4 ms·

This guy is a professor I would have loved to have for one of my English classes. His positive attitude and willingness to adapt and work hard for his students

by pak 15y ago

This guy is a professor I would have loved to have for one of my English classes. His positive attitude and willingness to adapt and work hard for his students is just remarkable and rarely seen in a college classroom. By the way, this is a great solution to the much-discussed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254) problem of effectively dealing with plagiarism: imagine if it were expected, as part of your class, that you engaged your professor via email while writing assignments. There would be no way to plagiarize, because the professor would have direct insight into each part of your writing process as he saw bits of your essay fall into place. Imagine all the students that could be guided to correctly cite and re-use sources if their professor had just headed it off at the pass instead of running it through TurnItIn and groaning at the fallout. I couldn't agree more with the benefits of this dynamic, more interactive teaching method for writing. It also makes me wonder if he would be interested in having students share their works-in-progress via Google Docs--he would be able to essentially peer over their shoulder as they type and comment. Or would that be going too far?

timwiseman 15y ago
There would be no way to plagiarize, because the professor would have direct insight into each part of your writing process as he saw bits of your essay fall into place. I fear you give too much credit in that respect. This does not mean you could not lift passages out to integrate with your work without a professor being any wiser. It might make copying a complete text a little harder, but even there it wouldn't be hard to integrate some deliberate errors, let him catch and then revise. Finally, it would do nothing at all to stop you from hiring someone else to write it for you as long as you could either pay that other person to participate in the e-mail feedback or you were willing to do the revisions yourself.

by pak 15y ago

timwiseman 15y ago

There would be no way to plagiarize, because the professor would have direct insight into each part of your writing process as he saw bits of your essay fall into place. I fear you give too much credit in that respect. This does not mean you could not lift passages out to integrate with your work without a professor being any wiser. It might make copying a complete text a little harder, but even there it wouldn't be hard to integrate some deliberate errors, let him catch and then revise. Finally, it would do nothing at all to stop you from hiring someone else to write it for you as long as you could either pay that other person to participate in the e-mail feedback or you were willing to do the revisions yourself.