The semester is over. Some thoughts...

• Turnitin.com definitely was the winner over Blackboard's built-in system in terms of being the most helpful plagiarism tool. I turned off the option that checks student papers against other student papers in Turnitin's database, so the program was NOT making a copy of student papers, so the privacy issue was solved. As a tool, Turnitin did a pretty good job of spotting when students used outside source material. It might not have caught all of the direct quotations in a student paper, but it did catch most. Often, it would catch "paraphrases" that were more like direct quotations, and the student could then use this material to re-write the paraphrase before submitting the final draft for grading.
  
• I made two film changes in my Masterpieces of the Cinema class. I removed Jules and Jim and Lost in La Mancha. I was sad to see Lost in La Mancha go because it was our one documentary of the semester, and it did a great job of demonstrating how collaborative film is as an art. However, it really is not on the level of a "Masterpiece" so I decided to remove it. I replaced these films with The Night of the Hunter and Bicycle Thieves. Both films proved very popular with students.
• We covered a lot of poems in the first online version of Introduction to Poetry, and for the first time, I made heavy use of podcasts to supplement the learning modules. We might have tried to cover too many poems, however, and I think the discussion posts suffered as a result. I'll be modifying the syllabus significantly and changing the way students do the postings in class. I might also experiment with CommentPress.
  

Since I was having such miserable results with SafeAssign, I finally posted a question to one of our college's listserves about the status of Turnitin. Within a day, Turnitin was again offered as a content link within Blackboard - yeah! Now we have a choice -- go with Turnitin, which has a wonderful database collection so that my students can check the status of their quotations and paraphrases, or go with SafeAssign, which has a miserable database and fails to come up with any matches. Now, if students could just elect to have their paper matched against other Internet and electronic database sources instead of also having their paper copied into Turnitin's own database, we'd have the whole intellectual property situation solved and more students and teachers could use the product without feeling that rights are being violated. For me, the benefits of Turnitin -- for both teacher and student -- still outweigh the potential intellectual property rights issue; it will be nice to see what finally happens with the lawsuits so we can move on.

Our English department is undergoing Program Review right now, and I'm the chair of this "enjoyable" activity. Anyway, our committee has been going over the program review questions and deciding how to present the material to the rest of the faculty. One of the questions has to do with goals for the next three to five years. I wonder what the department would say if one goal would be to have all on-campus composition classes offered only in computer classrooms. If we believe that computers assist students in the writing process, then are we doing about 50% of our students disservice by not giving them the opportunity to take a writing class in a computer classroom? I'd be interested to know how many colleges in the country ONLY offer writing classes in computer classes now. I'm sure there are faculty who have never taught in the computer classroom who might have cow at the thought of teaching all future classes in such an environment.

Well, after a day or so, the SafeAssign feature of Blackboard suddenly came to life and began providing reports on student papers. The results, however, left something to be desired when compared with Turnitin.com. Here's the main use for me as I see these "plagiarism detection" tools: I simply want students to be able to look at their reports and see any matches that might have been made to the sources that they're using in their papers. If the match is exact, the student needs to make sure that he or she was quoting. If the student was "paraphrasing" that information and it was a match, then some revision is clearly needed with that "paraphrase." Also, if a paper comes up with a ton of matches to different sources, that may also signal to students that they're using way too much info from outside sources in their paper. So, I see SafeAssign as more of a teaching tool like grammar check than something to catch cheaters. But how good is the product when about 75% of the papers in my Comp 1 class came back with 0% matches even though the papers contained quotations and paraphrases from electronic sources? My conclusion: SafeAssign has a very limited database selection in comparison with Turnitin.com.

More Blackboard problems... All the debate and worry about Turnitin.com last year, seems to be moot now that Blackboard has added its own plagiarism detection tool - SafeAssign. Like Turnitin.com SafeAssign compares student papers against a multitude of databases, but unlike Turnitin, SafeAssign doesn't keep student papers for its own database. That means it's not exactly sufficient in terms of catching students copying other student papers at JCCC from semester to semester, but that's a sacrifice people arguing for intellectual property rights seem able to make. I really don't care which one we use, but it would be nice to have at least one working. Turnitin.com is no longer available as an add-on yet in our new version of Blackboard (even though I think we have a 1-year contract), so I moved on to SafeAssign. However, though SafeAssign is happy to take student papers, the program is not yet providing reports for students or faculty.

I really like to use these plagiarism software tools as teaching tools, so I encourage students to check their "originality reports" to see how accurately they're quoting and paraphrasing. Last semester, students in my classes using Turnitin.com found the matches to be of help and many revised their papers based on the number of matches - e.g. students didn't know how much they were "overquoting" until they say all the matches. So, I look forward to doing the same thing with SafeAssign, but rather than providing students and me with a report that looks like this, I instead am just getting another copy of the student paper. Thanks AGAIN Blackboard for promising something without delivery! Way to go Blackboard!

JCCC has once again uploaded a new version of Blackboard (ver,. 6.2) that's supposed to solve the numerous bugs with the current system, but as always seems to be the case, old problems are replaced with new ones. Here's the most irritating one for me. The calendar no longer works when you enter new entries. When you click on a day, and enter your stuff, the date changes to the current day. So as a workaround, you manually have to change the date before posting the new entry. What a time waster! I could go on, but this page from the Ed Tech Ctr at JCCC does a great job of listing all the new bugs: http://ce-annotations.blogspot.com/

You know, I really used to like WebCT, but since Blackboard took it over, the software has created numerous problems, which is kind of a big deal since I've become reliant on CMS for all of my classes. Another example of how mergers that are great for the companies and the CEOs are awful for the consumers...

On a bright note, JCCC purchased a site license for SoftChalk, so I'm converting all my boring web pages into colorful templates with that software. It's really easy to copy and paste pages created using FrontPage into SoftChalk. Uploading to Blackboard is swift and easy. My one complaint: It doesn't let me look at the HTML code to change some problems (font size, formatting, etc.) quickly as does FrontPage.

The League for Innovation has a series of online modules for the community college teacher. Much of the stuff is pretty basic (e.g. tips for learning your students' names), but it is well outlined so you can easily access specific modules of most interest to you. They have some information on teaching online classes, but it makes up only a very sm:all section of a larger module on using technology with your classes. I do want to list some of the technology resources here though because they do contain more information than what's present in the module:

• Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever
• Educause
• Instructional Technology Council