Category Archives: Academic Tips

How I Used Twitter and Ended Up Learning to Write

Posted on November 28, 2012 | Leave a comment
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With Kate Drabinski

We write all the time. We’re academics, so it’s sort of our job. And then there’s twitter. Why bother tweeting? It isn’t real writing, and it will never make it in our tenure or promotion files, so isn’t it a waste of time? Not at all, we say, and here’s why.

1. Twitter keeps us thinking and learning. Real time online conversations keep us moving and going and thinking and seeing others being productive. It is a place where academics can feed for ideas and spurs our micro-creativity. Compared to the traditional academic timeline in which feedback and interests can be months or even years—let’s be honest, Twitter real time conversations enables real time feedback. This feedback and interest in what we, and others, are thinking about inspires our writing.

2. Twitter keeps our offline writing projects moving. Because of those real-time conversations, we stay motivated to keep writing and thinking when we log off. It can also help us to make decisions we might otherwise stew over. Twitter keeps us productive and can jolt us out of those negative phases when we get blocked or discouraged. Sometimes it just takes a single tweet to help get out of bed. Also, a response or favorite from a follower can help us to not feel so alone when we are discouraged or moving slower—to recognize it all as part of the process.  “@drcompton @kdrabinski I feel this!”

3. Twitter forces us to think about audience, something academics are notoriously bad at doing well. We both tweet to multiple audiences–academics, sure, but also activists, students, personal friends, family members, Ashley Judd, Dr. Ruth, fellow bicyclists in the case of @kdrabinski, and fellow sneaker enthusiasts in the case of @drcompton. Tweets go out to all these followers, and part of tweeting well is remembering this and writing in clear ways that will resonate with these different audiences at different times, but never with everyone at all times. These are important skills to remember as we write offline for similarly diverse audiences, and twitter makes us practice on a daily basis.

4. That tiny character count makes us be precise in our writing, another thing academics are notoriously bad at. We’ll leave it at that, for precision’s sake.

5. Being precise means revising, deleting, rewriting, and revising again, the very most important parts of writing well, and the parts too often left for later until forgotten altogether. 140 characters isn’t a lot, and rarely is our thought fully formed the first time we try to force it into that tiny space. We must focus, focus, focus—focusing on what is really necessary and important. We find ourselves deleting, trying again, figuring out what can be saved for another tweet, and what our central point really is. Twitter forces us to revise on the spot, and real skills are developed that translate to our offline writing. After all, a first draft is simply writing to the starting line. The real work is in the revision, and twitter won’t let us forget that.

 

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Posted in Academic Blogging, Academic Productivity, Academic Tips, Early Career Research, Professing

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Your Professor has Moods, Deadlines, Bad Days, and Feelings too

Posted on October 6, 2012 | Leave a comment
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It’s common for us to attribute doing well to ourselves and doing poorly to others and or the circumstances around us.  However, something it seems to me that students often fail to fully realize is that professors are people too. Which means we have feelings, moods, and just as many life disruptions as our students.

In college prep courses and tips online it seems to be common knowledge that students should let their professors know what is going on in their lives–when they are having a hard time, and so forth. This way the professor makes less assumptions and often times may have ideas that can help or contribute to easing a students negative emotional state.  In my view, if you are at a state where you are crying in a professor’s office, then there are bigger things going on…and those things really should be the central focus for the student over my class. This is one reason I offer a drop assignment, and for the big life events, we have Withdrawals, Drops, and Incompletes. I know to students these seem like the enemy and as bad things, but they really shouldn’t be viewed that way unless they are being abused. No one is perfect and everyone is affected by life at some point.

It is rarely talked about among academic circles and I would go as far as to suggest that it may even be faux pas for a professor to let students know about their issues.  While, I do let me students know when I will be traveling or have big deadlines, I generally try to distance any negativity going on in my personal world from my professional life and definitely from my students. I am sure my RAs can predict my moods and know when the best times are to approach me about various things…and when to not. Just off of the top of my head I know I can be “short” or what I consider to be task focused if Im on my way to the restroom/coffee, headed upstairs (which is equated with class or Deans and other faculty), or need to leave for an off campus appointment.

I know a professor (not at my school) who currently hates a particular day of the week because of a mandatory meeting s/her has to attend in the afternoons. It would be easy to imagine that this professor’s morning classes on this day are a different experience than on a different day of the week.  Likewise, this is why I strongly encourage making appointments for meetings even during office hours. If you want to have a 100% focus from your professor, it is good to let them know you are coming and what you are going to want to talk about. This way they can be prepared to fully help you out and schedule the appropriate time to interact with you.  I often have students show up in the last few minutes of my office hours, more so than at the beginning. I use to schedule my hours prior to my classes, but I found that I felt as if I had to rush the students.  Now, I put in a break, but this too is then often eaten into. I also worry about if it is a disservice to stay into “my time” for the student who now expects me to be accessible 24-7.  I know it is a disservice to my writing and family life.

This brings me to a conversation I overheard  at our student union this past week.  A group of caring students were extremely upset about a test they had just taken. They had prepared for the test studying notes, the book, etc. and from their perspective, very little of this was on the test.  These students, (students who worked and expected to make A’s) felt they had failed.  Additionally, they were very upset at the professor.  How could s/he do that to them?  So they were brainstorming their angry emails–which would surely have an accusatory tone.

For me it was clear there were a number of assumptions being made.  The first and most obvious was that they had failed.  I encouraged them to at least wait 48 hours and see if they felt the same after 2 days.  We can get a great deal of new information that really affect our feelings and understanding of situations if we can be patient for just 48 hours. Sometimes, issues can even be entirely resolved.

Or, to even give the professor a chance to return the exams and see what the situation really was–did they in fact fail? In my mind as a professor, there are a ton of things that could be going on or have gone wrong not at all related to the student. It brought to mind this one time when I accidently gave the wrong exam to a class–I had updated and changed a number of questions around specifically for their class and class discussions but then managed to print of the exam from the previous semester that had not been changed. I of course caught my mistake quite quickly and figured out an appropriate way to fix the scenario.  I am so thankful this test was on a Friday, it must have been on a Friday, because I was able to get out ahead of the issue before any students had emailed with concerns. Now, this was a rare case. However, I did make it right.

Often times space, time, and patience can answer questions and ease our concerns.  For me the most tragic assumption is that professors are out to get the student. I find this to be the most tragic, because I know this as a complete myth. Never have I witnessed or heard of this being the case.  I would believe in unicorns first.  I can reconcile that more easily over the above increasingly more common assumption. I have at least scene a goat at a circus that had one horn growing out of the center of his head or they may just be really good at hiding. But above all, believing in unicorns doesn’t put me on the defense, create more obstacles in my life, or waste my emotional energy.

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Academic Tips, Professing

Building Writing Skills from Day 1: Or How I Learned to Stop Assuming What Students Should Know

Posted on September 2, 2012 | Leave a comment
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By J. Wheeldon*

September is the beginning of the school year and another chance for those of us who teach the next generation of scholars to think about what we might do differently this time around. As Profs finalize syllabi and update lectures, I want to suggest that the first few weeks of class is a good time to get a sense of how students understand the basic building blocks of writing. In my opinion these building blocks include: sources, structure, and citations.

Academic honesty has been much in the news of late. Whether it students at well-known schools or evidence of plagiarism by journalists and television personalities, a debate of sorts has emerged on the issue. Some see plagiarism as a function of technological advancements. Students today can copy and paste things from multiple sources, change a few words around (and the font!), and pass it off as their own. Others suggest stealing the work of others is hardly new. While technology may make it easier to cheat, the decision to cut corners amounts to a basic ethical lapse. For these commentators, it this moral question that must be confronted.

Based on a project I conducted while at George Mason University, this resource provides some more details on a step-by-step approach to assist students to plan, research, draft, and review academic papers. For now, I want to focus on the question of how to help students properly cite sources and integrate material into original work. In my experience teaching in multiple countries, states, and universities, one major issue is that students do not know what standard is expected of them. Should they use APA or MLA? Does the Prof want Chicago style or some other strange and/or personal approach to citation? The lack of clarity for students is a function of the lack of consensus among disciplines and the seemingly endless infighting that is a historic feature of the academy.

Punishing students for plagiarism requires first that Profs clearly articulate the standard required. This means including policies, tips, and techniques on syllabi and in lectures. It may include other approaches as well. For the last 4 years I have been using a citation quiz in the first week of all my classes. Students complete it, and we then talk about what the “best” answers might be and why.

The quiz is below and I encourage you to read through it and think about if and how it might be useful to your teaching. No doubt you will need to adapt it and I would love to see how you improve it. My biggest suggestion is this: Don’t assume. Yes, students should have learned this stuff in high school. Yes, their required writing course or some other departmental specific course should have prepared them. I assure you, however, most do not know as much as you think they should. A quiz is a good way to start a conversation about writing. In my experience, investing in this early in the term pays off later when the endless mountains of essays arrive to be graded.

Let’s help students learn about proper citation practices instead of blaming them for not knowing. Remember, once you build this into your coursework, no student can say they didn’t know how to properly cite sources, and/or that no one taught them. At least not in your class.

–

*Dr. Johannes Wheeldon (LL.M, Ph.D) holds degrees from Dalhousie University, the University of Durham, and Simon Fraser University. He worked at the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada between 2002-2005 and has since worked for the American Bar Association, George Mason University, and the Center for Justice Law and Development.

He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University and teaches Philosophy to inmates at the Coyote Ridge Correctional Center. He can be reached at jwheeldon@gmail.com.

You can also follow Dr. Wheeldon on Twitter @JusticeLawDev

 

Additional Resources

www.Plagiarism.org

www.owl.english.purdue.edu

Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices is available here: http://wpacouncil.org/node/9

 

Self Administered Citation Quiz

Part 1 Source Selection (True or False)

1. ___ Academic sources include articles from peer-reviewed journals, articles from University web sites, non-fiction books or chapters from those books.

2. ___ Its ok to use non-academic web pages, TV shows or movies, and wikipedia as academic sources as long as you cite them.

3. Rank (1 – best, 5- worst) the following sources in terms of academic reliability:

___  Newspapers and magazines

___  Peer Reviewed Journals

___  Wikipedia

___  Non-Fiction Books

___  Government funded websites

 

Part 2 Citations (True or False)

4.  ___ Copying a sentence or two without crediting the source is not plagiarism.

5. ___ It is not plagiarism if you use information or ideas without crediting the source as long as the exact words are not used.

6. ___ Using specific terminology used by someone else, even a unique word or two, must be set off with “quotation marks.”

7. ___ The author and year of any source used must be included in cases when you summarize, paraphrase, or directly cite the work of another.

8. ___  Page numbers must be provided whenever you paraphrase or directly cite the work of another.

 

Part 3 Bibliographies (True or False)

9. ___ All sources used in an academic paper do not have to be listed in a bibliography.

10. ___ The information provided in a bibliography should allow a reader to find the source you have used.

Part 4 Read through the Writing Website

Go to: http://classweb.gmu.edu/WAC/adjguide/academic_papers/references.html

  1. Based on the website what points on structure, citations, and style did you all ready know?
  2. What points did you not know?
  3. What aspect of the points raised will be the most challenging for you?

 

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Posted in Academic Tips, Professing, Writing