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Western Civ hit the cap of 90 today and is officially closed. I’m glad that our department chair went ahead and put a cap on the course. Having less than 80 in the class last fall made me underestimate the demand. And since we’re not likely to have too many graduate teaching assistants for the upcoming year, it’s not as if I can easily handle a hundred or more in the freshman survey!

Like migratory birds, the New York Times returns to a perennial favourite topic: university student behaviour. This time, the subject is plagiarism. I’ve seen the link twittered and blogged about (hat tip to Historiann for some of the best of the blogging).

The Times, as is often their wont, excuses current day students by claiming that this really isn’t their fault — it’s those darned interwebs as article author, Trip Gabriel, explains:

The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

But, as Historiann notes in her pithy commentary,

It’s not hard to understand that if you take words from someone else and put your name on them–even if you can’t find the name of an author for attribution–that’s plagiarism, and the definition of it never goes out of style.

Interestingly enough, plagiarism is a persistent problem in remix culture. Research any fan community (from before or during the online era) and you’ll find evidence of someone who plagiarized others’ work (whether baldly republishing it as their own or doing so with minimal changes — new characters or in a new universe or a new song with a sloppy recut of someone else’s video footage).

What amuses me is that most of these will still include the traditional fan creator’s note that the characters/universe belong to the original author/cast/corporate body. There’ll also be someone who, when the plagiarism is uncovered, steps up to defend the plagiarist by saying “this is all derivative, anyway, so how is it hurting anyone?”

The impulse to plagiarize in fan works is even more mystifying to me than in academe — there’s no assignment hanging over your head, no requirement to be completed. There’s even a common fan cultural practice, reccing (recommending), that is focused on sharing/reviewing other good fanworks. But still, some people plagiarize fanworks rather than rec.

As the senior quoted in the article points out quite aptly, writing is hard. We know that — it takes time, it takes practice, it takes research or some effort to acquire the knowledge to flesh out the piece with facts or details. Good writing takes rewriting — the revision process is something that staggers many novices who’re unable or unwilling to disengage themselves from what they’ve produced. To put something raw and untested out there is scary. To be brave enough to share your writing, whether with a classmate, a peer, a professor or the world wide web? That takes guts and, you know!, the actual accomplishment of the writing.

Procrastination, perfectionism, denigration (this is just history/English/whatever, that isn’t that hard/important/part of my major, so I don’t have to work at it) — whatever the impulses leading one to plagiarize, one can always say that the appeal of the no-effort path to good marks or high praise seems to be what is most at work here. It’s not some new internet-age paradigm of originality and identity. It’s plain old plagiarism and we’re not letting it slide by, whatever the excuse!

My estimable colleague Andrew Smith has blogged very thoughtfully on the ways that historians can illuminate the true value of the census in Canadian society, both through our study of the past applications of this data and our promotion of statistical literacy in future generations of voters and politicians.

I commented there but I will reiterate here that it’s sad how stoutly math-phobic many history students seem to be. By equating mathematics and statistics with something they can’t and don’t really want to learn, too many people leave themselves open to be manipulated about history and their current world by those who count on that essential ignorance!

Yeah, ‘ha-ha’ — very funny. The number of times I get people telling me that the inevitable end of someone taking a history degree is to work in fast food (according to conventional wisdom, philosophers drive cabs, but historians and English majors take orders at the local McD’s)? Far beyond counting.

What’s frustrating is that, yes, there’s not an easy and seamless career path beckoning history graduates when they take their diplomas. But does that mean that you are doomed to a life of endless hair-net wearing with your history degree?

Of course not. I’m pleased to see that the AHA is sharing historians’ advice on employment prospects for majors in a forthcoming pamphlet, What to Do with a History Major. One common thread throughout the list of examples in their blog post is the need to work at finding work.

There aren’t going to be employers impatiently waiting for anyone coming out with a random bachelor’s degree, whereas science and engineering programs often have career fairs or prospective employers courting graduates. So history undergraduates entering their senior year (or recent graduates of B.A. and even M.A. programs) need to put a priority on making themselves “employable” and doing whatever they can to dig out possibilities. Some might have to move to areas where entry-level employment in major corporations is possible, or hotfoot it to the halls of power for law and government jobs. Others might want to combine their education with another qualification (museum studies, experience in the business world or, in areas where they are actually hiring teachers, a B.Ed.).

But all of this also depends on having a strong B.A. experience behind you. Can you write well? Can you research effectively? Can you look through materials and lay out the possible interpretations or applications rather as you did with causes or effects in your undergraduate work?

This is why it’s frustrating to see so many passive upper-year students, trying to coast to a C+ grade instead of seizing the opportunities in their courses and across the university to build up some skills that will be important to a future career. Yes, I’m aware that some are working outside of school can be a daunting drain on your time. I worked throughout my own undergraduate years, culminating in a full-time retail job held alongside my full-time student work in my senior year. But there are workshops, invited speakers, seminar sessions and other opportunities available during your education that will be much more difficult to access later in life.

Check out those on-campus conferences! Work on your writing! Pursue opportunities to develop your research skills! Learn how to sell yourself as the kind of worker that you want to be (or build the skillset to become an entrepreneur). Don’t wait until graduation to start thinking about what you want to and can do with your education.

My students’ labour and my own, that is. Today I spent almost fourteen hours editing and entering data into a Google docs spreadsheet that auto-populates a timeline (via a cool gadget) with biographical and analytic entries about early medieval figures. It was a bit of a battle to both figure out the technology and the teaching techniques (next time I have students do a similar project, we’ll definitely spend more time on “how to write for a reference work”). I also marked each of these short assigments so I’m on the home stretch for the class although many other assignments still remain to be graded.

There were a few other bobbles along the way. The webpage is kludgy and since I couldn’t use all of the SIMILE gadgets directly, I don’t have quite the layout or interoperability I’d hoped for. I still have to take the last few remaining hard-copy entries and input those, myself. But for now? I’m pretty pleased at what we’ve got.

Please, take a look at what they’ve done: Early Medieval Biographical Timeline.

1) We’re running low on whiskey. Somebody stock us up?

2) Why didn’t we get some cool t-shirts like these from ThinkGeek? Still waiting on the Wesley Crushers bowling shirts, though!

3) Who in their right mind thinks it is a good idea to use “u” instead of “you” in a formal academic composition?

As fodder for my students’ research assignment in the early medieval survey (sophomore level), I’m assembling a list of names of early medieval figures, prominent enough that they can be researched in English from a modest regional university library (that at least does own a copy of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages) but not so easy as to take no effort (i.e. no Charlemagne). I’m focusing on the period from about 300-950.

I need approximately 85 names, though, so each student can have their own individual to research and on whom they can share the information. So hit me with the names of your favourite early medieval historical figures: chroniclers, warleaders, queens, abbesses, monks, bishops, kings and the like! Please?

I wait in my office for the last of the exams from the super-sized class to show up. They wrote on the 21st at the same time as the rest of the class but through the miracles of holiday schedules, these last few still elude me. We won’t even talk about the many others who’re writing deferred exams and/or papers at some point. Those I can enter into the system with an “I” for incomplete and a date for the final mark.

It’s driving me crazy because I want to be rid of the fretting and just “GO” with the new term that’s unfolding before me. But I can’t because I’m missing these last three or four exams. Gah!

All I do is mark student work, drive the car places, sleep, eat, mark student work and go to obligatory meetings. And desperately try to finish my holiday shopping!

Yes, it’s that boring. I’m planning on taking the 23-26 off from marking to have at least a little bit of a holiday. In the meantime, check out this cool Teaching with Interactive Timelines tutorial that I’m going to be using in winter term’s early medieval survey.

Let me direct you to The Little Professor’s wonderfully amusing tale of a grade challenge. Oh, it helps to be fluent in the Trek-verse, but you are, of course, aren’t you? It’s only logical!