Can Writing Be Your 20 Percent Time?

An education colleague, Lisa Thumann, wrote a post recently about how some teachers are using the concept of  20% time. It’s a work concept that came about in 2006 when one of Google’s engineers wrote about how the company allowed them  to spend one day a week (20%) of their time “working on projects that aren’t necessarily in our job descriptions.”

They weren’t playing games or updating their Facebook page. They were supposed to be developing something new, or fixing something that’s broken.  Google claimed that in 2009 half of all Google’s products originated in 20% time.

When I heard about this back in 2006, I wondered why more employers didn’t introduce the concept.

Well, it has some obstacles: Money for one. Why pay people a chunk of salary to work on other things?  And what about those employees who would be updating their Facebook pages during that time?  But it could (with some parameters) produce some important things for the employer.

Lisa was writing about educators but what about you as a writer?  I was writing on another blog about this and later thought about how writers often complain that they just don't have time to write, but the secret is setting aside time to write on a regular basis.

William Stafford and Robert Bly are writers known for their "morning poems" which they did each day upon waking up.

The problems in doing the 20% in some jobs might be: Where to get the time? How to monitor work? How to stay on task? (And that includes using the time to fool around and using the time to just do your regular job.)

If I told you take Wednesday as your outside writing time, would I also take away 20% of your workload or would you just have to do that 100% in 80% of the time?

Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have said that the concept came from their childhood Montessori School experiences.

Creative play is underrated. So is having the time to be creative.

Right Brain, Write Brain

Have you ever seen this animated image of the silhouette of a dancer? She turns in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. The idea is that your personal right- or left-brain dominance determines the direction you see her spinning.

If she is turning clockwise (to the right), then you are likely to be right-brain dominant, and vice versa.

It's hardly scientific or absolute, but it is an interesting way to enter a discussion on whether right and left brain dominance affects how we learn. (See my earlier post on that side of the topic.) I have had students tell me that they were able to make the dancer change directions. What does that mean?

If you are writing or plan to be a writer, would it be better to be right or left-brained?

According to the popular interpretation of this brain research, the right brain is the feeling side, where imagination rules. It is where symbols and imagery are deciphered and the side that believes, appreciates, and presents possibilities. Fantasy, philosophy, and religion are here and it seems to be the right place for fiction writers and poets.

But don't dismiss the left brain which is seen as the logical side. In this hemisphere of details and facts is also the land of words and language, order and pattern.

It is popular to view the left hemisphere as the domain of mathematicians and scientists, but writers are pretty dependent on facts and getting details down. And you can't always rely on the spelling and grammar checker or an editor to fix your grammar and punctuation.

So, which is more important? Obviously, good writers - especially in an academic setting - need the right and left side of the brain to write in most genres.

Can we develop the less dominant side of our brains to become better writers? Should the right-brained poet work on left-brained activities and writing prompts?

Steinbeck on Writing

John Steinbeck - author of The Grapes of Wrath and many other novels, Pulitzer Prize winner & Nobel laureate, gave advice on writing in an interview in the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review. Although he was talking more about fiction writing, some of the advice holds up for the kind of writing we ask students to do.

For example, learning when to put an idea aside, being a tough self-edit and just writing the page without dwelling on the entire paper are all important things to learn. Reading your paper aloud (not just for dialogue) is something we ask students to do in all our sessions in the Writing Center with our consultants.

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Plagiarism and the Web

Educators have been complaining about student plagiarism since books came to be printed. Since we have moved from an analog to a digital culture, it has become much harder for teachers to keep up with student use of online sources.

We have tried to use technology to fight technology. I know a lot of teachers at all grade levels who rely on trying to “Google” a key phrase or sentence of student writing that they suspect is plagiarized. It's not a great method. It doesn't tell you how much of the overall paper is borrowed, and it doesn't compare it to the "hidden Web" that is behind logins and walls. And it doesn't compare it to papers by your other students this semester or from last year or from other teachers at your school or any school.

I got to thinking about this topic again because of a query from a faculty member about PCCC using a service like Turnitin.com. I had downloaded a white paper awhile ago on "Plagiarism and the Web: Myths and Realities" from Turnitin.com.

A few findings:

• Plagiarism is going social.  One-third of all content matched in the study is from social networks, content sharing or question-and-answer sites where users contribute and share content.
• Legitimate educational sites are more popular than cheat sites. 25% of all matched material is from legitimate educational web sites - 15% of content matches come directly from sites that promote and benefit from academic dishonesty.
• Wikipedia remains the most popular single source for student-matched content on the Web, comprising 7% of matches in the months examined.

Want to know where students are most likely to look, copy and paste?  The top 8 matched sites, along with their corresponding category in Turnitin's database, are:
1) en.wikipedia.org - Encyclopedia
2) answers.yahoo.com – News & Portal
3) www.answers.com - Social & Content Sharing
4) www.slideshare.net - Social & Content Sharing
5) www.oppapers.com - Cheat Sites & Paper Mills
6) www.scribd.com - Social & Content Sharing
7) www.coursehero.com - Homework & Academic
8) www.medlibrary.org - Homework & Academic

Of the 25 most popular sites, 14 are legitimate student resources for learning. It is a bit encouraging that more students are frequenting legitimate academic or educational web sites than cheat sites.

But before I get to using a service like Turnitin, I want to share some of my own thoughts and observations from 35 years of teaching and more than a decade in educational technology.

1. The majority of instances of plagiarism can be prevented by creating good assignments and by not using the same assignments semester after semester. Yes, I blame teachers for a lot of plagiarism. Assigning topics that abound in online answers encourages using the material online. For example, just crossing a topic with a contemporary issue makes it much harder for students to "find the answer" and promotes some original thought.
   Asking for an essay on the symbols of evil in Lord of the Flies will send a student to Google and turn up any number of answers. Asking students to compare the hierarchy of leadership on the island to our current Washington administration and Congress, or to the people who control our financial institutions will be a lot harder to plagiarize.
2. Don't rely on English teachers to be the only source of instruction on research and citation. Don't blame whatever level of teachers comes before you for the problems. Now that I am in a college setting, I hear, "They should have learned this in high school."  When I taught high school, I heard, "They should have had this middle school." And yet I know from watching and helping my own sons that they DID have this in elementary school - but it's a process of learning and sophistication, not a one-time lesson.
3. Teach and give smaller assignments in how to take what is found in sources and either summarize, paraphrase or quote it.
4. Teach the art of careful note taking. I wouldn't assume students know how to do it well unless I saw them do it. I have used exercises in having students just highlight new information in an article and been amazed that most of the article ends up highlighted when there were only 4 instances of new information. This does not come naturally. I am amazed at how many of my college students expect me to give them notes, slides, and study guides.
5. Have students do an annotated bibliography as a standalone exercise.
6. Model academic integrity. Do you credit and cite things that you use and photocopy for class?
7. Address plagiarism before it occurs. Show examples. Tell them what you consider plagiarism to be. What are the penalties in your class and in your school?
8. If you just tell students, "I don't allow you to use Wikipedia," you might as well stick your head in the sand. They will use it. They will not cite it for you. Better that you teach them how and when to use Wikipedia. It does have a place in starting research. Most teachers use it themselves. It has pretty extensive source information in the history behind an entry and includes sources for the vast majority of information. Wikipedians are very careful to note when articles are incomplete or questionable. Show your students good and bad entries in your field. Let them know that you know how it works.
   You do know how Wikipedia works, right? One of my favorite lessons that I have used with graduate students and undergrads is to have them read How Wikipedia Works and then create an original article in Wikipedia and have it grow and survive until the end of the semester. Do you know how challenging it is to just find a topic of value that is not on Wikipedia?
9. Use examples from the "real world" of writers who have been caught plagiarizing or violating copyrights and what the punishments can be. Students who have grown up in a digital culture have had sharing, openness and re-use (good things) mixed in with sharing music, retweeting thoughts and downloading free software. I'm not sure that their ideas about originality fit at all into the world of academic research and writing. 
10. When you have a student who clearly plagiarized, don't make it only a disciplinary action. Make it a teachable opportunity. Require the student to redo the work and fully document the research. The worst use of a service like Turnitin is as a "gotcha" tool.
11. Much plagiarism comes from laziness, but a lot also comes from students who don't know how to do the research, and are not good (or confident) writers.
12. Students are poor at time management. If you give 3 weeks for a research paper but don't do anything during those 3 weeks in class concerning it, many students will not begin until day 20. Break the paper down into smaller sections with milestones that are checked. This doesn't need to require a lot of "grading" by the teacher. Have them bring in one book they will be using and put bookmarks/Post-Its on 3 passages they plan to use and cite. Show the citation format.
13. Students know that without some software like Turnitin.com to do the checking, the teacher is not going to check many or any of the sources they cite. If no one is monitoring the speed limit on the highway, people will exceed the limit with impunity.

Turnitin.com is designed to assist educators in identifying potential instances of plagiarism but also to give students feedback during the writing process.

Turnitin's database compares papers submitted to against three main repositories of information: 14 billion current and archived web pages; 150 million student papers; and 110 million content items from academic publishers.

You might not think about user-generated content (on sites such as Facebook, Scribd, SlideShare, Yahoo Answers and Answers.com) as a source, and some of these "walled gardens" don't show up fully in a search query.

Turnitin also queries academic, educational and homework help sites (such as medlibrary.org and the National Institute ofHealth, and popular homework help sites like coursehero.com and bookrags.com.

Another legitimate category for research is News and Portals like The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Associated Content.

The bad guys are the "paper mills" that are made for cheating and academic dishonesty. They profit from students by selling, exchanging or placing advertising around offers of "original student papers." Teachers should be aware of these sites (like oppapers.com and allfreepapers.com). Turnitin spots many of these usages not only because they index those sites but also because the papers have already been submitted to the Turnitin database in someone else's name! The student papers in their database and the most controversial aspect of their service and also what makes it far more powerful than using a search engine.

Encyclopedia web sites are as popular as the paper encyclopedia were in the 50s, 60s and 70s were with people who are now teaching. Wikipedia, Brittanica. com and Encyclopedia.com fall into this category.

According to the Turnitin white paper, "...institutions with widespread adoption of Turnitin see a reduction in unoriginal content of 30 to 35 percent in the first year. By the fourth year, many institutions see levels of unoriginality fall by up to 70 percent."

As I noted in #7 above, demonstrating how you use technology like Turnitin, Google, and sites like plagiarism.org to your students BEFORE they do research writing has a chance of deterring them from improper research, citation and writing practices.

When I was on the Academic Integrity committee at NJIT (where I introduced Turnitin to the university), I never saw a case of a student being confronted with a detailed and even color-coded Turnitin "Originality Report" of their written work next to the original sources when the student didn't admit to using those or similar sources.

In every case, was it plagiarism? Was it grounds for disciplinary action? Those are questions that institutions and instructors need to decide. But each instance was certainly an important “teachable moment” if we want to change students' approach to using information in the proper way.


Further Reading

• A good article from the Chronicle of Higher Education "The spread of technology designed to combat academic cheating has created a set of tricky challenges, and sometimes unexpected fallout, for faculty members determined to weed out plagiarism in their classrooms..." http://chronicle.com/article/Escalation-in-Digital/129652/  
• A useful summary of citation rules from the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/Acknowledging_Sources.pdf

Writing Workshops for January-February

The Writing Center is beginning its writing workshop series for the Spring semester. The following workshops are being offered in January and February 2011.

 Intro to the CWE

This workshop provides a basic overview of the College Writing Exam. It discusses what is involved in the exam, frequently asked questions by students, and gives sample questions and papers.

Location:

PCCC Writing Center

(Paterson campus--in the Library)

 Date/Time:

Mon., January 31, 2:30
Thurs., Feb. 3, 5:30

Preparing for the CWE and Other Essay Exams

This workshop will focus on helping students manage their time when taking a timed essay exam.  It offers strategies for planning the essay and writing within a time constraint so that you maximize abilities and chances of passing the exam.  This is especially helpful for students who have never taken the CWE or who have problems with running out of time or going off topic.  Materials needed:  pen and paper.

Location:

PCCC Writing Center

(Paterson campus--in the Library)

Date/Time:
Mon., Feb. 7, 5:30
Tues., Feb 8, 2:00

Attacking the Question

Ever sit down to write a paper only to realize you don't even know where to start? The place to begin an essay is with the question. What is being asked of you? What is required in the answer? This workshop will teach you how to attack an essay starting with the question. You'll learn to decode "professor speak" and figure out what's really being asked of you. From there, you'll learn how to formulate and organize an answer.  This workshop will help students taking the CWE to figure out exactly what a question is asking and how to go about answering it.

The focus of this workshop will be topics on the November CWE theme: Consumerism.

If you have a paper that you're struggling with, feel free to bring the topic to the workshop to get some examples of how to get started. Materials needed: pen and paper.

Location:

PCCC Writing Center

(Paterson campus--in the Library)

Date/Time:

Tues., Feb.15, 5:30
Wed., Feb. 16, 1:00

Proofreading Strategies for Essay Exams

This workshop will help students overcome some of the problems with editing of writing an essay in a timed setting.  This workshop will give you some strategies geared specifically toward timed exams and allow you to notice more of your errors before you turn in the test!  It will be especially helpful for students who are not confident in their writing abilities, haven’t written in a while, or have problems with grammar and editing.

Location:

PCCC Writing Center

(Paterson campus--in the Library)

Date/Time:

Thurs., Feb. 24, 1:10
Fri., Feb. 25, 5:30

Studying for Exams

This workshop aims to help students prepare for lengthy exams.  It will help students figure out how to organize the information in their notes and readings, understand the broad themes in the course and discover the best study strategies.  If your instructor has handed out a study sheet, please bring it to the workshop.  You can also bring in your lecture notes, textbook and any exams and/or quizzes taken during the semester.

Location:

PCCC Writing Center

(Paterson campus--in the Library)

Date/Time:

Mon., Feb., 28, 1:10
Tues., March 1, 5:30

For full descriptions of the workshops and a schedule of upcoming workshops for the summer, go to http://pccc.libguides.com/writingcenter and click on the "Student Workshops" tab.

If you have any questions about upcoming workshops or the Writing Center, please contact Elizabeth Nesius at enesius@pccc.edu.

Grammar for the Texting Generation

Texas schools looking for a way to improve grammar and performance in writing by the current texting and Twitter generation of students will be turning to a new high-tech "Writing Coach."

The State Board of Education recently approved a plan to offer Pearson's Texas Writing Coach as a tool for school districts.



It provides print and digital instructional materials which teachers can customize for students - English language learners; advanced; struggling and trying to catch up in class; on-level or have other unique needs.

The interactive, writing and grammar program is aimed at middle and high school students. It gives students personalized help through a digital writing "coach" component that gives immediate feedback to individual students, right down to the paragraph level of essays.


To learn more about Texas Writing Coach, go to http://txwritingcoach.com/

Tech Tips for Teachers

The Learning Network at The New York Times published a good article on "Tech Tips For Teachers: Free, Easy and Useful Creation Tools."

These tools can help students visualize texts with tools like Wordle, Tagxedo or The New York Times Visualization Lab, create timelines using  Xtimeline, Time Glider or Timetoast and design presentations that go beyond PowerPoint using things like Glogster.edu and Museum Box.

For prewriting, mind maps on paper, and now electronically, are popular idea-processing tools. Their use was popularized by the British IQ specialist Tony Buzan starting in the 1960s.

Bubbl.us, CoSketch.com and Cacoo are good starting places that also allow collaboration by student pairs or groups.

Of course, students can also use The Times for generating ideas on many topics across disciplines from math to fine arts.

• Student-Powered Podcasting 
• English Language Arts Units for Grades 9-12 (National Educational Technology Standards for Students Curriculum Series) 
• A Teacher's Guide to Using Technology in the Classroom 

 

Hybrid Tutoring

On Friday I gave a presentation called "The Hybrid Tutoring Experience: The Path to Better Writers" at the NJEDge.net Faculty Best Practices Showcase.

The presentation was about the advantages of combining online tutoring and face-to-face consulting for a single assignment.

PCCC uses eTutoring.org to provide online writing (and other) tutoring to our students. Through the Title V grant, Writing Intensive students are required to use eTutoring for help with their writing at least twice during the semester. In addition, WI students are strongly encouraged to bring writing assignments to the Writing Center for assistance.

We have found that a good way to tackle difficult assignments is for students to go to eTutoring for a first draft of their essay and then bring those comments into the Writing Center and go over them with a face-to-face writing consultant. The student can go through the paper and make changes with a consultant present to answer questions, offer opinions, and make additional suggestions.

This approach has several benefits. First, it expands the number of times students can work on a draft of a paper. (eTutoring limits it to three drafts.) Additionally, it gives students the opportunity of knowing what problems they may be having before coming into a live session with a tutor. They can give the tutor information about their problems when making the appointment, and by bringing the eTutor's comments, they give the writing consultant a starting place. This saves time, as consultants usually start a session cold (not receiving the paper in advance). Finally, it removes some of the limitations of both face-to-face and online sessions by allowing students to ask questions about the eTutor's response and providing writing consultants with an immediate second opinion on the essay being discussed.

The PCCC Writing Center will continue to encourage hybrid writing tutorials with students to provide a well-rounded writing experience.

You can view my PowerPoint presentation below. More information about the PCCC Writing Center can be found at http://pccc.libguides.com/writingcenter.

The Hybrid Tutoring Experience

View more presentations from Elizabeth Nesius.