Category: Lay of the Academic land

Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information

Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names

Stanford History Education Group Working Paper No. 2017-A1

56 Pages Posted: 9 Oct 2017    Date Written: October 6, 2017

ABSTRACT

The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis.

To investigate how people determine the credibility of digital information, we sampled 45 individuals: 10 Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduates. We observed them as they evaluated live websites and searched for information on social and political issues.

Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In contrast, fact checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site.

Compared to the other groups, fact checkers arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time. We contrast insights gleaned from the fact checkers’ practices with common approaches to teaching web credibility.
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Wineburg, Sam and McGrew, Sarah, Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information (October 6, 2017). Stanford History Education Group Working Paper No. 2017-A1 . Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3048994

Is it plagiarism if I found it on the Internet?

The challenge of properly using references when writing an academic paper.

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. All published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is covered under this definition.

Many colleges run student papers through a program like Grammarly or  TurnItIn to check for potential plagiarism. This is how TurnItIn works:

  • Submitted work is matched against a database of previously submitted work from every institution which subscribes to Turnitin, (including international institutions); current and archived internet pages and databases of books, journals and periodicals.
  • Turnitin does not detect plagiarism: it is text-matching software which provides an “originality report” on what proportion of a student’s submission is original (not matched to other sources) or unoriginal.
  • Turnitin also offers an online marking tool – GradeMark, allowing teachers to add text-based comments and marks to assignments submitted to Turnitin.

A recent syllabus from a FESHE certified college course provided this guidance on the course research report: The report will be graded on subject matter, grammar, spelling, and originality. There is absolutely no allowance for plagiarism, or cutting and pasting of Internet material.

Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric has an excellent and comprehensive resource on Sources and Citations at Dartmouth. It discusses why learning to cite sources is an essential part of your education, with many examples and a great section on “Quality of Sources.”

What has been your experience with plagiarism?

Post a comment below or email mike@companycommander.com with you questions.

Are your papers in order?

Firefighters bring more sources of transfer credit than any other group.

Shortly after I was appointed director of the Fire Science Program I met with the community college counseling office. I was learning the process to submit students for graduation.

There was a perceptible shudder when I introduced myself. “Firefighters are always a challenge.” The counseling director explained that the paper forms they used to process graduation applications had space for 4 sources of transfer information.  (It was a long time ago – before electronic student records.)

Some students will graduate with our degree but including coursework completed when they were in the military, took a CLEP exam, and/or attended another educational institution. Many fire science students were bringing twice as many sources for academic credit. The counseling office needed to create an addendum transfer credit form.

I routinely submitted graduation applications with six sources of transfer credit. The record number was 17 sources. That pattern continued when I moved to the university and ran a bachelor degree completion program.

Firefighters bring more sources of transfer credit than any other group of students. That means we need to make it easy for academic counselors and program directors to approve transfer credits early in your shift-work scholar efforts.

GET YOUR TRANSCRIPTS NOW

You need to order official transcripts from every place you went to get college credit, including the places where you registered but did not finish a class. Send the official transcript to your academic institution and request an unofficial copy be sent to you.

Each college or university will have a place to request a transcript, some will offer it on-line.

Let’s look at the sources for your academic credit:

Military: ACE credit for military experience – Joint Services Transcript

Academic institution: Each has specific website/process, this includes Public, private. for-profit, federal and military academic institutions.

AMERICAN COLLEGE OF EDUCATION (ACE) COLLEGE CREDIT RECOMMENDATIONS

Does my technical training receive ACE credit? You can look it up in the National Guide to College Credit for Workforce Training. Here are some fire-based organizations have received ACE college recommendations:

  • National Fire Academy
  • California Department of Forestry – Fire Academy
  • Fire Department of New York City
  • Illinois Fire Service Institute
  • Fire and Rescue Training Institute, University of Missouri
  • Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute
  • Texas Engineering Extension Service
  • Virginia Department of Fire Programs
  • West Virginia University Fire Service Extension
  • Bergen County Law and Public Safety Institute

Having completed a technical course with ACE College Credit Recommendation does not guarantee that your college or university will accept the credit. Each institution can have a different policy or procedure based on their needs and goals.

DO IT NOW

It may take a couple of weeks to get the transcripts delivered. Getting all of your transcripts sent to the college/university and meeting with your academic counselor early will provide a clear pathway to your graduation goal.

University of Phoenix closing campuses

The Phoenix New Times reports that the for-profit University of Phoenix will phase out on-campus enrollment and teaching at around 20 locations, according to employees and internal discussions. The locations in question include full-fledged campuses in Detroit, Tucson, El Paso, and Albuquerque, along with smaller learning centers in San Bernardino and Woodlands, Texas.

The list assembled by reporter Joseph Flaherty include:

  • Colorado (ALL)
  • Florida (ALL)
  • Michigan (ALL)
  • New Mexico (ALL)
  • Utah (ALL)
  • Augusta, GA
  • Chula Vista, CA
  • Columbus, GA
  • Costa Mesa, CA
  • El Paso, TX
  • Honolulu, HI
  • Oakland, CA
  • San Bernardino, CA
  • Tucson, AZ
  • Virginia Beach, VA
  • Washington, DC
  • Woodlands, TX

These closures come after a February 2017 announcement of the elimination of up to 170 full-time faculty members.  That announcement was made two weeks after the University of Phoenix was part of a $1.1Billion sale of the Apollo Education Group – taking the enterprise private.

Phoenix is the Capital of For Profit Education

According to Joseph Flaherty at Phoenix New Times, Phoenix  has become the center of for-profit higher education endeavors. University of Phoenix and Grand Canyon University are based in the capital city.

Flaherty quotes sociology Assistant Professor Tressie McMillam Cottom (Virginia Commonwealth University): “For millions of people, the time trap makes a for-profit college your only practical choice for labor market entry, stability, or mobility,” Cottom writes. A new credential can seem like the only way out of a dead-end job, and an army of enrollment counselors can guide you through intimidating loan paperwork.

While there are some success stories from for-profit higher education, Professor Cottom’s description in the Atlantic article The Coded Language of For-Profit Colleges appears more common:

The more likely story is the student who finishes with high debt or more debt than their salary can absorb—say, a nursing assistant. Or the student who doesn’t finish, perhaps the most vulnerable of all students. She has debt, no degree, and all the burdens that made her likely to attend a for-profit college in the first place. For these students, the problem of inequalities in access and outcomes is clearly a consequence of lower ed’s expansion.

The Troubling Appeal of Education at For-Profit Schools

The Academic Landscape

It is an exciting time with no clear path on the “best way” to get to your academic goal.

Sixteen summers ago I turned in my gear, keys and “active member” ID card at fire headquarters and became a full-time assistant professor at a nearby university medical center. While I had a lot of experience as a part-time faculty member at a state-run community college, the transition to academia was jarring.

Shift Work Scholar is designed to help firefighters and paramedics in their academic journey. The information presented in this blog does not take the place of your academic advisor, career development mentor, parent or sponsor.

Since 2000 we have seen:

  • Some departments requiring college credit hours as a prerequisite for a unit or command officer promotional exam.
  • United States Fire Administration establishing a national model curriculum.
  • Expansion of on-line and non-traditional courses to entice adults to enroll in higher education.
  • Rapid expansion and subsequent crash of private for-profit colleges.
  • Efforts by some states to match vocational/certification training with academic course credit – such as getting 4 semester hours of college credit for getting a Fire Officer I credential.
  • Push-back of “book-smart” but “street-dumb” fire officers.
  • Intrusion of evidence-based practices on fire suppression and supervision.
  • Challenge of the traditional regional accreditation process and players.
  • More fire officers with graduate degrees.

It is an exciting time with no clear path on the “best way” to get to your academic goal.

Let’s get started.