Books, etc.

My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture

My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, by Susan D. Blum.  Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009.  Located at: First Floor, New Book Display: PN 167 .B48 2009; also available online for SHU users via eBrary.

University undergraduate students and faculty live in two different cultural communities and their understandings of plagiarism and originality differ profoundly.  Blum presents plagiarism as (for faculty) rooted in Enlightenment discussions of ideas, words, expression, individual originality, and sources –summed up in the concept of “authenticity.”  But students live performative lives –surrounded by texts via chat, texting (text is now a verb), and view performative quotation and allusion very differently from adult norms of attribution.

Plagiarism involves, according to Blum, and spectrum of behaviors from outright intentional deception (purchasing a paper to be submitted as one’s own) to casual or uninformed quotation and appropriation of text.  Academic disciplines vary in their approach to quotation: when does a cliché (if the shoe fits …) become a literary allusion (the best of times, the worst of times) become unsourced appropriation and potential plagiarism?  Students are actually very sophisticated in their use of quotation and other textual reference, but their norms differ from those enforcing originality in academe.  The previous sentence is actually quoted from page 27 –academic norms require that I attribute it to Blum; but if I loosely paraphrased the same content without attribution, am I committing plagiarism?

An anthropologist, Blum bases her study on interviews carried out by four trained students; 234 people participated in 154 interviews (“a few involving more than one student” –so there’s quotation marks!) and 32 conversations resulting in more than 5,000 pages of transcripts.  She studied “Saint U” –probably a more “competitive” university than Sacred Heart University although many of Blum’s findings seem directly relevant to this context.  Her chapter “Growing Up in the College Bubble” should be required of all faculty and staff.  This is thought-provoking material about a serious concern which evades simplistic policies and processes.

--Gavin Ferriby

The Evolution of Search (Google)

This six-minute video reviews very recent history: from 1999 -- this video is produced by Google, so it has a predictable point of view.  But it gives a great overview quickly!

 

 

Hat tip to Library Link of the Day.

--Gavin Ferriby

You Are Not a Gadget: Jaron Lanier

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.  209 pages.  Sacred Heart University Library: HM851 .L358 2010

We’ve heard the terminology:   crowdsourcing, the hive mind, the noosphere, the wisdom of crowds.  Jaron Lanier, a technology pioneer and Silicon Valley insider, dares in You Are Not a Gadget  to question the current elevation of the collective intelligence at the expense of individual intelligence.   He sees value in the collective, but as a tool, not as a replacement for the individual.  A case in point is authorship.  As Lanier puts it:

"An impenetrable tone deafness rules Silicon Valley when it comes to the idea of authorship. … The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book… If the books [being scanned into] the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book.  This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. … Authorship – the very idea of the individual point of view – is not a priority of the new ideology. … The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting."  (p.46-47)

Lanier’s book has been widely reviewed, in The New York Times, for example, and he was recently profiled in The Economist.  He wants us to remain individuals even as we invent and use technology, and not “respect bits too much.” (p.119)  “Any gadget”, he says, “gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us.” (p.192)

--Bonnie Figgatt

Online Britannica: better than Wikipedia!

Britannica – the Online Encyclopedia. Go to: http://0-www.britannica.com.enterprise.sacredheart.edu/

It’s better than Wikipedia!

The online version on the Encyclopedia Britannica features many great resources you can use in your research.
•    300+ streaming videos covering science, the arts, world studies
•    New York Times and BBC News feeds
•    Comprehensive statistics on world countries
•    Thousands of ebooks
•    Primary documents
•    Comprehensive statistics on world countries
•    Interactive world atlas
•    4000+ quotations, contemporary and classic
•    Dictionary and Thesaurus
•    Encyclopedia entries written by scholars

You can access all of this through the SHU Library database listing. Click on the Find Resources tab on the library homepage, select Find Articles Search Databases, and choose Britannica. Britannica is a great place to start basic research and then add in videos, current news articles, primary documents, or images. It’s easy to use and provides scholarly information. Take at look at Britannica today, it’s better than Wikipedia.

--Nancy DelVecchio

EdPubs: US Department of Education Publications Website

For many years, I have used the edpubs.gov website to order books for the library.  I thought that I would share this resource with you, if you are not familiar with the service.

The US Department of Education produces many publications every year.  These items are available to the public for FREE.  You don’t even pay shipping costs.  There is a limit of five items per order, but you can order additional items as soon as your first order is received.  There is information under FAQ section advising how you can order items in bulk or have them delivered more quickly.  I have never used either of these services.  I will let you know that I usually receive any items that I’ve ordered in less than two weeks.  All of the items are available in print or as a physical item, but many of them are also available in PDF or HTML format so you can download them immediately.

 
I keep using the term “item” instead of book.  That’s because there are more than just books available to you through this website.  There are brochures, CD-ROMs, newsletters, posters, grant applications, in addition to the longer reports that I order for the library.  Some of the items are available in both English and Spanish.  When ordering, make sure that you read the description carefully so that you select the correct item.  There is a brief description under some of the titles, but the best thing to do is click on “more” so you will see the complete summary of content, full description, availability and the physical description.  Some titles come as a brochure and a brief report and a full report, so you have to be careful about reading the description in order to get the item you really want.  Make sure that the item is “in stock” before clicking on the “add to cart” button.  The FAQ’s state that you can call and order an item not currently in stock, but I have not had luck in getting out of stock items. 

There are several ways to locate items on this website.  The main page has the “Featured Items” displayed by title.  There is a link to the most recently added publications, those published within the last few months.  The easiest way is to click on the Subject line under “Find Publications By” section.  There is an A-Z listing of all of the subjects and the range of coverage is huge.  I recommend that you scan the list just to see the scope of availabe subjects.  It is really a very easy site to navigate.

To show you the variety of subjects available, these are just a few of the books that I have ordered from EdPubs.gov:

Projections of Education Statistics
Trends in the Use of School Choice 1993 to 2002
Status and Trends in the Education of American Indians and Alaska Natives
Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study: 2001-1
Evaluation of the Public Charter Schools Program: Final Report
National Education Technology Plan, 2004
Meeting the Educational Needs of Homeless Children and Youth

--Kim Macomber