Primrose Road

From the Daily Nebraskan last Friday: Virtual avatars may affect real life decisions Apparently, watching digital representations of yourself as overweight, middle-aged, and/or pretty in "virtual reality" can help you lose weight, save money, and make more friends. I think what this study implicitly suggests about Gen X / Gen Y narcissism is far more interesting than what it overly suggests about weight loss, savings, and making conversation: we're so narcissistic that we either (1) can't see ourselves for who/what we are or (2) can't change for the better when given good advice or assistance, but can change when we play video games about ourselves.

In other Daily Nebraskan news: According to a representative at UNL's Counseling and Psychology Services center, loneliness can cause strep throat and shingles. If I'm right in my suspicion that this is a far more touchy-feely than medical idea, I can't wait to see the day students with strep throat, bronchitis, and/or flu line up at the health center, demanding psychological counseling because of their infections.

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!