Primrose Road

The Daily Nebraskan reports that UNL now has a policy "on the books" for the use of Safe Assignment, a system in which students submit their papers via Blackboard; the papers are then scanned and assigned a "matching score" based on how much material from the paper appears to be copied directly from other sources. The big issue here has been whether professors are violating students' intellectual property rights, because the papers are saved in Safe Assignment's database and then used for comparison with future submissions. In other words, students are contributing their work, without compensation, to a commercial service (as the DN's article points out). It's rather interesting that questions of intellectual property are arising here. Some departments now request that instructors not leave boxes of student papers outside their offices (previously, the large box was a great way of collecting and returning papers), out of concern that someone who is not the instructor or the student could read the paper. At the same time concern for students' intellectual property seems to have heightened, we're seeing changes (thanks to the good ol' Internet) in what "intellectual property" means, and these changes seem to have affected new students' understanding of what constitutes plagiarism in the first place. While students still outright cheat using essay mills and other sources of pre-written papers, there are also those who walk into college without an understanding of when to use quotation marks, and when and why to attribute ideas to someone other than oneself. My freshman comp students, who were born in 1989, have grown up with the info-at-your-fingertips (well, sort of) Internet; when they were born, I was writing book reports and learning how to use Print Shop on an Apple IIGS!

I've heard it argued that our readings of the sonnets are often affected by mid-poem page breaks; what happens when we read the plays via Instant Message? On AIM, you can IM the "SmarterChild" bot and ask to read any one of Shakespeare's plays. (I'd assume that the edition used is the non-copyrighted Globe Edition used by a number of Shakespeare projects on the Internet.) Here's the IM equivalent of a "page break," for The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Proteus Upon some book I love I'll pray for thee. Type more to continue. PrimroseRoad (11:05:04 PM): more SmarterChild (11:05:04 PM): Valentine That's on some shallow story of deep love: How young Leander cross'd the Hellespont. I wonder what the purpose of this service is when online texts like Open Source Shakespeare are readily available and searchable. Perhaps next in line is Hamlet: The Text Message?

Last year, I bought a Mac because my friends and colleagues assured me that it, unlike a PC, could be counted on through my qualifying exams and dissertation. And, yes, my friends and colleagues who have Macs have found them to be very reliable. And then there's me. I think I've had an out-of-nowhere hard drive crash. My computer can't find the hard drive, and we've concluded that it's not a software issue. (I'm on a friend's computer right now, obviously.) I have an appointment at the "Genius Bar" on Friday afternoon and I'm hoping they'll be able to rescue at least some of what's on the hard drive. Fortunately, I've already printed the syllabi and handouts for the upcoming term, and my qualifying exam notes live in three different places.