Monthly Archives: October 2016

How to give the source for images

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Earlier, I wrote about citing sources, but one of the students has just asked me how best to cite the source for a photo. I’m glad he asked; I do think its important to credit sources for images, but unlike plagiarism, we can’t police it so I leave it up to the students to do it. Every year, some photographer or company writes complaining we stole an image, and each year, I go in a remove the offending object. That seems a more time efficient than trying to police the students on this.

But for students who want to give credit where credit is due, and you should, a good way to do it is to use the caption option that comes with the ‘Add Media’ route to posting pictures. When you select a photo to insert into the blog post, on the right hand side of the screen is the Attachment Details panel. One of the options is ‘Caption’. That would be a great place to stick the source.

This image came from http://boingboing.net/tag/copyright

This image came from http://boingboing.net/tag/copyright

Note added Oct 20, 2016. Maybe I need to take this issue more seriously. I just got a letter from a lawyer demanding $8000 for a photo a student posted in 2014. It was a thumbnail picture of fruit like anyone could have taken with their phone at a farmers market or at Wegmans….

How to improve your grade: wisdom from the class of 2015

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In the last class of last year, I asked the students to write a postcard to the person they were 15 long weeks earlier, at the start of semester. I wanted to know the lessons graduating SC200 students would tell themselves if they had a chance to go back in time and start the class again. I asked them to advise themselves on how to learn better and how to get a better grade. At the start of the semester, I blogged about what they said about learning better, and then I discussed it in class.

Here’s what they said about how to get a higher grade. Most of the advice (90%) covered just two things: blogging and exam review sessions. I want to discuss this feedback in class today because we are coming up to the first exam review sessions, and Blog Period 2 deadline is the end of next week.

The advice, in order:

  1. Go to exam review sessions.
  2. Spend more time on blogs
    • blog regularly
    • blog more
    • don’t leave blogging until the last minute
    • start blogging earlier
    • reach out to the TAs for advice on the blog entries
    • apply blog feedback
    • add more of your own analysis to the blog
    • blog all three periods
  3.  Prepare better for tests
    • go over previous tests; keep answers
    • each test builds on the last, so understand the early tests
    • take all tests even though only two count
    • ask TAs and Andrew about things you don’t understand
  4. Do better on the tests
    • think hard and always be critical
    • read questions thoroughly
    • allow enough time during the test to think hard
  5. Take advantage of extra credits

As with the learning advice, it was shocking to me to get back from the students stuff I had been telling them all semester.

(Parenthetically, the students also offered me some advice:
1. Ban cell phones
2. Make first blog period mandatory.
I am working on #1. On #2: my experience with the mandatory plagiarism test this year tells me to never make anything else ‘mandatory’. What do you do with the ones that fail to do it?

Those damn phones

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Just finished a very interesting lunch with 14 faculty from the STEM Gen Ed discussion group. We meet every month or two for therapy and to exchange good practice. Today’s topic was the problem of cell phones in  the classroom. There is very strong evidence that phones are toxic to learning in a classroom setting (main mechanism: distraction). Today’s discussion was about getting students to pay attention to the class, not their phones.

Methods:

  1. Do nothing. It our responsibility to help students learn. But do we have to try to change damaging personal behavior when it is self inflicted?
  2. Outright ban. Hard to enforce.
  3. Try to persuade. Show them the data. I tried this in 2015 and again this year, with no noticeable impact.
  4.  Designated smoking section (an area of the classroom students can opt into with electronics). This works for Julia but half the class opts for the electronics section, so the problem is at best halved.
  5. Collect phones for extra credit. This is what I tried. Quite a performance, and some loss of class time, but my impression is that there has been less use of phones in the class since we tried it (anecdotal observation). Perhaps that one time showed the students the learning impact? Julia suggested instead that it must have forcefully shown the students how much I care. It is sweet she thinks the students care when I care….
  6. Swap phones for extra credit.  Students swap phones with each other and sign that they were not used for the class. Julia’s idea, completely new (so no data). Worries about cheating?
  7. Software solutions. Bill Goffe points us to flippdapp. Looks interesting.
  8. Hardware solutions. Via Alicia Keys, Bill pointed us to overyonder. Quite pricey.

My take on all this is that we can implement #5 better, and I might yet try that, but before then, I’d like to experiment with #6 and #7. Next class, I’ll talk to the students and see what they think.

The white board from today's discussion... phones are good for photos -- even in airplane mode.

The white board from today’s faculty discussion… phones are good for photos — even in airplane mode.

In the middle of our discussion about all this, my phone rang (is it just me that thinks the iPhone sound-off button sucks?). Our whole discussion ground to a distracting halt…

How to give citations to sources

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For reasons that are unclear to me, many students seem completely uncertain as to how to cite sources. I think this is because their teachers have insisted on particular formats. My son tells me that one of his college professors spent a whole hour teaching the class how to do APA format referencing. Googling APA citations, I see he is not alone (example). I have to say I feel like citation format is a unimportant problem in academia. The key principle is to make sure the source is clear. How that is done I leave up to students.

For SC200 the blog, live links can be used to direct the reader to the source, and I think that makes things readable, accessible and looks much better. But if traditionalists want to give sources at the end, fine with me. We don’t care how it is done. But we do care deeply that it IS done. Unless something is widely understood general knowledge, citations MUST be given or it is theft (you have used the ideas/data/concepts developed by someone else and passed them off as your own).

So here’s some examples of ways to do it:

  1.  As Read and colleagues (2001) pointed out, it does not always make sense to complete a course of antibiotics even after you feel better, despite what the doctor says. This is because…
    ,,,,,,
    end of post:
    Read, A.F., Day, T., & Huijben, S. (2011) The evolution of drug resistance and the curious orthodoxy of aggressive chemotherapy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. 108: 10871-10877.
  2.  The doctors advice to complete a course of antibiotics even after you feel better does not always make sense (Read et al. 2011). This is because,,,,,,
    end of post:
    Read, A.F., Day, T., & Huijben, S. (2011) The evolution of drug resistance and the curious orthodoxy of aggressive chemotherapy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. 108: 10871-10877.
  3.  Andrew Read and colleagues have argued that the doctors advice to complete a course of antibiotics even after you feel better does not always make sense.
  4.  ….The doctors advice to complete a course of antibiotics even after you feel better does not always make sense. This is because…

SC200 2016 Students: (1) If you want to do it some other way, no problems, but it must be clear what the source is. If you are worried about whether your way works, email SC200@psu.edu and ask. (2). Note that I am assuming here that you have put things in your own words. If you are using someone else’s words, you need to email SC200@psu.edu and ask permission to use them and if that is granted, we will talk about the use of quote marks etc. That is to avoid plagiarism — see p. 9 of the 2016 syllabus.

Class Test 2: upping the bar

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This test happened yesterday. It covered more ground that the first test (since we are now half way through semester and the tests are cumulative). I also deliberately made it a bit harder to keep students stretching. Looks like that worked pretty well. The average score among those who did the test was 77% (C+), very slightly down on Class Test 1. The distribution broke out as:

A, 15; A-, 44; B+, 46; B, 43; B-, 41; C+, 27; C, 30; D, 61; Fail, 35, and 9 no-shows.

The top end of the distribution took a hair cut: no one got everything right, only four students got 26/28 and only 9 got 100% on my ask-28-questions-grade-out-of-25 algorithm (down from 20 last time).  There were fewer were fewer A’s this time (15 versus 42), but more A-‘s (44 versus 32), and about the same number of B’s. So I did manage to challenge the students at the top end. Good.

But at the bottom end, things got a bit worse. More students got a D or failed. So the distribution has become more bimodal. I think that’s to be expected when the bar is raised. The students raising their game get better, the students not following things get more heavily penalized. The tests become less forgiving if the basics aren’t soundly in place.

try-harderI guess now there will be students thinking about dropping the class. They’ll be worried about their GPA (that precious, weird and destructive statistic unique to US education). The alternative strategy, and one I need to encourage among the poorly-performing students is to seize control, NOW. Review all the material, pop quizzes and class tests to date. Identify the misunderstandings. Figure them out. I you can’t, ask the TAs, or ask me after class, or at the review sessions we will put on. 

Each year at this point, I get a little nervous. Will 100 students waste their time and money and abandon the course? Can I lift those students by lifting my game? At least I have experience now. This course rewards those who try effectively. Each year there are startling improvements which give me great pleasure. No grades are set in stone yet: I take the best two of four class tests, so there is still everything to play for. Game on.