I’m in New York, where the 2007 meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication got underway today. I’d meant to finish up Cadet Casey’s story before the conference started, but time got away from me, so I’ll see if I can make the time to do so tomorrow before serious conference-blogging gets underway.

The Intellectual Property caucus was engaging and productive. From what I understand, a lot of what went on will be summarized at the CCCCIP site in days to come, and it’s late with an early day for me tomorrow, so I’ll be brief in my notes here. Karen Lunsford started the meeting, and while she made a number of important points and exhortations, what I found most interesting was her description of the University of Kansas’s March 10, 2005 University Council resolution, which declared the importance of access to scholarly information and called on all faculty members to ask publishers for permission “to permit the deposition of a digital copy of every article accepted by a peer-reviewed journal into [an open access] repository.” According to other people at the meeting, the University of California system is working toward a similar initiative. Such a move would have profound implications for scholars and the circulation of knowledge, and one can only hope more institutions follow suit. Charlie Lowe followed Karen, talking some about Creative Commons and the IP Caucus Open Source Software resolution, encouraging schools and faculty to explore the possibilities offered by OSS in their work and their students’ work. John Logie then spoke for a while about the relationship between the CCCC IP Committee and the CCCC IP Caucus: the caucus is essentially a task force, he said, while the committee has “administrative teeth.” While the Committee is the formal arm, he suggested, the Caucus is more of a grassroots space where radical, powerful ideas take shape. He talked about the annual “Top IP Stories” he’s working on, where people discuss the most important news stories involving intellectual property in the past year, such as the 2006 US Appeals Court decision in Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley wherein the Court ruled that the remixed re-publication of Grateful Dead concert posters qualified as fair use under Section 107 of U.S. copyright law.

After Logie spoke, the caucus broke into work groups. I was in a group dedicated to unpacking IP issues in the classroom: as Carol Havilland put it, we as composition scholars have a habit of engaging intellectual property concerns in complex conceptual ways, but then turn around and teach our students simple rules without helping them explore the rationales behind them. We wound up talking about what it would look like to teach an “ethics of citation” and what such an ethics would do and how it would work. Brian Ballentine was the one taking notes, and I’m sure he’ll recap the session with more grace and facility than mine at ccccip.org. Our small group session closed with Havilland offering an interesting proposal: it might be useful, she suggested, to look for cases to share with our colleagues where the rules we express to our students come into conflict with other rules, with institutional principles, or with what we see as ethical behavior.

Enough for tonight. Tomorrow, I present, and I’ll be attending more than a few sessions and meetings — I’ll see how well my note-taking holds up.

Update: Bradley’s blogged it, as well.

No matter what my job as a scholar and pedagogue employed by the federal government might mean legally speaking, for my writing here at Vitia, it’s high time I performed/acknowledged/declared this rhetorical release, given what I believe about the uses of openness and (f)re(e)mix culture:

All original material posted hereafter, aside from comments owned by their respective commenters, is hereby released into the public domain.

Given that I’ve published here early versions of things that have made it into Pedagogy and JAC, I know that writing such a statement of release may in the future give me difficulties. And, well, that’s kind of a big part of the intent, dear reader: to let it go, and in so doing, to open it up to complication.

The ongoing debate surrounding TurnItIn and other plagiarism detection services (PDSs) has taken some interesting turns. Sharon Gerald has smart insights and suggestions about how teachers might deploy such services in their classrooms, to which I can only say: go, read, now. But I’m particularly interested when Clancy suggests that “the anti-PDS arguments… don’t address the underlying principles enough,” and I agree with her that we need to talk about those underlying principles more — but those principles are also why I disagree with the way she casts the debate. So, to sort this out (and I’m sure she’ll correct me if I’m misrepresenting her position), for Clancy the foundational question seems to be: if plagiarism must be detected in order to prevent it, how do we construct the work of the composition course in order to facilitate that detection and prevention?

In Clancy’s words, “What exactly do you do at the moment of encounter with that paper that you’re 99.9% sure is plagiarized?” According to Clancy, in the past, such certainty came from the “intuition” of professors. First point of disagreement: it’s not “intuition” at all; it’s the instructor’s familiarity with previous drafts and strong engagement with the students’ style, which — in my experience — develops very early in the FYC semester. In other words, what Clancy calls “intuition” is a product of the way the contemporary composition course is constructed (or, OK, at least my composition course). So in that sense, the moment of detection has already happened, by virtue of the way we teach. It sounds to me like Clancy’s actually asking for verification, for which she offers five methods, four of which I use: Googling, talking to the student, requiring a paper trail, and requiring multiple drafts. (I agree that the ethics interview and “originality report” are obnoxiously didactic and sanctimonious.) Clancy says talking to the student can make the student angry, to which I’d reply: not necessarily, especially if you say to the student something like, “I notice your style and tone changed markedly in this paper. Can you tell me about your writerly decisions regarding audience? What sources and positions are you drawing from here?”

More confusing to me is Clancy’s assertion that asking students to show their “paper trails” — their notes as well as their drafts — fosters an attitude that students are guilty until proven innocent. I don’t see how this can be so: making those trails visible and helping students to see that essays don’t spring fully formed from the foreheads of their authors is, for me, part of the processual work of the composition classroom. But then I see what Clancy’s saying: she’s assuming that showing the paper trail is done in service of plagiarism detection. It’s a similar case with Clancy’s assertion about submitting multiple drafts and “sources to compare the drafts to” in order to detect plagiarism: if one understands, rather, that writing gets produced in class, that the work of the writing class is writing, then those drafts are produced as an organic function of the course, as in-class material product (and, OK, evidence) of its valuable intellectual labor. And the instructor doesn’t have to “micromanage” at all — my students produce generative writing in class, respond to one another and revise, and so when I see the final document with all the evidence of textual work that preceded it, I spend the most time with their one-page reflective letters where they describe to me what changed and what didn’t, where they got stuck and un-stuck, what strategies they used, and why. Ultimately, I think Clancy runs into trouble when she sees that sloppy, recursive writerly process as serving plagiarism detection and prevention, rather than seeing the avoidance of plagiarism emerging organically from the processes that good writers use.

And that perspectival shift is precisely my problem with TurnItIn: the enactment of an argument about how to best use PDSs performs an epistemological shift that causes us to privilege plagiarism prevention as the overriding goal, and to see all other aspects of composing as serving that end. TurnItIn privileges the appropriative moment and positions plagiarizers as Pokémon, telling composition teachers, “Gotta catch ‘em all!” So criminalized, they must all be caught and punished. Of course, this language (consider Clancy’s use of “burden of proof”) is perfectly in line with the popular media rhetoric on plagiarism pointed out by Rebecca Moore Howard; language that constructs plagiarism as the ultimate “deadly sin” punishable by the “academic death penalty.” Such a language of criminality and the privileging of property rights obscures the way that writers work, cite, collaborate, argue, and respond to one another. But see, there are two impulses in Pokémon: the accumulative impulse (”Gotta catch ‘em all!”) but also the give-and-take engagement of playing one card against another, one Pokémon against another, the pleasure in the way that texts and writers engage another. My problems with TurnItIn are that the ideological blinkers it offers show us only one value for writing — and, further, that it indicates to students that it’s perfectly acceptable for one party to appropriate that value while another party is criminalized for performing the same appropriation.

I’ll whisper here my dark and unspeakable secret: dear reader, I won’t lose sleep if I fail to catch and punish every single wicked, evil plagiarist. Sure, I notice the odd changes of voice and style, and every time I’ve noticed such shifts (every semester save one since 1998), I’ve confirmed that there was indeed a problem, and followed up on it. But if The Doomful Specter of Academic Plagiarism called me before him to pass judgment upon my pedagogy and told me that I’d been found wanting — told me that a student had, heaven forbid, Gotten Over — I’d be like, “Well, OK. So?” Does that in some way invalidate my entire pedagogy? Does that show what a jacked-up terrible instructor I am? Does that show that said student learned nothing from the course and thereby offer a reason why we must use machines to hunt down and mercilessly exterminate the relentlessly proliferative scourge of plagiarism committed by the lazy and amoral students populating our courses?

Well, here’s a thought. A while back, writing teachers were cheered by the arrival of a technological solution to the relentlessly proliferative scourge of spelling errors committed by the lazy and illiterate students populating their courses. Today, there’s a substantial body of empirical evidence pointing to the radical increase in homonym and wrong word errors in student writing following the rise in popularity of spelling checkers in word processing applications. So tell me: what kind of increase in ethical errors might we imagine seeing in student writing, if we were to pass along to machines the apparently overly onerous task of actually paying attention to how our students write?

In some ways, I may have it easier than instructors at other institutions when it comes to the question of plagiarism: here, our plagiarism policy is graven in stone.

Literally.

Here, plagiarism as a violation of the honor code becomes a matter of who one is, a performance of identity, as the intersection of an economic interaction (the appropriation of someone else’s written labor) with the affectual response to experience (that dreadful desperate sensation of feeling overwhelmed by work combined with the moral nausea at thinking of betraying ideals).

Which is why I’m so interested that my hometown newspaper has picked up the recent and ongoing discussion of how appropriate technological and profit-based responses are to such matters. One wishes those who have picked up the Post story or responded to its branches in other venues (I won’t link to the ugly, bigoted, redneck parochial crap that the Wichita Eagle allows to remain on its site) might have first read Rebecca Moore Howard’s insightful and compelling rhetorical analyses of our ongoing discussion of plagiarism. One wishes those who have picked up the Post story might have consulted folks with some expertise on the topic of writing, writing instruction, and plagiarism — but of course, as Howard points out, the issue of plagiarism is all too easily argumentatively reduced to judgments of instructors good versus students bad, students steal versus scholars borrow, neutral technology versus ethical decisions.

Take, for example, Platypus Matt’s repeated assertions in the Kairosnews threads (I know Matt, and I like Matt, and I figure he knows that here I’m not dissing but disagreeing) that “the victim” in cases of plagiarism is “the teacher.” Student bad, teacher good, innocence violated by rapacity. But how is the teacher “the victim” of plagiarism? How has the teacher lost or been injured? Matt quite explicitly dismisses the notion of the value of student work, and instead clearly constructs plagiarism as a concern of authority and pride: the student pulled one over on the teacher. The only way in which I could agree with such a perspective would be by asserting that I expect to always be in a position of knowledge and experience superior to that of my students — and that’s an assertion I’ll never make. Matt’s arguments seem to me to evacuate student writing of its implicit value as work.

Yet, at the same time, I’m very much inclined to agree with Matt’s strong critique of the discursive equation of writing to property. Writing isn’t scarce and solely owned intellectual capital, as Matt rightly points out: it’s in fact, a complicated amalgam of productive and distributive processes. Writing is produced by a complex interaction of social relations, labor, and technology; so, too, do those same factors of technology, labor, and social relations interact in profoundly complex ways to distribute writing. In both the production and the distribution of writing, we see information as necessarily constructed by human labor, and therein lies our concern with its appropriation.

The problem that I see is that TurnItIn.com performs precisely that same appropriation while simultaneously uglifying our relationships with our students. TurnItIn.com is an inherently suspicious technology of surveillance, sending to our students the message that none of them are sufficiently trustworthy in our eyes. I suppose I could be accused of having the luxury of that big stone monument and everything that goes along with it to rest my indulgence upon — but I’ve felt the same at other institutions, as well. More importantly, though, TurnItIn.com appropriates the value of student writing for the sake of its own profits, while at the same time criminalizing students for the very same practice. In other words, TurnItIn.com stands as a monument of staggering hypocrisy — and that’s not a monument I’m going to erect in my classroom.

A bit past our semester halfway point, I asked students to (anonymously, if they chose, as many did) evaluate the course: what they were or weren’t getting out of the class, which types of work were most and least useful to them, which aspects of my teaching practices were least or most productive. The results were informative and helpful, and also fairly consistent. What was most helpful were their perspectives on what types of writing they already felt fairly comfortable with, and what types of writing they felt hadn’t yet been adequately addressed in the class.

As I recently described, Essay 1 asks students to choose a personal context, to examine their own relation to that context, and to draw some conclusions about that relationship, supported by examples from experience. Essay 2 asks students to engage with a difficult text in the sophisticated ways that academia expects, to understand and then move beyond its argument and draw broader conclusions, and to support those conclusions using accepted forms of citing textual evidence. Essay 3 asks students to chart the complex rhetorical and logical interrelationships among a group of texts on a given topic, to analyze those relationships, and then to make an argument to a specific audience based on that analysis, supporting their arguments with examples appropriate to their audiences. Essay 5 will ask students to perform an analysis of their own writing both within and beyond the context of the course, looking not only at their own writing since September, but also to the past and future and synthesizing possible trends and tendencies. Looking at those assignments, and at my students’ progress, I anticipated (correctly) that they’d probably be burnt out on citation-format stuff by this point in the semester, and also that there might be a desire for more engagement with the nuances of style and questions of genre, since they seem to be doing quite well in terms of their writing’s content and structure. (More evidence that they really are a bright bunch this semester: in semesters past, working with students on structural concerns in their essays has sometimes felt like the teacherly equivalent of pulling teeth.)

And I was right. Their written responses to the mid-semester evaluations indicated a strong interest in tone and style and the authorial motivations for deploying certain stylistic strategies, an interest in the rhetorical strategies associated with other genres (including, from several students, concerns with film and visual literacies), an interest in textual juxtaposition, and from an overwhelming majority of students, an interest in doing “creative” work. This last interest is somewhat problematic, for two reasons: first, to be blunt, College Writing is a course in the essay. But that first reason supposes that essays are somehow less creative than other genres — which is, of course, the second problem.

And so their responses — along with some insights from Joanna, Amber Engelson, and Amanda Carr — led to my new Essay 4 assignment, where I ask students to remix a text.

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Dánielle Nicole DeVoss, Nancy Allen, and Stephanie Vie gave a presentation titled “Copy-Right Anxiety: File Distribution and Intellectual Property,” and I’m not sure what the hyphenation means — maybe foregrounding the question of whether it’s ethical or right to copy? I didn’t hear them explain it, but that certainly didn’t detract from the quality of their presentations. Dánielle’s focused on using examples of video pastiche to theorize some implications of new media convergence, while Nancy’s had a deeply pedagogical focus on the implications of open source practices for the classroom, and Stephanie’s examined the intersection of students’ attitudes about peer-to-peer file-sharing and their attitudes about plagiarism; the three, taken together, sparked a lively discussion and composed a sort of collective matrix of insight about the nature of intellectual property online.

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In comments, John writes:

I will agree that we haven’t developed many good tools for helping students re-enter their word-processed drafts. Or, perhaps more accurately, Microsoft has not incorporated the kinds of tools that writing teachers might recommend. There’s an interesting question: why hasn’t our profession (and groups like CCCC and WPA) found a way to challenge Microsoft to incorporate useful teaching tools into Word?

To which I want to say: I like the sentiment, but no, no, no, no, no. Don’t teachers who employ digital technologies in the classroom already do enough unpaid sales and marketing work for Microsoft? Aren’t we already doing more than enough to lock ourselves into using the tools of big corporations so that they can wring ever-increasing amounts of cash from our educational institutions?

Charlie Lowe is doing really good and important work with the open source community on developing digital tools for writing teachers, and the open source community is likely to be much more responsive (or at least responsive for the right reasons) in terms of developing those digital tools than Microsoft. Please, let’s get away from this logic that favors the relentless increase of privatization.

Geoffrey Nunberg just did a fine piece on NPR about the discourse of the “personal” versus the “private” and the accompanying rhetorical concerns of ownership. His piece stands as good evidence why copyfighters — of whom, yes, I’ll finally admit to being one — need to be thinking about the work of both Peter Elbow and J. K. Gibson-Graham, about how the act of engagement with ongoing discussions about intellectual property constitutes the seam or suture joining personal, political, and economic concerns.

Sorry I’m late.

I gave my presentation this morning, along with Krista Kennedy (as read by John Logie) and Charlie Lowe. Charlie was in his usual relaxed, easygoing talking-through-the-points mode, while John did a fine job of reading Krista’s stylistically compelling sophisticated theoretical essay. I didn’t do quite so well, largely because I was trying to talk a point-by-point presentation for the first time; in the past, I’ve always read my presentations from papers, and I do a fair job of that, I think. But my lack of comfort with the talking-through-the-points format was highly apparent in my voice, in the somewhat rushed delivery, and in my hesitation to deviate from those points. As is the case with students whose papers display a marked increase in correctness errors when they grapple with materials or genres unfamiliar to them, my presentation was marked by my delivery’s evidence of my inexperience with the genre. Which is disappointing; with the preparation I put into this, I would have liked to have done a better job.

If you check out the presentation, you’ll see that it’s highly inductive and paratactic, and those qualities are only accentuated by the cuts I made after rehearsing it and having it come out at around 22 minutes: I tried to get rid of the points that seemed least essential, but that resulted in a highly “gappy” feeling in a number of places. What I was trying to do in the presentation was simply to look at ownership issues as connected to student writing through an economic lens, in the hopes that such a lens might help the audience see how student writing — when considered and practiced as “open source” rather than as scarce and solely owned — can give an increased and more diverse valuation to the labor of everyone (students, teachers, researchers, and the various permutations thereof) in the community of first year writing. An additional difficulty, I think, is that the complexity of the theoretical stuff I was trying to present actually really doesn’t lend itself to the and/and/and qualities of parataxis, and is much more easily understood via the subordinating conjunctions of hypotaxis. Which I knew intellectually, but — since I’d never tried to do a presentation like this before — not practically.

On the good side, these points comprise the core logic of Chapter 5 of my dissertation, so I’ve got my revision work laid out for me. I’ll also say that I think my classroom focus served as a nice complement both to Krista’s flights of Deleuze and Guattari high theory and to Charlie’s explicit working-through of the implications of the Open Source development process for composition, and this seemed to play out in the really excellent Q&A that followed our presentations, where a lot of people offered insightful and provocative comments and questions (including several from Bradley Bleck that I couldn’t answer, which gave me considerable material for future thought) linking Krista’s rhizomes, Charlie’s development process, and my own concerns of valuation. So sometime in the next week or so, I’ll be cleaning up the presentation some; right now, I’m grateful to Charlie, Krista, and John, and to all the folks who joined in the discussion.

Doctor Chadwallah (who was apparently attending incognito, and who Krista explicitly referenced in her presentation) offered no questions, to the regret of many who were present.

Some of the basic concerns that I’ll need to demonstrate in my CCCC presentation:

1. Writing, as information, is a non-rivalrous good: what I get from reading a paper doesn’t take away from what you get from reading a paper.
2. University pPlagiarism policies in higher education, in order to give students the motivation to write, impose an artificial scarcity upon student writing that helps to firmly anchor it as a commodity with economic exchange value. (This follows from Bruce Horner’s attention to the Marxian difference between the use value of student writing and the exchange value of student writing.)
3. Writing is produced by economically valuable student labor.
4. Under the neoclassical economic model, students’ upward class mobility is predicated upon their becoming more productive writers/knowledge-workers. (Note that what neoclassical economists call “increased productivity,” Marxian economists call an increased rate of exploitation.)
5. Just as there is more than one definition of “class,” there is more than one definition of “class mobility,” although both terms bear unavoidable economic implications.
6. While some associated with the FLOSS movement offer the dictum “free as in speech, not free as in beer” to help others understand the goals of the movement, it should be noted that both senses of the term “free” — gratis and libre — bear economic implications, particularly when understood in relation to the concept of ownership.

So that’s what I’ve been working through lately — it’s also, in very condensed form, the groundwork for my dissertation’s Chapter 5. Which of those, to you, seem to demand the most proof; what have I left out — and what implications are you seeing that I’m missing?