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 has been nefarious. The New York Times reports that a history department has banned citing wikipedia as a research source. Why do they use wikipedia so often? I realize it’s free, online, and easy to access. However for most college students this is also true of many (potentially more vetted) online resources, including many encyclopedias, made available by their academic institutions. As long as wikipedia remains the lazy student’s plagiarism source, it will continue to be easy for instructors to spot the lazy students.
Read MoreIn 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 could insert a random word, say, donut, into the entry on topic x and expect to see donut on at least one submitted homework. I might actually try this.
Read MoreIn 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 asked what the word meant. Silence. This is a tough class to crack as it’s in the evening and they’re tuckered out and digesting, so I often have to resort to calling on individual students. No worry, I thought, as it’s an easy question for someone to answer, and it’s just their general disinclination to speak in class that’s causing the blank stares. I choose a name from the list. The student in question looks up at me with the same blank stare. “Umm, do you mean ‘blog’?” she asks, and then provides the definition.
It is actually the case that ‘weblog’ has ceased to function as a denoting term amongst this age group, having been supplanted by the catchier ‘blog’, thereby obscuring the etymology.
I felt just a tiny bit old after that class.
Read More