The future of originality

Online learning facilitates communication, interaction, and collaboration between students in an unprecedented way. Students are not constrained by time, geography or economics from linking up with other who share a common interest. Professors and other experts are now vastly more accessible to students by email and websites, and indeed, students may casually request information and opinion from experts and expect to receive an answer more or less instantly. The very existence of the internet encourages open sharing of ideas, words and objects.

One of the potential consequences to such openness is that students are learning to use what they find on the internet without sufficient thought or background reading. Because Googling a topic will instantly throw up thousands of hits, students can - and in my experience, sometimes do - use the first 5 or 6 hits as the authority on the topic, without reading deeply or widely enough on the subject matter. They are searching, but they're not investigating.

Furthermore, the potential to use material found on the internet without attribution is enormous. Students are accustomed to copying and pasting, to downloading, and to sharing material found on the internet - this begins in elementary school. The plethora of information on the internet provides unlimited possibilities for creating a pastiche paper on any topic imaginable. Obviously, the further along in their education a student gets, with an increasing demand for specialized knowledge and language, the more difficult this copy-and-paste approach will be. But are we teaching schoolchildren and university students how to use the technology to create knowledge and, at the same time, to understand where that knowledge came from, and to cite it properly?

The New York Times recently ran a series of articles on cheating and plagiarism in education which report widespread plagiarism in higher education. Organizations like plagiarism.org cite other research confirming that plagiarism is common and accepted among many students.

Cheating and plagiarism breach  principles of academic honesty. Most institutions have policies about academic honesty, explicitly require students to learn about them, and have developed procedures for dealing with students who violate them. This Youtube video by Capilano University film students and Patrick Donahoe, Vice-President Student and Institutional Support, illustrates one strategy for informing students about plagiarism and cheating:



Institutions are now using plagiarism-detecting software such as Turnitin. Professors are becoming more canny in assignment and test design. At the same time, the potential for students to plagiarize and cheat using the internet continues to get bigger and bigger. It would appear that a silent arms race is underway.

The reasons for plagiarizing are cheating are numerous: poor time management, not enough time, laziness, poor writing and researching skills, and so on. The consequences of plagiarism and cheating are that students fail to learn, and more importantly, that they fail to develop the skills of investigation, analysis, evaluation and synthesis that underlie critical thinking and turn one into an educated person. The technology that now allows us to instantly connect, communicate and collaborate, also facilitates cursory and shallow thinking when the amassing of information is easier than thinking about the content. Learning has never been easy, but previous generations did at least have to read hard copy so that copying and pasting in a few key strokes were impossible. Furthermore, they had access to the same works as everyone else - typically whatever was in the library - making it harder to find more obscure sources to copy from. What took days to write a couple of generations ago can now be written in a couple of hours. Taking ownership of a piece of writing is not a prerequisite for writing a detailed and professional-looking paper.

What are some of the strategies that educators can use to encourage students in the acquisition of knowledge, critical thinking, and the ability to synthesize and create knowledge? How can we encourage investigative skills beyond those used to conduct internet searches? Technology has changed our capacity to create - how can we use it to foster academic honesty, creativity, and originality?

Using Twitter in and outside the classroom

How handy is Twitter in the classroom? Let’s look at the basics of what Twitter has to offer first.

Twitter is a microblogging platform that allows you to send out messages known as tweets containing a maximum of 140 characters. Your tweets are seen by everyone in your social network. You build a social network by “following” other Twitter accounts; similar, others will discover and follow you. Your followers see your tweets, and you see the tweets of everyone you are following. If you follow a huge number of Twitterers, you will be awash in a constant and never-ending flow of tweets – your profile page will be updated constantly as those you follow send out tweets. If you follow a smaller number of people, or if they are not prolific tweet-senders, your page updates will be fewer. You can control whose tweets you are seeing. But those new to Twitter sometimes feel overcome by this constant barrage of information – be warned - you may hate it, or you may feel comfortable ignoring tweets you don’t care about.

You can tag tweets using hashtags – putting # in front of a word in a tweet, like #blogging, tags your post – you can search for tweets containing information about blogging using #blogging as a search term. Twitter shows you all the tweets from all users that have been tagged #blogging.  You can keep track of everything you tweet about a specific topic by marking it with a hashtag – convenient for organizing tweets by topic.

When someone you follow tweets something, you can retweet it if you want to recirculate the information to people who follow you. You can append it, direct it specific users, or change it. You can even keep track of which of your tweets has been retweeted by someone else.

You can address a tweet to someone in particular by putting @ in front of their user name. You can also send direct messages privately to other users. You can configure your Twitter account to be public so that anyone can follow you, or you can protect it so that you decide who gets to follow you and only your followers can see your tweets.

Finally, you can send tweets from your computer by going to twitter.com, from your desktop using an app like TweetDeck, or from your mobile device.

OK, those are the basics. There are some options for using Twitter that I haven’t explored here in the interests of simplicity. An excellent video guide to using Twitter is available here.

Now for educational uses of Twitter.

First of all, you need to consider what educational goals you can accomplish with Twitter. Twitter provides a quick and easy way for students to share information with each other and the instructor. Here are some specific examples:

• sharing resources – posting websites and links of interest; you can also share music, videos, pictures,  and document
•  organizing class ideas and resources using hashtags
• asking questions – especially good for shy students who never ask questions in person
•  communicating outside of class
•  sending reminders about due dates, readings, exams
•  instructor clarification of points
•  ice-breaking – getting to know each other
• collaboration by smaller group
• as a backchannel during lectures
• to survey the class on a specific question
• in language instruction – send questions that must be answered in that language
• to create a document such as a story, one line at a time, in turn
• to archive student ideas submitted as tweets by formatting them into a pdf document

Some things to think about if you decide to incorporate Twitter into your classroom:

• Public or private? Do you want to control who is in the social network?
• If you already use Twitter professionally or socially, you will probably want another Twitter account to keep the classroom separate. You can manage those accounts using something like TweetDeck. Have all students follow your class account.
• Will you use Twitter during classtime and if so, how will you deal with Twitter as a backchannel? If using it during classtime, does everyone have access? Do you want to lay out some basic groundrules?
• Are there any potential downsides? Critics of Twitter have argued that it is a time-waster, that 140 characters are insufficient for communicating anything significant, that it is a distraction, and that it encourages poor writing and lazy thinking. I would advise an instructor to have a good grasp of Twitter as a user before considering implementing it as a communication tool in class.

Finally, as academics we are interested in evidence-based teaching practices. The use of Twitter in education has not yet been comprehensively studied. Much has been said in support of using Twitter in education. Yet only about 30% of faculty report using Twitter and the remainder are either unconvinced of its usefulness or unfamiliar with how it works. As Twitter use grows, the opportunities for studying its efficacy for learning will undoubtedly be explored.

Further reading:

Wading through the dialogue about Twitter in education, my personal favourite for best source of information for instructors has to be How to use Twitter for Social Learning by Jane Hart’s Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. This is a comprehensive guide that is well-written and easy to use. You can also consult Twitter basics at Twitter.com.

If you have tried using Twitter in your classroom, please let me know about your experience!