Plagiarism teach-back

I had so much fun making a podcast last week that I decided to try it again. Here I explore one of the most common forms of cheating on the internet, certainly the most common I encounter: plagiarism of essays. I look at the pros and cons of some of the most common forms of plagiarism detection software as well as situations in which the software doesn't work and common sense is a better option.

Click here to listen to the Plagarism podcast

subject verb agreement podcast

I made this podcast using audacity and it wasn't too difficult as it combined skills I've used before, though I've never put them all together in one. I already had audacity installed since I've used it to edit music files before, which also gave me a basic understanding of how it works but I had never used it for live recording. I also have experience using the mic and headset for real time conferencing in elluminate and, yes, world of warcraft, but had not recorded through it either (okay, well I did try to record my elluminate session once but gave up when I learned my school's account doesn't support recordings so I couldn't access it). So setting up the mic and a new project in audacity were no problem. But I had to look at an internet tutorial to find the record button. After recording, I was also familiar with the playback and editing functions but there was one snag. In audacity, every time you start recording, it opens a new sound track so, when I finished, I had a bunch of little sound snippets in separate tracks, instead of one continuous file, so I had to play around for a while to figure out how to move everything into the same track and the delete the extra ones, saving every couple second to make sure I was safe if I accidentally deleted the wrong thing.

I was very frightened of doing this project because every recording of my voice I have ever heard sounded horribly nasal. I hate the way my voice sounds on tape or over the phone so recording my voice and playing it back was not something I was super comfortable with. But it turned out much better than I thought. I don't know if it's because I have a good mic (I doubt it) or because audacity has very faithful sound reproduction, but the voice came out very clear and normal sounding (still doesn't sound like me but since it also doesn't sound like a five-year-old with a cold, I'll take it). I did learn by looking at the sound wave diagram that I take a lot a breaths when I speak, which can create overly long pauses, but these were easy to edit out. I'm very happy I did this project because it convinced me that creating audio recordings is quick, easy, and doesn't mutilate my voice. As I said, I was leery about this but it was so painless, it's something I'd certainly do again. In the future, I might want to get creative and sync the audio file with a screen capture program so I can include a video of a word document or power point presentation to include visuals as well.


Click here to listen to the Subject/Verb podcast

podcasts on iTunes

I've had no prior experience with pod casts but my boyfriend is a big fan of them so I asked him to help me out on this one. He said that anyone who is anyone has their podcast on iTunes so that's where I went to search which may or may not have been a good idea. The reason it may not have been a good idea was that the searching on iTunes was not easy. When searching for “Thesis Statement” one of the first results is an explicit song with that title by the band Hot Pink Karma....I guess you learn something new every day. For another thing, there was too much over choice and very little information was provided about the contents of the individual entries. Trying to click for additional information usually resulted in the system trying to download the item so I had to mostly guess and had a few false starts before I found a semi-decent podcast. To make matters worse many of the pod casts on the site are no longer available but are not removed for some reason. Thus I would spend a lot of time finding a pod cast that looked promising only to find that I could no longer access it. What I eventually did find was a producer called Stone Writing Center which releases two pod casts called “Essay to Go” and “Grammar to Go” which are designed to provide students with concise chunks of English instruction they can listen to while moving from class to class. It seemed like a good concept and, information-wise, the content is spot on, covering exactly what students (at least freshmen which is basically the level I teach) would need to know. However, I highly doubt I would actually use them in a course because the narrator speaks in a very annoying and condescending tone and interjects comments like “Now I know this seems hard,” or “A thesis statement probably seems like the kind of think only a graduate student could get right” which I fear would make the students feel talked down to (it sure made me feel that way) which is exactly what they DON'T need in their first college level writing course. As far as what instructions I would give to students, iTunes still seems pretty easy to use. If I supplied the name of the pod cast, that should eliminate the search issue and, once the item is found, you just click and it downloads. However, iTunes DOES need to be downloaded and installed so, if I were to use it as a podcast source for my classes (which I'm not sure I would) I would include instructions on how to do these things. This would probably be too much work for the student though, unless I was going to use it more than once or twice in a course.