6/10/08
5/7/08
Blogging 101
5/5/08
Enter the Blogosphere
I have found our discussions here to be quite useful, particularly since blogging fit the topic of this course. I have learned from my colleagues, and hope that I have somehow contributed to our online discussion. I must confess, however, that I find some of the overheated and hyperbolic claims (not by my colleagues) made by some of the writers and specialists in the field to be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Some of the authorship claims defy one's sensibility at times. On the other hand, I found the issues of copyright and fair use to be compelling. In fact, those issues sparked my political blogging spirit, and I wanted to march out of the room some nights, decrying the injustice of the corporatocracy (oligarchy, plutocracy, GOP - grand old plutocracy).
For the rhetoricians amongst us, I would recommend taking a look at Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennet, Richard Dawkins, and James Q. Wilson. Using Foucault, Barthes, and Bakhtin as models for authorship and sources for cultural analysis is more than just primitive. It's like trying to study biology without Darwin.
Cheers!
Blog Reflection
I think one of the coolest things about the blog is the ability to link, post videos, and give all around multi-media representations of what we're working on, especially in a class that focuses on things that are not so seemlessly translated to paper. Also, being able to check the blog or contribute to it from anyway has really proved to be an easy way to stay connected to the course from home, to check what's going on, and to get some quality feedback from classmates on our own ideas.
It's an excellent tool, and I feel like we're using it well. Other than the pressure to contribute when I might not have anything, just to meet the requirement, it's been a really pleasant and positive experience.
My 2 cents worth...
Like others, this was my first experience using a blog for anything, much less class discussion. I agree with Dan that it is a good forum for the quieter among us to express ourselves, but like We-um, sorry, entremanureal I often felt that when I had to post, I just didn't have much to say. I never dedicated the time or energy to follow this conversation out in the blogosphere; in fact, I had a hard enough time just following our own blog—where do you people find the time? The one time I chimed in on another blog, my comments were ignored. :( Serious, thoughtful blogging is hard work and not for the timid; unfortunately, it's easy for me to be lazy.
I really liked the blog as a repository of all of the quirky and interesting links our class found pertaining to authorship and copyright issues. I also thought it was beneficial for some extended rants. Nonetheless, it did feel like a chore and a bother most times (I think I've been in school too long). Will I blog on my own? Probably not. Will I leave the occasional comment? I think it's safe to say yes. And as this is my last class at NIU, shy of writing my thesis this summer, here's a big thank you, ENGL 529!
In Retrospect, A Cool Thing
Like others here, I somehow never got around -- or never worked up the courage -- to post elsewhere, but I think the more time I spend exploring the more comfortable that will get responding to what other people have to say. I will also agree with the comment that I sometimes posted here largely because I had to, which sometimes left me struggling to find something worthwhile to say. But on the whole I ended up really enjoying our class blog, and I do believe I will miss it.
5/4/08
Blog Infant
- The ability to read classmates' thoughts on the readings helped me more thoughtfully respond to the articles and books. I wasn't simply reacting to the readings; the blog allowed me to digest additional context and perspectives because of my peers' analysis.
- Other postings unrelated to the readings opened up a world of literature, parody and scholarship I never would have found without the blog. Thanks!
- The blog encouraged us to form a community beyond what I usually experience as a part-time student who visits campus twice a week. While I still don't know everyone's pseudonym, it was nice to understand more about my classmates' perspectives beyond what you can discern from class discussions or ten-minute breaks. I don't think I would have reached beyond my ol' technical writing buddies without having familiarized myself with others on the blog.
What frustrated me about the blog:
- Often, I felt the need to just post something in order to meet a class requirement. This frustration may have more to do with my unfamiliarity with blogging combined with my overwhelming workload this semester, but I often wondered if I was really contributing anything that a fellow student could use or reflect on.
- While some of you disagreed with my reticence to post on external blogs during a brief class discussion, I have to admit I still felt reticent all semester. Though many of you encouraged me by assuring me any posting would be anonymous, I sadly regressed into feeling isolated without a cyberspace community. Just as I would rarely if ever interrupt a conversation I walked into in person, I would rarely if ever contribute to a blog I hadn't been monitoring for a while. And unfortunately, there just wasn't time during my juggling act. It wasn't clear to me until late in the game that my contribution on this end might have publicized our efforts and lured external folks to our discussions. I'm sorry I didn't contribute to that.
- I have to agree with ehrengard and jb that the visual style of our blog made it difficult to follow a strand of comments or related postings. Some of us tagged our postings, but in no real systemmatic way.
Having said all of this, I want to end by sharing that this has been one of the most active group of classmates I've encountered in terms of discussion, both verbal and written. Thanks for making the semester interesting and lively!
so long, class blog
I regret not taking a more active role in reading/responding to the scholars on our blogroll. I did post to Sivacracy (it's somewhere, maybe I'll dig it up) but I don't think I linked back to our blog here. I guess it wasn't really related to authorship and copyright, so I suppose I failed on that end. I still, for whatever reason, generally thought of our class as the primary audience and did not consider that someone like John Logie or Rebecca Moore Howard might be reading.
Perhaps it's because I understood this blog space mostly as another way to interact with and understand the readings. I liked when conversations would migrate from here into the classroom. This is not to say I don't see the potential to reach a wider audience here, but that is a goal for my paper while these posts were more spontaneous efforts. Perhaps that stems from my perceived sense of privacy I get from my super secret pseudonym.
I'm rambling (and, wow, I need to get to work on the paper we're workshopping tomorrow), so I should go. Best of luck with your papers, everyone! There I go again with the audience thing. Ahem. Farewell, loyal readers!
5/3/08
End of Semester Thoughts on the Blog
However, even my collaboratively written blogs did not have this consistent level of activity (and, I am pained to admit, quality), which is very important and very exciting.
Additionally, though others have said it, an advantage of this forum is that those of us who have a hard time talking can come out of their proverbial shell. I can see the advantage of this virtual space for classrooms, even if they are not specifically "endorsed" or a requirement of the professor, just as a place for questions and answers.
Lastly, I've been in kind of a creative weird place lately, and so, when that is the case, I read some poetry or related prose. In this case, I'm re-reading Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," and I've come across this bit, and his words on copyright are better than mine.
"Finally, as to my own books, I wish I could send you any of them that might give you pleasure. But I am very poor, and my books, as soon as they are published, no longer belong to me. I can't even afford them myself--and, as I would so often like to, give them to those who would be kind to them."
--Rainer Maria Rilke, April 23,1903
Thoughts on Blog
On a larger level, though, and I believe this was the most beneficial element of the blog, I have become familiar and comfortable with blogging and web 2.0. This is showing in the classes I teach, as I introduce new technology to my students and as my understanding of writing and composition has developed from a linear writer-to-reader approach to a much more circular writer-reader discussion.
4/30/08
Blog Geographies
Blogs have a ton of potential for expanding classroom discussion. We didn't utilize the blog to its fullest possible imaginable (!) potential, but I think all we did added exponentially to the value of this class for me. I've always enjoyed classes where we can have this freer space to write-think. I don't know if the average student below junior level could make good use of this, but for the rest of us, yes.
I'm thinking about architecture and geographies and spaces ever since RSA plus hearing Kathleen Turner's Arnold Fox-winning paper this semester on "fourthspace" (a concept by NIU's own James Giles). The blockiness, the linearity, of this blog is so limiting and unorganic. I'd prefer a setup like the Huffington Post's homepage or something where blog posts had larger or greater sizes according to how much they were read/used. Something more open, more expandable, less cephalopodan (sorry: I now have all these fun metaphors I now use every chance I get).
Spatial relations. Thinking about space in modern psychological torture (Guantanamo, etc.). Thinking about that Austrian who imprisoned his daughter in his cellar for 24 years. Industrial cement. Bare-bones squares. Square trapdoors. Dark boxes. Pressure devices. Desensitizing acoustics.
What does space look like on this blog? Featureless squares. Windows and doors. Anonymous fonts. What does our space say about us? What content matches all this blankness?
The "blogosphere" - spherical, radial, more organic - is that where the radical comes in? In our connections despite the liminality, the limitations, of our form? Why do I hear this fear, this hesitation, to break out of this safebox, this box, this safe, this square, this imprisoning form, -- and comment on someone else's blog? Come on, take a baby step, I challenge you, everyone in the class (who hasn't already), comment on one other blog and post a link to your comments! Cherry-dipped foam-on-top double-dare ya!
Here is one of mine on Sivacracy.net. (Sivacracy rocks! We should all be posting a million posts there.)
---
“The Wild Iris” by Louise Gluck
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Editorial in Northern Star: Online file sharing is not a crime
Some notables from John's editorial:
"In an environment where students share computers and set up ad hoc wireless networks for educational (and, let’s face it, gaming and entertainment) purposes, it’s not always easy to prove, exactly, who did what....
There are perfectly legitimate reasons one might transfer a lot of data for educational purposes, and I encourage students to investigate for themselves the Internet Archive and Creative Commons, where a plethora of information and digital media is freely available and freely distributed....
Suspending students from the network without concrete evidence that they’ve broken the law seems pretty bold to me. If I still lived in the residence halls, I’d be terrified. The absence of due process is scary indeed."
I couldn't have said it better. There have been no comments on the article on the Northern Star website. Leaving your thoughts there might help to spur discussion.
4/29/08
class blog
4/28/08
Coldplay follows in Radiohead's Footsteps
Scalia on 60 Minutes
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/60minutes/main4040290.shtml
One great quote: "Anyway, that's my view," Scalia says. "And it happens to be correct."
Reading Response: Authorship in the Academy
In “Who Owns My Work?” Herrington examines the contributions academics in technical communication make to their universities and the rare cases of litigation between them or between academics and professional organizations. She charges academics to be familiar with university policies and guidelines and even copyright and patent laws to protect their intellectual property and to intelligently advise their students—future academics or professionals (126). Herrington explains that the “work-for-hire” agreements signed by numerous academics are not legally binding; therefore, when a case goes to court, judges look to the agency-partnership laws to determine the best course of action (136). Additionally judges must determine whether or not the “properties” are created under reasonable work responsibilities. She goes on to summarize cases such as Williams v. Weisser (Williams, the professor, won) and Hays v. Sony Corp. of America (Sony Corp. won) and illustrates the arbitrariness of court rulings. To avoid conflict specifically between academics and universities, Herrington encourages the universities to remove the heavy hand from intellectual property and instead cultivate the interests and activities of their academics because their continuing expertise in the field will only enrich their campuses and improve their reputations.
Both Unsworth and Herrington’s articles describe the institutional attitudes of value placed on scholarly work by university faculty administrators as well as judges in the court of law. In Unsworth, electronic publication is not seen as valuable as printed publications. In Herrington, academics and universities fight for the rights of what they perceive as valuable information to them. Though Ede & Lunsford’s “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship” is not mentioned above, the “value” theme is also present in their article. They discover that a high or low value is placed on scholarship depending on single (high) or collaborative (low) authorship. The conclusion in each of these readings seems to imply that an attitudinal change toward modern ways of publishing, writing, and owning scholarly work will depend on progressive, forward-thinking academics and their students. Those who want to see changes take place will most likely need to be the agents of change in their institutions.
“Into the Blogosphere Review Process: A Statement from the Editors” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs." Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. 27 April 2008
4/27/08
Is it all about the money?
Call me naive, but I found it strange that universities would seek patents or copyrights to the work of some faculty, mainly those working in the sciences. What benefit would a university have by claiming such a thing? Reputation? If so, maybe it's a ploy to keep the research at the university, instead of having it follow the individual researchers. However, that doesn't really make sense, because most research is person-dependent, I think, in the sciences; major breakthroughs or epiphanies usually escape documentation, and when they are documented, it's usually the person rather than the institution getting the credit.
If the university held the patents, it could potentially cash out if they sold the patent to a private company, but how often does that happen? From the research I've done on open source software, in the case of the UNIX operating system that was developed jointly with AT&T and UC Berkeley, it was UC Berkeley who fought to maintain rights over their work, and when they won suite against AT&T, UC Berkeley promptly gave the OS to the world as Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX, which exists to this day in several open source formats (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) Another example is the Apache server software, the most popular in the world, which was developed at UIUC National Center for Supercomputing Applications; when developers of the project moved elsewhere, rather than let the project die it was completely open sourced and became free to everybody. IBM even later gave support because they figured rightly that making their hardware compatible with the free software everybody had would be an incentive to buy from IBM, and they were right. Here are two cases where patent or proprietary interests from universities worked to everyone's advantage, because such interests where essentially ephemeral from the start. So I guess I've come full circle; maybe it's not so bad that universities seek patents over some of the work of their faculty.
What is curious is that work in the humanities is outside this control; is it because it is unprofitable? As Unsworth points out, that is largely the case; academic monographs are lucky to sell a few hundred copies, if that much. Is there no audience? I think using the example of Postmodern Culture is a little misleading; at least the title sounds interesting to someone who is moderately curious about cultural trends; would Victorian Poetry have the same draw? You decide. Maybe it all comes down to money...
A Moment of Clarity
In addition to recognizing that the individual notion of author is a cultural phenomenon that is easy to succumb to, this week's readings also made me realize that my own education may have had a hand in the "brainwash." After reading Ede and Lunsford as well as Herrington, I'm realizing that this class is the first class I've ever encountered that embraced the collaborative author. Otherwise, I've been learning within institutions that reward individual authorship and from faculty who often must play the single-author game to maintain their status. It's a trite epiphany, I know, but one that at least helps assuage my guilt when the single-author in me rears its ugly head.
Mein Kampf Critical Edition
Apparently Mein Kampf is banned from publication in Germany, though, as this article points out, it can easily be found online. I did a quick search of Google and found an online copy very easily (second hit!). Scholars are arguing that before Mein Kampf goes into the public domain in 2015, a critical edition with annotations, pointing out Hitler's inconsistencies and factual errors, should be published. They argue that doing so will inform people and allow them to dispute claims of neo-nazis who will use Mein Kampf to their benefit.
Interesting argument. I agree that a critical edition is definitely needed, and the sooner the better, since as the article points out, we don't have 7 years until publication (in Germany), but rather negative time as the text is available online for free. Keeping Mein Kampf carefully tucked away under the disguise of copyright only hurts those seeking to study the text and analyze its rhetoric.
4/22/08
turnitin.com does not violate copyright
Bottom line:
Judge declares turnitin.com does not violate copyright (The decision was last month, but eschoolnews just recently published this article).
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/news-by-subject/litigation/?i=53564;_hbguid=606186df-e5c3-438c-906b-a191add1bfe6&d=top-news
YouTube "Muting" Instead of Suspending
Writers push for laws to maintain Internet freedom
Tue Apr 22, 6:52 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Writers are pushing for legislation to guarantee the Internet's status as an open forum for communication. Partic Verrone, the president of the Writers Guild of America, West, is scheduled to appear today before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at a hearing entitled "The Future of the Internet." - Associated Press
Net neutrality is being defended again.
"Science 2.0"
Anyway, Scientific American has an article called "Science 2.0--Is Open Access Science the Future" (Printer friendly format, yay!) about collaboration on scientific discoveries using the Web 2.0 model of collaboration (e.g., Wikis).
How would this kind of thing work in the humanities? I wonder how shifts in ideology would affect such an entity in the humanities.
Via Slashdot. I mentioned the Sokal Hoax in the discussion...we'll see how that goes over.
4/21/08
Reading Response
Reading Response: Having a technical writing background, I have felt like the proverbial underdog. I truly appreciate the articles Dr. Reyman asked us to read for tonight’s class. In particular, I appreciate the Slack et al. reworking of the role of the technical communicator beyond “a purveyor of meanings…” and “a mediator of meanings…” I appreciate their push to view the role of the technical communicator as an “author who acts as articulator.”
I agree with the authors that outdated notions and analogies of technical writers as mere transmitters of packages of information and encoders telegraphing to decoders have defined the traditional technical communicator. I agree that these simplistic views limit the role and scope of the work done by the technical communicator. What I hoped for next in the article was a clear delineation of the new and improved technical communicator as authorial articulator. In a rare moment of agreement with Walter Jacobson, I, too, stumbled on the “identity train.” The analogy served to be more of a distraction than an enhancement to my understanding of the authors’ claim. I do agree that technical communicators influence the information they re-write through a Bakhtinian “articulation of voices.” I agree that technical communicators act as the author of technical text and do have an authorial power. I do not believe that they will ever attain the “status” of the traditional author. Shakespeare we ain’t.
In the last portion of the article, the authors push theoretical knowledge as being critical to the technical communication field. I think that the notion of the technical writer has changed since this article was conceived. Searching through job ads on Careerbuilder.com or Monster.com, one can see job postings for the outdated technical writer archetype as a 'robotic' cut-and-paste typist diminishing. The demand for a sophisticated communicator who can “skillfully use effective grammar, edit, media management, and so on” must also participate in “the early stages of project design”, manage the project, and act as a critical thinker is on the rise. The call for a master’s degree in many, many job postings, for me, implies that employers are searching for “technical communicators as authorial articulators.” I think that this article may have been relevant to the writing community at some point. However, it seems a little redundant now. I think the writing community has gravitated to the idea that a technical communicator does act as an author – at least as a collaborative author. I think digital media has significantly affected the job function of a technical writer. Just speculation, perhaps technology has enabled the technical author to move beyond formatting and re-typing and granted more “authorial power” and collaboration.
Anyhow, the people who ask me what I’m going to do for a living can and will continue to think of me as a “messenger.”
The MPAA is trying to get legislation passed that would pressure universities to police their own networks – something that would be unmanageable, he said.
“The MPAA has been consistently trying to get [universities’] funding changed,” he said. “For some reason, they’ve decided we are weak.”
In addition to the MPAA and the RIAA targeting individuals, ITS, on rare occasions, will disable a student’s Internet access if they see suspicious activity, Czerniak said.
“If we detect an inordinate amount of activity on a particular IP, we may go shut it down,” Czerniak said. “We then contact the student and see what’s going on. It may or may not have to do with copyright issues.”
I'm writing a letter.
/jb
Reading Response
As I was reading this week’s articles, specifically Herrington’s “Work for Hire for Nonacademic Creators,” I continually found myself trying to relate the discussions of technical communication to my limited related experience. Despite knowing that today’s authors were not writing about copy editors and newspaper columnists (my former jobs), I wanted to find ways to equate my work to their writings. Even though I don’t believe I could accurately call myself a technical communicator at any point in my history, the arguments that were made in this week’s reading, mainly that students need to be informed of their role in and knowledgeable of the applicable laws surrounding the technical communications profession, would have benefited me greatly in my former occupations.
Herrington illustrates the nonacademic applications of work-for-hire doctrine, individually showcasing each determining factor that courts use for deciding legal authorship and then relating each to the teaching of technical communication by suggesting why students should be aware of specifics of legal authorship. As I was reading her article, I was reminded of some writing I did will while employed as a copy editor for a veterinary organization.
Although my main job was to copy edit manuscripts to be published in a research journal, occasionally I was asked to write newspaper-type stories for the yearly conference newspaper. For last year’s conference, I wrote a series of ten-question trivia quizzes about Washington, D.C. Upon publication, I was quite upset to see that I was not given credit for writing the quizzes and that the quizzes had been heavily edited, something that as creative writing student, I was not used to. In school, I frequently participated in writing workshops and received much feedback and many suggestions from fellow students, but I was never told to change anything in my writing. To have my writing, even though it was a series of quizzes, edited without my knowledge and published before I was able to even see the edits, felt like a slap in the face.
As I was reading this past week and formulating ideas about technical communicators, I started to see how an understanding of this “different” authorship, as N. Nyl points out in a comment to June Cleaver’s plagiarism and PowerPoint post, would have prevented these hostile feelings I held towards my employer and would have prepared me for the workplace that I entered. What I wrote wasn’t mine, from a legal standpoint; I wrote as a representative of the organization I worked for, and as such, my writing could be edited by another representative without my knowledge, or as far as the organization was concerned, without me caring.
Many English and other majors will find themselves in jobs that they did not foresee while in school. Many of these jobs will require these students to write (or create) collaborative or technical projects for which they may or may not receive authorial credit (they will hopefully receive credit indirectly in terms of salary, bonuses, and promotions). Many, if not most, of these students, just as myself, will not have taken any technical communications courses before entering the workplace. Herrington and Reyman both call for an increased awareness by students of how their work will be used in an employment setting. But, not having foreseen their future occupations, where will these students come upon this insight into the ways of the technical communications profession? I would argue that students need to be exposed to these ideas of varying types of authorship early and repeatedly in college courses. Writing or composition classes can discuss these ideas as they apply to genre, and other classes in the students’ majors can illustrate more specific instances of how authorship applies to their discipline. By showing all students that our Western model of single authorship is not the only practicing model, we will prepare them for the corporate and collaborative author-role that they will likely encounter in their future employment.YouTube Campaigning
Is it realer online? Is there a real-feeling or authenticity or authority to the YouTube/Facebook types?
4/20/08
plagiarism
Attend any English conference and you will walk away with an armload of lesson plans, usually none of which have a “copyright” clearly emblazoned on them. In fact, teachers are encouraged to plagiarize—that is, take the plan, use it, and make any changes you like whereby it becomes yours. Personally, I have written “adapted from” at the bottom if I used someone else’s plan and changed it, but that’s certainly not a requirement (and only when I was giving the changed version to someone else). There are websites, such as the National Counsel of Teachers of English (NCTE), which have tons of viewable lessons plans complete with a “printer-friendly version” icon. No one seems worried about getting paid for the print and every lesson I’ve received from an author comes with the implicit agreement to email the author if you can improve the plan in any way. Long story short, it’s a collaboration. I think technical communication is pretty much the same because the formats are similar and people consistently work together toward the improvement of the final product. Read: “progress.” Furthermore, regarding technical communication, it seems silly to consider something as “plagiarized” just because the format is standardized. Letters, numerals, colors, tastes, are all standardized. We have to all speak the same language if we are to understand and learn from one another and/or work together.
So here I am, fighting for the right to say that these things aren’t plagiarized, but there’s a sneaking suspicion about the motivation. I realize that while I’m busy yelling to consider things “standardized” instead of “plagiarized,” the people who are making the standardization so free are actually the people who would most like to see Americans as cattle to be herded. Ah ha, that’s the long-term goal nowadays, isn’t it? For everyone to speak/think/behave alike and be good workers for big business? Why else would PowerPoint presentations be so user-friendly? So they’ve got me fighting for what they want. Amazing. Great. Now I’m even more confused.
4/16/08
Rowling and Copyright
On a personal note: as I've been working on a large Harry Potter project, I have frequently used the Harry Potter Lexicon as a reference.
4/14/08
huh.
The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.
-- Herman Melville, on the writing of fan fiction
Man "writes" 200,000 books
Related to that, one of my "followers" on Twitter posted this little blurb about automating authorship.
There is no doubt, though, the book — or at least the physical artifact we know as “book” — is in something of a crisis. Not too long ago, I heard Ken Wark, a Professor of Culture and Media at The New School’s Eugene Lang College, remark that the professor is now really a “DJ,” as books are no longer assigned to students; rather, collections of essays are gathered up in readers, or, increasingly, just pointed to on the web. What was “the book” is now a mashup. It’s significant that the academy no longer views the book as the center of learning.Are our syllabuses degenerating into patch-writing? So, all you teachers are to blame!
What would happen if your students wrote a program to write their papers?
I don't even want to bring up copyright.
An Example of What I'm Talking About
"It was the queer fate of the men who fought over the great question of Union that this most desperate and spectacular of all their battles should not be entirely comprehensible until after all of the dead had been buried, the wounded tended, the field itself made into a park, and the armies gone far below the horizon, fighting other battles in other places. Then the President would come and speak a few sentences, and the deep meaning of the fight would at last begin to clear. Then the perplexing mists and shadows would fade and Gettysburg would reveal itself as a great height from which men could glimpse a vista extending far into the undiscovered future."
All he's really saying here is that Gettysburg would come to symbolize the entire war for many, that it changed everything, that it was, to put it in the terms we all got from our sixth-grade history teachers, the turning-point of the war. Of course he's also saying much more than that -- that the battle would come to be seen as the defining event of the war, just as the war itself was the defining event of nineteenth-century American history. In both cases, nothing could ever be the same again.
Now, I have actually assigned chapters from Catton's book in first-year composition classes (including the chapter on Gettysburg), and what I'm most struck by is the extent to which virtually ALL of my students recognize this as great writing, and, in fact, a clear example of great autonomous authorship. They get that WHAT he's saying isn't particularly new (nor was in 1955 when the book was first published), but that HOW he says it is uniquely his. The individual expression of common ideas here is what matters to them. They also get that "patchwriting" something out of this passage would not somehow make it less Catton's or more theirs.
Seems to me they have a clearer understanding of authorship than Howard and her cohorts are willing to admit.
Authorship: Not so hard to grasp, really
An awareness of intertextuality is not the same thing as authorship. Film is an inherently intertextual medium, and individual films are constructed through the collaboration of writers, actors, photographers, designers, editors, composers, and technicians. We recognize the screenwriter as the author of the screenplay, the composer as the author of the score, the actor as the author of the performance, and the director as the author of the film.
Frankly, I (and, I would submit, most of us) don't find the concept of authorship nearly as problematic as some of our theorists would like. I fail to see how the idea that our conception of authorship is comparatively recent changes anything -- it is still OUR conception. Besides which, I would also like to suggest for the record that, while the concepts of originality, individualism, and spontaneity ARE relatively recent additions to our notions of authorship, the concept of individual or autonomous authorship has been with us for just about as long as human expression itself. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides are all unproblematically recognized by Aristotle as the autonomous authors of their respective works -- interesting considering that Homer's epics were most probably composed orally as part of a long oral tradition and Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were all playwrights who wrote for performance, to say nothing of the fact that every single one of them was dealing with well-known stories that were ancient even to them (all four of them, for example, dealt with the events and characters of the Trojan War).
And it's this very fact that gets at the heart of how unproblematic authorship really is: nobody in fifth-century Athens cared about the STORY, which was recognized as public property; what mattered to them was the individual expression or treatment of the story. Believe me, Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Electra are very different plays, though they deal with exactly the same characters and exactly the same events. What makes them different is the autonomous author who gave individual expression to the story.
My point? No one is suggesting that writing or authorship happens in a vacuum -- obviously writers are all influenced by other writers and creators (which is not the same thing as collaboration). But if we do not teach our students that there is a difference between giving original expression to commonly held facts and ideas (whatever the source of those ideas might be) and claiming someone else's expression of those ideas as your own, we are not only setting them up to fail, we are also quite simply refusing to do the jobs those very students trust us to do.
4/12/08
Howard and Turnitin
A thought.
Copyright Info for Middle Schoolers
I guess by the time these middle schoolers reach college, they would not be plagiarists or patchwriters for that matter.
http://www.waunakee.k12.wi.us/midlschl/msb/copyright.htm
Parody vs. Plagiarism
Those who use copyrighted material to poke fun at others and draw attention to negative publicity do not need permission to use the material and are not in danger of the "copyright police." In contrast, those who use copyrighted material to edify others and create derivative works that are shared freely with society may find themselves in legal battles surrounding copyright laws if they did not get permission or pay for the right to use the material.
Have I missed something? If so, please help me understand.
If what I said above is essentially right, then isn't something terribly wrong?
Fanning "Napster" VW Commercial
Net Neutrality
For those of you who are interested on how others are trying to stimulate public will around Internet-related issues...
"Support Net Neutrality: Say 'No' to Corporate Control "
When I saw this bumper sticker, I was intrigued to see what issue fueled (excuse the pun) the vehicular picket sign. My Google search led me to "Save the Internet," a site built by a coalition focusing on how corporations use the Internet to control access to information. The coalition warns:
...Corporate control of the Web would reduce your choices and stifle the spread of innovative and independent ideas that we've come to expect online. It would throw the digital revolution into reverse. Internet gatekeepers are already discriminating against Web sites and services they don't like:
- In October 2007, the Associated Press busted Comcast for blocking its users' access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like BitTorrent and Gnutella. This fraudulent practice is a glaring violation of Net Neutrality.
- In September 2007, Verizon was caught banning pro-choice text messages. After a New York Times expose, the phone company reversed its policy, claiming it was a glitch.
I find it interesting that the site is using the anti-corporate rhetoric we've come to know and love, but also that they are trying to create a framework using one of Boyle's requirements: finding a common interest which cuts across traditional oppositions. On the homepage, they invite readers to "learn more about an issue that unites the Christian Coalition, Teamsters, PETA, video gamers, the ACLU, Gun Owners of America and many more."
DeVoss and Porter
By hindering the free transference of information between academics, DeVoss and Porter fear that the creativity of the academic community will be stifled by less exposure to new ideas and thoughts. The reality that these authors see is the opposite of the more utopian ideas of Lessig. For Lessig, in an ideal situation, all culture would freely available to whomever was interested. This idea encourages an understanding of piracy as productive and innovative, yielding more positive things for society than negatively taking away from them.
Ultimately, DeVoss and Porter are calling for an altered understanding of the relationship from writing an object to publishing. In the post Napster era, the publication process takes on new levels of meaning and begins to resemble something more free form and constantly evolving. This contradicts current academic models of publication, but speaks to technological advancements that allow for more up to date information. As a result of this changing model, DeVoss and Porter call for a change in the understanding and teaching of plagiarism in the writing classroom. Rather than merely discouraging the act, the authors encourage teachers to instruct their students to think of their own writing as something that is inherently formed by their experiences and exposure to other writing, music, video etc... Rather than understanding that borrowing from any other source and working it into their own object is plagiarism, students should be encouraged to understand their place in the academic world, and appreciate that all writing is influenced by something else, including famous pieces of written works or culture.
DeVoss and Porter – Meet the New Boss (same as the old boss?)
Of course, my title comes from a song lyric; have I used it fairly? Am I required to provide a citation, footnote, or other acknowledgment? To whom, Pete Townsend, Roger Daltry, the Who?
Since most of the first half to two-thirds of the essay reads as a summary of Logie and Lessig (with a few points added in), I will address only two claims in the concluding sections. Generally, DeVoss and Porter (as does Howard to a degree) enlarge upon the classical models of learning and classical attitudes toward plagiarism to support the insistence that the concept of single authorship is a more contemporary creation (see footnote 30, 197). Well, so is mass literacy and general education. In Classical Greece and
Cherry-picking from a culture because it fits a particular view one has is much like quoting out-of-context (of course for those advocating patchwriting that probably wouldn’t be a problem). It would in fact be similar to citing Marx as an expert on human nature because he understood economics – at least in part he did. He seemed to be wildly off the mark in his predictions for capitalism and the glorious workers’ revolution. Perhaps the Greek and Roman models worked well for them because they met the needs of fewer than twenty-thousand, when in all likelihood one couldn’t get away with plagiarism anyway because most of the audience knew the sources. One could argue in fact, that this “truth” might have applied to most of
My other issue with DeVoss and Porter applies not only to them specifically but to postmodern theory generally. DeVoss and Porter exclaim: “As we see it, the purpose of writing is not to reward the author, or for the author to gain prestige, credit, wealth, and fame” (200, their italics). Hmmm. There’s carrion we should nose here somewhere. When asked by Socrates’ biographer why the humble collaborators did not themselves publish in the online communities they advocate, DeVoss and Porter demurred: “We don’t always necessarily want money from our work. . . . Most of us do want: (1) wide distribution and recognition of our work, and (2) credit for our work (whether in the form of dollars, prestige, appreciation, reciprocity)” (196, footnote 28, my italics). How does one square these views? The above constitutes the problem for postmodern theory: the expressed purposes and pronouncements are at odds with the practices of the theorists. What is the Greek word for hypocrite?
4/11/08
4/10/08
Part III, Collaborators: A Funny Thing Happened in the Forum (Part II)
I will state it categorically at this point: Foucault is an ass who has done irreparable damage to our discipline. The misapplication of his nonsensical “theories” has led to too many attempts such as Howard’s to excuse academic laziness and mediocrity. But don’t let me try to persuade you; here’s a snippet from Richard Dawkins’ ”Postmodernism Disrobed”:
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.
I recommend reading the remainder of the essay; it is hilarious, and you will come across some familiar names. Rather than relying solely on scientists, however, try the following from Joe Carroll’s Literary Darwinism:
By eliminating truth, poststructuralism yields epistemological and ontological primacy to rhetoric or "discourse," and it simultaneously delegitimizes all traditional norms. Since poststructuralism treats all norms as arbitrary, it has a convenient application within the field of radical political ideology. (16)
Theorists do not need to be abstruse and evasive, unless what they theorize lacks coherence or even common sense. We do not need to be ashamed for having once believed in an Oedipal complex, but we should be ashamed for believing it today or peddling variations of it (some feminist and Lacanian theories) when a whole body of scientific and social scientific evidence has soundly refuted Freud’s pseudo-psychology. Howard’s problem here is that she has tried to create a problem that only exists if one accepts postmodern premises that ignore scientific evidence to the contrary. Humans are social creatures; we are moral. We tend to expose cheaters because we have been designed (randomly by natural selection) to expose cheaters. Plagiarism is indeed a cultural phenomenon, but it is also a moral one. We were not designed specifically to address plagiarism; we were, however, designed to address instances of moral transgression. Plagiarism maps onto that moral algorithm quite nicely.
Part III, Collaborators: A Funny Thing Happened in the Forum (Part I)
In a nod to the turbulent period at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries – or the birth of modernism – Howard marshals all her metaphors and allusions to attempt to spin her “mess” (flap): mechanized plagiarism in the twenty-first century and the postmodern attempt to free authorship from cultural arbitrariness (all the while making it even more arbitrary as they go along) becomes a power struggle between the old guard (regime) of “originary” and “proprietary” authorship and the liberators of academic cheats (my interpretation) (131). Foucault’s panopticon might indeed be an accurate description of the way prison systems use surveillance to minimize the number of guards necessary to guard prisoners, or the way totalitarian states turn individuals into a fearful watching herd, but it hardly equates to plagiarism-detecting software surveilling student papers; software, in fact, that in many cases only works if students are willing to submit their papers. Now if Howard wanted to analogize the NSA’s current data-mining of all our internet activities (or Orwell’s telescreen and thought police monitoring the citizens of Oceania), then she might have a case. But such silliness only undermines her claim.
Because I would have exceeded five hundred words, and your patience, I have added a second post, which represents a broader response.
4/9/08
The Solitary Author
Dogpoet writes the above paragraph in response to an article that claims that Web 2.0 will change authorship as we know it. New technologies allow readers to respond to author's works-in-progress. Dogpoet (hereafter, DP) sees this as a major loss. What I find especially interesting though, and I have posted this on DP's blog, is this idea of the solitary author, writing alone and uninfluenced by others.
This notion, though romantic wasn't ever really a reality. We can see this in many circumstances. First, most books aren't actually written by just one person. Editors step in at many stages in today's publication process. Similarly, writers' workshops offer writers instant feedback from up to twenty readers. And even asking a friend for her thoughts risks altering that "one voice" of the author.
On a deeper level though, we can see that the author has never really been alone. This blog post on plagiarism clearly points out the intertextual influences, known or unknown, that each writer is subject to. Bakhtin also calls attention to this interplay of ideas of words when he writes, "our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others' words" ("The Problem of Speech Genres" 89). Similarly, in "The Death of the Author," Barthes argues, "a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author."
And, the more I read Rebecca Moore Howard's Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators, the more I'm coming to understand that this (incorrect) notion of the original author, uninfluenced by those around him, is unique to our time and culture.
What does all this mean? As writers (and scholars) it means that we need to acknowledge the influence of others' words on our thoughts, actions, and words. We need to be aware that our culture, even our culture before the web, holds our hand as we write, constantly directly and reshaping that work-in-progress. If we accept this, we can embrace the true potential of the cacophony of voices in our lives and blend them to a unified, unique whole.
Howard Blog Redux
- Genre and situation matter: Turnitin "quantifies and universalizes writers' use of sources, rather than acknowledging that the acceptability of source use is governed by local conditions such as the assignment, the student's grade level, and the syllabus for the course"
- Better ways to avoid plagiarism exist than fascist policing: "There are much better ways of teaching writing pedagogy than using PDSs in general, and Turnitin.com in particular. These better ways include (a) sequenced assignments, so that students are mentored through the process of producing major papers; (b) the use of common sources to begin a writing project, so that the class can work together through the problems of source use, and then each student can branch out into his or her own research; (c) instruction in critical information literacy, so that students locate compelling, pertinent sources rather than basic documents produced immediately in a quick Google search" (and she gives plenty more too)
- "The use of [Turnitin and similar programs] casts instructors and students as adversaries and describes writing and reading as mechanical procedures of extracting and citing information"
I just find her conflation (variously) of what I would separate into plagiarism, patchwriting, and mimesis (not that I would stop there in my methodology) confusing. What is okay? What is not okay? What is natural?
4/8/08
Open Source Licenses
- The short answer is I didn't think so, but some people are more into the open source thing than others. I am not a lawyer.
- The slightly longer short answer is: "No" for most programs that use the GPL (the most common) license. Here is a direct answer from the Free Software Foundation, regarding their GPL license. Here's a documentation license from the same group, since we're not programmers.
- The long answer is: here is a short list of licenses that can be used. Remember, these are primarily related to code.
Anyway...
Back to Page 11 - My last 2 pennies
And another thing. While hotly debating plagiarism last night, it seemed that there were many distinct opinions floating around addressing what Howard was believed to be advocating rather than what Howard has observed. While listening to the debate about page 11, I noticed that students who write poorly were slammed. I think that there is this elitist attitude toward students who struggle with writing. I know I've been guilty of it. It isn't just students, classmates, etc. I have found in my professional life that I have acquired a certain snobbery, because I may know how to more clearly articulate (as someone mentioned last night) what I think than someone else.
What I'm trying to say (not very clearly articulated) is that I want to constructively discuss what drives students to patchwrite rather than to toss out negative, shmarmy labels, judgements or assumptions about why students engage in this activity. As Howard states on page 23, "Understanding the excluded plagiarist and his or her moral beliefs takes a prominent place in the scholarship of plagiarism. Like the scientific model of anthropology that is now in eclipse, this approach to plagiarsm sets up a textual "Us" and "Them," in which the civilized, researching "Us" endeavors to understand the native, pagan "Them."" I think our discussion last night was leaning toward the us/them model. Please add your pennies to this posting.
4/7/08
plagiarism, American style...
"The key to avoiding plagiarism is to make sure you give credit where it is due. This may be credit for something somebody said, wrote, emailed, drew, or implied. Many professional organizations, including the Modern Language Association and the American Psychological Association, have lengthy guidelines for citing sources. However, students are often so busy trying to learn the rules of MLA format and style or APA format and style that they sometimes forget exactly what needs to be credited. Here, then, is a brief list of what needs to be credited or documented:
· Words or ideas presented in a magazine, book, newspaper, song, TV program, movie, Web page, computer program, letter, advertisement, or any other medium
· Information you gain through interviewing or conversing with another person, face to face, over the phone, or in writing
· When you copy the exact words or a unique phrase
· When you reprint any diagrams, illustrations, charts, pictures, or other visual materials
· When you reuse or repost any electronically-available media, including images, audio, video, or other media
Bottom line, document any words, ideas, or other productions that originate somewhere outside of you."
Government act on File Sharing
4/6/08
Malvolio Reading Response
My thoughts about Howard’s book are a little helter-skelter at the moment. I’ve been struggling all weekend with how to approach my response, where to focus, what to address. My sense of it is that I’m juggling two primary reactions: on the one hand an awareness that I should be open-minded and willing to entertain radical ideas, however uncomfortable or angry they make me, and on the other hand an instinctive rejection of most of the basic principles on which her theory is based. The problem is that I’ve learned to trust my instincts; I’ve been an artist and an educator long enough to have a sense of when I’m being bamboozled.
And of course I realize that in rejecting pretty much everything Howard has to say I am falling into the cunning little trap she has set for me and other writers and teachers like me. So I may as well get this out of the way now: part of the calculated effect of Howard’s book is to position anyone who disagrees with her as backward, unenlightened, and an enemy to progressive composition theory (she has, elsewhere, called herself a “martyr”—a deeply disturbing characterization—and her opponents “jerks” [see her paper “Public Intellectual, or Public Object? Mass Media Representations of Plagiarism Scholarship” at http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Papers/CCCC2003.caucus.htm]). Walter Jacobson has, not surprisingly, already articulated a response that echoes my own, but let’s see if I can articulate why I think Howard’s attempt to reconsider writing and composition pedagogy within a context informed by the open-source or remix culture of the Internet is both false and dangerous. For while it’s clear that her zeal for radical revision of our understandings of such concepts as mimesis, collaboration, authorship, and plagiarism comes from an honest desire to improve the teaching of composition and promote genuine learning, it’s also clear to me that this right idea has led her very far astray.
Howard seeks to confound utterly our understanding of such common—and commonly understood—concepts as authorship, text, collaboration, and plagiarism. This, she tells us, is born out of a personal teaching experience that led her to question her own definitions of all these concepts, and especially plagiarism. And she found her answers in postmodern literary theory, specifically the works of Foucault and Barthes. The first part of the book is devoted to laying out the various problems in defining plagiarism; here Howard is largely focused on the idea of what she calls patchwriting: “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one synonym for another” (xvii). The entire book is, in some sense, an explication of her belief that this particular practice is not only common among students but, in fact, the way all writers always compose; thus the very notion of plagiarism requires some radical reconsideration. Her concern with the criminalization of patchwriting particularly is connected to what she describes as a tension between dichotomous pedagogical models she refers to as “gatekeeping” and “facilitating”—the gatekeepers being invested in weeding out those deemed unworthy of admission into the sacred halls of academe, the facilitators being those more interested in helping all students succeed. At the very least Howard is advocating that patchwriting specifically be “decriminalized” so that we begin to recognize the practice as a kind of learning in which students engage and actively collaborate with the texts in question.
It all comes across as very bold and revolutionary, but the problem with this deliberately carnivalesque approach to composition is its very insistence on its own radical nature. Howard is clearly aware that her revisions—indeed, reversals—of previously received concepts of authorship and pedagogical technique are going to be discomfiting on some level to many of us, but she insists that those reversals are legitimate because they reflect the ways writers—both student and professional—actually compose. I would like to suggest instead that the reason they make so many of us so uncomfortable (if not downright angry) is our sense that they seem so radical and opposed to our actual methods of constructing texts because, in fact, they are. She asserts repeatedly that “all writing is collaborative” (41) and that “[patchwriting] is something that all academic writers do” (xviii), but she is unable to marshall any actual evidence to support these assertions. And I’m fairly certain that that’s because there can be no evidence to support such wild claims—short of surveying “all academic writers” or reading “all writing.” She even admits that she has so far failed to convince her own students. And though she places the blame for this failure squarely on the deeply entrenched cultural paradigms against which she so assiduously works, I think it’s far more likely that her students don’t accept it because it just ain’t so.
The major problem that I have with Howard’s book is not her clearly poststructuralist attitude toward authorship or her (to me) deeply troubling notions of plagiarism—she is certainly entitled to her own point of view. No, what most concerns me is that, by insisting that patchwriting is not only our default compositional method but one that should be actively encouraged in students, what she advocates and perpetuates is, more usually, just bad writing (context is of course important; as many here have pointed out, patchwriting can be perfectly appropriate in certain professional circumstances, though I contend that the composition classroom is not necessarily one of them). Even if the average student will instinctively patchwrite when asked to integrate sources into her writing, my sense of it is that it has very little to do with creative engagement with the text and a whole lot to do with simplicity and convenience. The best of my students have no trouble recognizing that patchwriting is at least bad writing, and at most not writing at all. I don’t mean to be cynical, but at the college level, how many of our students who patchwrite do so because it affords them a fast and simple way of getting through what they see as an unpleasant chore? And yes, it is absolutely a failure of pedagogy when our students think of their writing as something unpleasant to be avoided. But I would suggest that instead of enabling bad writing habits we should try to find genuine ways to get them to engage not only with the texts to which they respond (or, if you prefer, with which they collaborate), but also with the texts they produce as independent, autonomous authors. Denying that there is such a thing as authorship strikes me as counterproductive. And insisting that all learning is constructed by the learner only accelerates our already rapid decline into irrelevance.
Internet culture—remix culture, open-source culture, whatever we want to call it—has almost certainly helped foster the perception among some students that patchwriting is an acceptable way of engaging with texts. But it seems specious to me to suggest that because a method is valid in one context it is also valid in others. The concept of collaboration is certainly useful, but Howard’s appropriation of it (as well as her use of the related concept of mimesis) is highly problematic. For any theater artist—to use my own discipline as an example—collaboration implies reciprocity. Directors, actors, designers, playwrights, even audiences, all collaborate in two ways: by working with texts and by working with each other to create works of theatrical art. There is a silent agreement that exists between playwrights and their interpreters: the playwright writes specifically so that other artists can interpret her work. In other words, no matter how dictatorial a particular playwright might be (consider, for instance, George Bernard Shaw or Samuel Beckett), it is understood that the interpreters who will be responsible for performing the text are not the enemy but actual collaborators—Julius Caesar has been staged literally countless times since it first appeared in 1599, and each of those stagings represents a collaboration with the text and with Shakespeare and his collaborators (the performers and printers). Similarly, every published edition—publication being a kind of performance—is also a collaboration between an editor and the text. The idea of collaboration is thus written into the text. It is a fundamental aspect of the very act of playwrighting, of creating dramatic texts that are meant to be performed and interpreted by other artists.
But Howard isn’t speaking of theatrical collaboration. Nor, unlike Aristotle, is she speaking of theatrical mimesis. She is in effect applying concepts that were born in the theater (and, in the case of collaboration, other arts) to the composition classroom—an irony, it may be argued, since she seems to me to be in the process of denying some of the very qualities that make writing a fine art as well as a craft.
At this point I feel the need to return to a question I seem to remember articulating earlier in the semester: what is it that so offends (some of) us about the idea of what Howard continually refers to as the “autonomous author”? She continually insists that such a concept—the concept against which Barthes and Foucault also labor—does not reflect the actual ways all writers actually write. Yet the autonomous author has been with us since Homer, and most of us who write have no problem with the concept until someone like Foucault—or Howard—suggests that it is problematic. My opinions of the so-called “theories” of Foucault and Barthes are well-recorded so I won’t rehearse them here. It is enough to say that any theory of authorship or composition that relies on either of them has serious credibility issues for someone like me.
4/5/08
Professional Patchwriting Pays
Reading Response - Howard
One of the key quotes from the second part of Standing in the Shadow of Giants is "the autonomous, originary author derives from economic and technological change and participates in maintaining hierarchical social relations that are potentially threatened by those changes” (57). It is this idea of authorship that makes patchwriting seem negative or criminal and prohibits "a positive pedagogy for patchwriting." She goes on to describe how this idea of authorship is, in fact, new and cites some of the reading we did earlier in the semester on authorship. Howard also gives us "four properties" of authorship: "autonomy, originality, proprietorship, and morality" (58).
Morality, of course, refers to our need to trust the author has created his own text and not stolen anyone else's work. Proprietorship is the heart of copyright law--it is the basis for intellectual property: that the author owns that idea or work as much as she might own a plot of land. To own that work, however, it must be original. Originality is probably the most debatable among the four properties Howard gives us. The definition or intent is obvious, but determining to what level a work must be original is difficult to do. Howard summarizes autonomy as the idea that "the writer, from the Cartesian point of view, can act autonomously to apprehend and express ideas that are unmediated by social discourse" (80). We've seen the implications of these properties of modern authorship throughout the course in the rhetoric of copyright infringement cases and the arguments by the RIAA and the MPAA, the chief proprietors.
There are problems with plagiarism and how it is regulated and defined in the classroom. Howard talks about how on exams students are expected to (and rewarded for) answer questions based on ideas taught in class that, in terms of proprietorship belong to a different authors, without actually citing them. Even the guidelines used to define plagiarism vary from institution to institution and are considered "a local affair" (21). In many cases, plagiarism is unintentional. In these cases, Howard advocates "[teaching] citation conventions" (110). Intentional plagiarism should be punished. But, as Howard says, in patchwriting, intentional plagiarism is not always the case. Sometimes it is used by writers to help them better "understand what they are reading" and in this case can be used as "a positive learning strategy" (110, 111).