alive it doesn't sound like the kind of thing he'd do. More the sort of lowlife stunt that Erich von Däniken would pull.
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Thanks for the Luther link Ian. Although I'd never want to try it for myself, I've always harboured a mild curiosity about the Diet of Worms.
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In James Belich's Making Peoples he touches on something that I find very interesting, the vast difference in attitudes between indigenous nations in their attitudes to contact with Europeans. For example, compared to most native Australians, Polynesians showed a great curiosity for foreign innovations. As Belich notes, the first Australians' relative disinterest in such things is something for which they've never been forgiven.
Tim Flannery's magnificent prehistory of 'Austronesia', The Future Eaters, has a bit more to say about this. While there's plenty of contention over Flannery's ideas it's a must read for anyone with an interest in why this corner of the world is the way it is. He's also a helluva good writer.
One I've plugged here before: Customs and Habits of the New Zealanders 1838-42. Father C. Servant, Marist Missionary in the Hokianga. Servant was a keenly observant guy who took a real interest in the people he'd come to preach his gospel to. As a window into a vanished world untouched by the dubious hand of Elsdon Best it's full of little surprises..
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As Kyle Chapman points out here . . .
Kyle Matthews, as it turns out. Can't have been a Freudian slip :)
I can only conclude that those who advocate removing tax benefits from all religious organisations are either driven by a beady-eyed ideology, or are happy to undermine the vast amount of vital work that many of them do in order to nobble the Brian Tamakis of this world. There are plenty of religious people out there who are tolerant of other faiths, and of atheism, and are as enthusiastic about the benefits of science as any atheist. Literal bible-believers, IMHE, don't feature large when it comes to performing genuine charitable work.
The old Methodist publisher and philanthropist A H Reed once stated, "I have been a life-long non-drinker, non-smoker and non-gambler. I take no credit for that; many better men than myself are moderately addicted to all three." It's a pity that such an attitude isn't reciprocated more often by unbelievers. If those hard-line atheists who advocate a punitive and morally superior state regime towards all churches are unable to admit that many believers might be better people than they are, it's probably because they've never had the good fortune to experience the self-effacing charitable work that religious belief inspires in some.
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Some interesting questions there dubmugga.
Re. "kiwi" culture - only in NZ could this happen. If it doesn't bring a lump to your throat then, like me, you're probably tired of life. Or something. -
only you'd have to look for it in the royal breeding lines of relatively pure polynesian females who did continue the bloodlines not the muggles we have these days.
Muggles? Surely you mean mudbloods. As you seem to be taking something of a Harry Potter approach to these things you'll be on the right track with Mr. Brailsford. He does seem to have cultivated something of an Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore persona.
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I haven't looked at Barry Brailsford book The Tattooed Land, do you recommend it or are there questions about its varacity (which just makes it all the more interesting).
The early edition(s) of The Tattooed Land is/are fairly straightforward. It's the later revised editions, after Brailsford accorded himself a mystically purloined whakapapa and took to preening himself as a new age guru, that are a completely different kettle of bananas.