Category Archives: teaching

more on wikipedia

By susan | Published: February 25, 2007
A clarification on the post below: I wouldn’t actually sabotage wikipedia; it’s easy enough to figure out when students have plagiarized without resorting to tampering with what is an excellent free resource. That said, it seems that quoting from wikipedia in an academic context is not really a good idea, regardless of whether the instructor [...]
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modern sabotage

By susan | Published: February 14, 2007
In a meeting today of Linguistics 101 teachers at Rutgers we were discussing plagiarism.  A colleague made a hilarious suggestion: give students a homework question about topic x, then go to the wikipedia article on topic x and alter it to be incorrect.  Laugh at the results.  I expanded on the theme, positing that one [...]
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the velocity of slang

By susan | Published: February 4, 2007
In a lecture the other day, I had a slide on “neologisms” to illustrate the concept of productivity. This was in Linguistics 101, a course populated by undergraduates from a wide variety of majors, and I thought I’d use “weblog” as an example of a neologism. So I pointed to “weblog” on the slide and [...]
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