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September 14, 2006
What's needed in authorship studies
(This is not a list that I've generated alone; lots of these have come from colleagues.)
- A society for the study of authorship;
- A journal dedicated to publishing research on authorship
- An online clearinghouse, along the lines of the WAC clearinghouse;
- A bank of assignment and course designs that teach students how to write from sources. A wiki such as CompFAQs would be well suited to this sort of task.
- A bank of assignment and course designs that engage students in the intellectual work of the course so that they don't want to plagiarize;
- A bank of assignment and course designs that teach the conventions and ethics of contemporary Western textual culture;
- A bank of syllabi for courses in theories of authorship;
- Research that demonstrates the effectiveness of various solutions (e.g., honor codes, Turnitin, and pedagogy) to student plagiarism. What we have right now is a proliferation of claims, but the evidence offered for those claims comes predominantly from the writers' own experiences and observations—which means, as Chris Anson pointed out in July, we are arguing from belief rather than evidence.
- Empirical research that demonstrates the effectiveness of various solutions (e.g., honor codes, Turnitin, and pedagogy) to student plagiarism. It's not enough to persuade scholars; we also have to persuade the public, and statistics do that.
- Research that evaluates the evidence being offered in published scholarship about the effectiveness of various solutions (e.g., honor codes, Turnitin, and pedagogy) to student plagiarism. We have to hold ourselves and each other to high standards of evidence.
- Research that generates evidence for claims about students' use of texts;
- and--?
Posted by senioritis at September 14, 2006 01:23 PM
Comments
A full-time personal assistant for Dr H, to assist her with her brilliant ideas (and make coffee and give back rubs).
Posted by: susansinclair at September 14, 2006 05:02 PM
Ha! (a) These brilliant ideas aren't all mine; (b) I wouldn't be carrying all of them out myself. A full-time personal assistant would nevertheless be a fine thing; we should all be so lucky.
Posted by: senioritis at September 15, 2006 08:52 AM
May I suggest that y'all tune in and turn on for the new Wikiversity project, brought to you by your friends at the Wikimedia Foundation? Our goal is to create free/open/libre curriculum for everyone and everything. Please help us get started at http://beta.wikiversity.org/ We are slated for a six month beta, so time is of the essence. This thing needs a good kickstart!
Posted by: BradP at September 16, 2006 11:54 PM