NPDF Domain 4
I would like to include a reflection on a recent workshop that I held in Domain 4. The workshop that I held was on the theme of plagiarism, the first of this workshop that I have held. It was a good example of how I try to work technology into my classrooms, as a means of creating environments that are “inclusive, innovative...problem-based” (4.7).
The tutorial was based on material projected to the front of the classroom. Rather than lecturing, or demonstrating, I try to use projected material to encourage active student engagement and group (including peer-to-peer) learning. In the context of this tutorial, I attempted to do so in three different ways.
I started out with a Kahoot quiz. I say ‘quiz’, but I have been trying to use Kahoots more as a means of starting discussion rather than as a ‘quiz’. So, to ask a question where the answers might be ambiguous, or where some answers are partially correct. I’ve had reasonable success with Kahoots as quizzes, i.e., with perhaps a nine-question quiz, with the questions run through quite quickly, and students compete to get the most points. These have been quite successful particularly with groups larger than 10 or so -- with groups smaller than this, people tend to get increasingly self-conscious that they will get an answer wrong, and that others will know (the anonymity decreases the more the numbers drop).
I can’t say the Kahoot was hugely successful as a means of starting discussion, nor did people really seem to enjoy it as a quiz in this case (the group was small, around seven, the topic one that people are quite anxious about). I wound up going through the questions quite quickly, basically talking to myself while the students looked on.
The second activity was to run through a series of exemplary passages projected onto the screen, that is, an original passage followed by a passage that was an attempt at paraphrasing the first. I then asked students what they thought about the paraphrased passage -- were there elements of plagiarising in the passage? This exercise was useful in reviewing the idea that reproducing the structure of a passage amounts to plagiarism. This was a concept that I had included in the earlier quiz, but from the response I got from the students, it wasn’t necessarily something that they clearly understood: that reproducing the structure of an original passage could amount to plagiarism.
The big problem with the above exercise was that, in preparing the workshop, I neglected to include an example of an entirely non-plagiarised passage! This resulted in some regretful confusion, and is something I have since amended in the presentation.
The most successful element of the workshop was the third and final component. To start this component, I explained that really the best method to appropriately paraphrase a passage -- and to practice paraphrasing passages -- is simply to read the original passage over several times, then flip over the paper and attempt to write out the gist of the passage from memory. This isn’t an easy thing to do, but there really is no mechanical way of producing a non-plagiarised paraphrase of a passage!
I then gave the attendees exemplary passages for them to try out this method with. Once they had an attempt at a paraphrase, I got volunteers to hand me their written work, for us to examine using the projector and a document camera.
I’ll turn to the document camera for a moment. A document camera is simply a camera (like a web cam) that is set up on a prop so that it will ‘look’ at a document set on a surface, which is then projected onto a screen. I was introduced to document cameras when I was an academic writing instructor in Turkey. At first, I thought the device was faintly ridiculous, an attempt at a fad for classroom teaching. Yet when I tried it out in the classroom, I found that it was quite useful in gaining the attention and focus of students working in English as their second language.
I wanted to use the document camera in this case so that we could have a group discussion about passages written by students in class as cases, to see whether they could get the method of paraphrasing a passage above to work, whether it did work. I was a little bit worried beforehand about whether students would actually volunteer their work to be projected onto the screen. In fact, students were very keen to have their work projected and evaluated by the class (myself included). So that was very good, and I think the fact that they knew they would be asked to put their work up motivated them to try out the method as well as they could.
The most successful or at least interesting moment was when one of the students, on seeing her work come up on the screen, gave a kind of gasp of recognition, which came because, once the work was up there, projected largely, she was able to recognize where she had reproduced parts of the passage that was overly close to the original. This was very interesting, and unanticipated. I had anticipated that projecting the texts on the screen would be useful in terms of focusing group attention to the piece and encouraging group discussion. But what I think happened in this case was that, for this student, seeing her work outside of its usual context -- small, close and within her own field of work -- now, projected in large letters on to a lightened screen, enabled a new kind of recognition, where something that was previously invisible to her was freshly apparent. In other words, I’m gesturing to a kind of Gestalt effect, where she was able to piece together meaning within the discursive and logical domain of academic integrity and originality from seeing her written text in two different visual contexts.