 email me: benchia@singnet.com.sg
 |
Friday, 24 September 2004 Actual Event Date: 23 September 2004 (Thu) Participated in a joint discussion on combating Plagiarism today at Merrill Library. For hands on session, we did an exercise of detecting plagiarism. Basically it was C.S.I. ‘plagiarism'. We used online text databases and google to hunt down 6 different articles given to us, and shared our tactics on using google to streamline our search in hunting down plagiarism. It was actually quite simple once you got the hang of it. The problem is, quick as it is, it was still not feasible to be checking a class of 40 students who submit an essay every alternate week. It was just too high volume! USU library's goal is to upload an online resource on plagiarism on the web soon. Basically the resource page will include tools & strategies to combat plagiarism, workshop materials, and case studies on how plagiarism has affected higher education. The official URL will be at: http://library.usu.edu/Ref/plagiarism.html (check for it soon) While on the topic of recognizing and detecting plagiarism, I raised a few questions. One of which was how do you define ‘common knowledge?' Darren Olsen replied that the best way to gauge common knowledge was to see if the information can be found in an encyclopedia, or had reached the saturation point in that field of study. When it is that mainstream, you can treat it as common knowledge. Of course, there will still be some grey areas. I shared with the other participants my findings during my stint at CED, on the integration of Safe Assignments, (myDropbox.com) with EdveNTUre, the honor code backed by NTU, and how students have already requested to ‘test' the system ( link ). The USU librarians were impressed with CED's initiative, and shared concerns why their university is still planning on it. One reason is the copyright policy that exists in USA & Canada where anything you write is automatically copyrighted by law. In Singapore , we don't have to worry about that. Hence, the university is worried about reenacting the case of ‘Jesse Rosenfeld' who challenged university policy ( link ) on submission on written assignments and won. In summary, people plagiarize for many different reasons. To solve the plagiarism problem, we have to examine closely at the root of the problem, and understand why it happens. My ending question is ‘Knowing this, how would we instill an honor code to rid plagiarism at its roots?' Cheers, “Have you talked to your best friend recently?” References: Robert A. Harris (2001) the plagiarism handbook. Pyrczak Publishing. URLs of case studies: posted by vash, 14:11 | link | comments Saturday, 11 September 2004 Actual Event Date: 10 September 2004 Was asked to help out in the last minute for Friday's IT social. So At the risk of being ostracized, I quickly ‘arrowed' a few people to help out – do I really ‘make use' of the people around me? *frown* However, all things went well. People came, they ate & were merry. I tried my hand at burger flipping with mike Lyman – he's good! More ‘oldies' from my cohort came than I expected. Saw Carrie with her new baby (Caleb), Spencer (still most eligible bachelor as always) in his B&W, mike Lyman & Zach (old ITSA group), and many more. It was a nice ‘old' gathering for me… at the end of it, to my ‘surprise'; I was given an ‘outstanding service' award by Dr. Bryon Burnham (see pic). Note that it's not for ‘outstanding scholar' :) There are easily a handful of other people who deserve the award more than me, but I accept the award in the spirit it was given, and will proudly display it in my home. I follow the philosophy of ‘when you give something, you should not expect anything in return' . That was what I have been following, but the award was a nice gesture. Very touching actually… Like I said to Mike Whitesides, our new ITSA president, life can be as fun as you choose it to be. What a fitting way to end my postgraduate the way it started… right here at Adam's park 2 years ago. Cheers, posted by vash, 23:32 | link | comments Monday, 06 September 2004 Actual Event Date: 6 Sept 2004
posted by vash, 13:58 | link | comments Saturday, 04 September 2004 Actual Event Date: 1 – 3 September 2004
Arrived late on 1 September 2004 , and missed the first day of the conference ( http://itinstitute.usu.edu/ ). Pity I missed Larry Lessig's keynote. I have hear of his talks through downloads from the internet, but a live session would have been great. I sat through a number of interesting workshops. While I think about it and write more on it, you can first look at it via Stephen downes weblog ( http://www.downes.ca/ ). This guy is for real. Basically he blogs every thing he sees… I will update this post over the weekend. Really a hotbed for digital culture and blogging phenomenon. Great conference. cheers, posted by vash, 00:24 | link | comments Monday, 30 August 2004 Actual Event Date: 28 - 29 Aug 04
CED recently had its first annual retreat at Sentosa. What a pity, I could not attend. Seeing the many tired, but happy faces around office this morning, I knew they had a great time. Various team building activities were planned, and some even stayed for two nights at Sentosa... *sigh* such bonding... *sigh* Well, maybe next time, should I still be back at CED (we'll leave that to fate), I will not miss the Retreat. But it will be a tough one to top!
posted by vash, 15:53 | link | comments Wednesday, 25 August 2004 Daniel Tan in the news again. This time at Computer Times (Aug 25, 2004). He talked about how smart security-management tools can help in this era of virus invested computers. posted by vash, 23:46 | link | comments Monday, 23 August 2004 Actual Event Date: 19 Aug 2004
Had a chance to revisit with my senior Megan Wang, who works as a multimedia project manager at Institute of System Science (ISS). I arranged to meet her at NUS ISS at 7pm to do a follow up study on how Los were used in Singapore 's educational institution. We were meeting after work so my coming down did not affect either her or my normal working hour commitments. Earlier last month, I did a literature review on Learning objects that was used by Daniel Tan during his conference on ‘use, reuse, and profuse' featured on Computer world (Vol. 10 Issue No. 26, 12 - 24 August 2004). This was a follow up meeting to complete that research paper. We sat at one of the tutorial rooms with several computers and there she gave me a great overview of how learning objects were being used at ISS. Guiding me through some of their courses, I saw how their courses were designed and used by students. The bulk of the content is still text, but quite a lot of effort was done to make the instruction interactive, so that it does not become just another digital page turner. Their uses of Learning objects (LO) were similar to netg's approach. More limited in scope, but yet more focus. Full details available on report (link to full report). After the 2 hour session, I had 3 pages full of scribbling. Megan answered all my questions rapid fire. And even with that, we took 2 hours to go through those few showcase examples. Dinner was a surprise treat of Vietnamese food at Holland V. She was generous to buy me dinner and insisted on it fervently. We traded stories on travel and reminisced about times in Logan , and the quiet and spacious life there, and then about our future plans. Strange how alumni relationships can foster such great friendship. Around 10:30pm we called it a night and bid farewell. Everything aside, it was just nice to have a dinner with my 学姐 from USU. Cheers, posted by vash, 16:07 | link | comments Actual Event Date: 21 Aug 2004
As luck would have it, I got to represent NTU in a 3-on-3 basketball tournament recently. It was the 18 th Inter statutory board games (ISBG) 2004. All thanks to a last minute request by Lee Pui Man (AP at Division of Information Technology and Operations Management ), and Daniel Tan's (Director CED) support, I traded my Saturday work commitments to represent NTU at the annual ISBG basketball tournament at Tampines polytechnic. I teamed up with 3 other professors working at NTU, and honestly, they were really the old ones. All the other teams had a great mix of youth and athleticism. Some players I recall playing with during my days at NUS as an undergrad. Way too young to be a professor… This year's NTU team was singled out not for their incredibly good looking players (shameless plug), but because we had only 4 players on the roster. All the other teams had the maximum 10 players. i.e. 3 starters and 7 reserves. Everyone was all decked in a full suit uniform. That usually means that enough money and interest has been invested in making the team look good, which indirectly hints that these players most likely trained as a group before. NTU was a start contrast. We were a team of 'misfits' pooled together days before the competition, and with no experience playing with each other. ' It would be a miracle if we won...' so I thought. We lost the first 2 games (PUB & NUS), and won the final game (MOA). Blame it on the luck of the draw (both these two teams played in the Quarter Finals) or lack of NTU players, or Captain Lee Pui man's lack of sleep the day before (NTU dinner and dance), or el nino, etc. Winning the last game by a margin of 16 – 4 really made losing a little sore. Why could we not play that well from the early going? Nevertheless, it was a fun outing. Should the opportunity arise again, I would not hesitate to represent NTU again. Cheers, posted by vash, 12:35 | link | comments Friday, 20 August 2004 Actual Event Date: 19 Aug 2004
Info Sharing Seminar on ‘Enhancing Your Learning Performance' Programe outline: eUreka , ePortfolio, honor pledge, plagiarism and online Assignment Slightly smaller than expected turnout for today's info sharing session. Daniel started with the address and Sheryl followed with demonstrating ‘eUreka' (former known as ‘My Discoveries'), then came my turn at ‘e-Portfolio' . Next was Prof Koh Tai Ann (students' dean) leading ‘the honor code and pledge @NTU' , and then Prof Ang Peng Hwa (dean, school of communication and information) on ‘Research, copyright and plagiarism: which is which?' the session was closed by Mr. Lee Chye Seng's (DD, emerging technologies, CED) sharing on ‘ SafeAssignment'. Sheryl paced herself quite well through the eUreka presentation, and everything went smoothly without a glitch. I had the jitters just moments before it was my turn to present, but after the first 2 minutes, I got my groove and it was plain sailing from there. I started by explaining what portfolio meant to students and teachers, and then evolved to more than just digitizing content and putting it online. With today's technology, some modern portfolios are database driven, and even allow dialogue and discussion via ‘comments' and posting. From open source portfolios (e.g. OSPI ) to in-house portfolio creation wizards like EdveNTUre's ePortfolio . From there, it was all demo. On topic of ePortfolio: To be honest, I foresee only mild success in this eportfolio creation tool. The customization I did were done using a third party WYSIWYG editor (DWMX) and applied my own templates and CSS formatting to achieve the desired effect. So, when students try it out and find that unless they know HTML well enough, they can't replicate what they saw, frustration could result. EdveNTUre does have a WYSIWYG editor built in, but its not that robust yet. The Comments function is also not that strong yet. Comments are not threaded like in common discussion threads (e.g. slashdot.org), so as more comments come in, chances are things get confusing. On topic of honor code: It's a nice idea, and I would be impressed if Prof Koh could somehow instill this honor code into NTU students. But all that is done is explaining the code, and revamping it, it would be just like another of those software installation guides which people just click ‘yes' to without considering a second thought. I wish Prof Koh all the best for her laudable effort. On topic of plagiarism: Prof Ang's handouts (page 3, slide 6) on why students plagiarize say ‘everyone is doing it' . I am not comfortable with the fact that if everyone is assumed to be doing it, why do we have so few cases of plagiarism caught and ‘showcased' to warn other potential offenders. I am not out to catch people, just that why is such a seemingly important issue being overlooked for so many years? He did however point out several points that I completely agree with. E.g. that some students genuinely are confused between plagiarism and paraphrasing, and lack of research skills. For educators, their research is their intellectual property, having people quote them is the natural thing to do. No gray area in the ownership issue there. One point he raised which I somewhat agree is that ‘time pressures and poor time management' as a reason. However, I would like to include that time pressures get to even the most consistent of students, including those with excellent time management skills. And in a competitive environment such as NTU where students have weekly assignments and the risk of getting caught is low (even prof Koh openly admitted to this), the temptation is there. Moreover the bell curve manner in which NTU grades students (i.e. only the top echelon gets the best grades) creates even more competition and social and peer pressure on students to perform. I admire, yet sympathize with those ‘heros' that follow the honor code strictly. For they are penalized indirectly when their peers who plagiarize intelligently (those who gets away with it) scores an excellent grade, while these ‘heros' are left behind. Also, there are thousands of publications out available on the web. Some stored in databases, others restricted to school specific access. If everything you type out is automatically copyrighted, what protects you from accidentally recreating an original work that someone else has written prior to you? Be it years or minutes ahead of you. With no central database for people to check for copyright content, is it the students' fault that he can't verify if his ideas were uniquely his own? Lessig pointed out that this issue in his book (strongly recommended!) ‘ free culture '. It addresses the imbalance of modern copyright laws and much more. Prof Ang's copyright guidelines on Fair Use states that copying is ok so long as its not for commercial gain, and falls within the 10% limitation of materials (book, journals, etc. used for teaching and research) content. The US fair use guidelines are an easier way to remember: P.A.I.N. (thanks to lay kock for this nice acronym). For a quick crash course on Fair Use, teach act and copyright laws, go through this 8 hour self-paced online course I created (link pending) during my internship with CTDLC. When I gave my seminar on copyright in June 2003, I was full of confidence on how it can help strike a balance in the copyright fight between educators and publishers. However, after reading a few of Lawrence lessig 's books, and seeing case after case of how DMCA is decimating companies, students, teachers, grannies, 4-yr old girls with copyright infringement, etc. its swaying me towards Lessig' views that today's copyright laws in the USA is getting absurd. And the rest of the world is following US's lead! Creative commons is lessig's proposed solution to this imbalance. Check it out if copyright interests you. In conclusion, I agree that plagiarism is not the right thing to do. But when the payoffs of plagiarism far out weigh the risks of getting caught, it may be more than temptation that an honor code can handle. Looking at this situation from the perspective of the student, we should ask, ‘Is it in the students' best interest to plagiarize?' Sometimes, honor code aside, it might not be the fault of the student, but the system in which they are enrolled in instead as to why students chose to plagiarize. On topic of detection: This was to me the highlight of the day. Chye Seng started showing the huge array of internet paper mills (e.g. cheater.com, cyberessays.com, cheathouse.com) and then went on to introduce ‘Safe Assignment' . NTU has seamless integrated with myDropBox.com to include a plagiarism detection tool known as ‘Safe Assignment' within EdveNTUre. Basically each time a student submits an assignment, it gets sent to a database in the US , and returns with a smart detection score on percentage of assignment plagiarized from others. The demonstration was very promising. I will be most interested to see the findings at the end of the first year of implementing this new technology. Students who sat through the presentation would now think twice about plagiarizing, or would they challenge the system? Time will tell… what interesting times! cheers, posted by vash, 15:39 | link | comments Actual Event Date: 18 Aug 2004
I'll start off this blog with this recent article found at the New York Times (19 Aug 04) on: ‘In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards' Through the virtue of meeting people at the recent SP 50th anniversary celebration, I had a chance to meet several interesting people. One of which was Ms Fang Sin Quek, head librarian at SP. We hit it off immediately from the start. With a little help from Alan November of course… his attention-grabbing keynote on how elearning communities have embraced the blogging phenomenon took everyone's breath away. And here I was giving a workshop on that same relatively new topic at CED. People had many questions, and I had the virtue of being one of the few with the answers… how did wiley see this coming… I never know… The workshop itself went by quite fast. Reason being I cramped blogs, wikis, communities of practice all into one session. But seeing how related everything was, I just had to give my audience the ‘big' picture. At CED I actually had separate 2 hour sessions for each of those topics. But there is always a tradeoff. So, I had to cut back a bit on the fun part of showing the class how to use blogs and wikis. Feedback form (link pending) would say that I talked too much. :p http://singapore.motime.com/ or http://singaporepoly.blogspot.com/ I used the two blogs above for my demo. But mainly on the one with motime . I like motime because it had an easier learning curve. Signing up was way easy. And although blogger claims it can be done in 3 steps, I think they had too many distracters over there for a newbie. In addition, blogger takes so long to ‘republish' even the smallest of edits with a brand new page! Alas, I had to recommend blogger as the safer bet because it is backed by powerhouse google , while motime did not have a major player backing it, or worst, it could be on its own. But the fun stuff they could do on their own time, so I tried to share some of the research I found, e.g. case studies of how blogs and wikis were used successfully and unsuccessfully in schools. Here are the materials I used during the workshop: • http://it.usu.edu/~bechia84/workshops/blog&wiki/blogs&wikis@SP_18Aug2004.doc (word Doc) • http://it.usu.edu/~bechia84/workshops/blog&wiki/blogs&wikis@SP_18Aug2004.pdf (PDF) • http://it.usu.edu/~bechia84/workshops/blog&wiki/blogs&wikis@SP_18Aug2004.ppt (PowerPoint) They plan to start off a few blogs from its official home page, where students can use it as an avenue to voice their opinions on matters pertaining to the library. Already they have started a library club where student volunteers participate in helping out with the library at SP. That is just awesome volunteering spirit from the SP students. These core members could help with the admin role of recruiting students and promotion of the blog. Facilitators (link pending) play an important part in ensuring the success of a community blog. For the librarians, Sin Quek is already part of an informal community of practice (CoP) with the veteran librarians from the other polytechnics. Over the years they have been supporting and learning from each other. Much like the CoP of blackboard users that now exist between CED, SP and Ngee Ann poly. However, a lot of that knowledge is not captured by these members. I.e. there is no central database that keeps all these knowledge (not to mention wisdom!) accumulated over the years in running a library. If this case begins to sound to you like the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) at Xerox, I feel the same way too. Imagine if there was such a platform whereby these librarians could band together and archive some of their best practices together, as well as extract out their tacit knowledge. What a valuable repository of knowledge that would be! Especially to the newer and upcoming polytechnics who have not joined the CoP yet, this would be a god send of information gathered from all the early pioneers of librarians. Seeing such opportunities of informal learning really got me going. I am eager and excited to help out sin Quek, her peers and her students at SP. However, one important caveat remains: It depends on the kind of culture the institution is trying to develop. Unless they like the idea of encouraging and generating cross-functional and interpersonal collaboration and communication, then it's a good idea. If there is no support or buy-in, no matter how easy blogging gets, it won't succeed in setting up a virtual community of practitioners. I may be leaving on 1 September 2004 , but I will definitely keep my radar screen on how blogging is going to develop at SP. Cheers, posted by vash, 10:49 | link | comments  |
