Showing posts with label
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Show all posts
Showing posts with label
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Show all posts
Yup, the results are finally recorded. Everything has been tabulated by the certified public accounting firm of Price-Is-Right, Namby, & Pamby. I know what you’re thinking. “What in the world of CPAs are you typing about?” Well, sentence-with-ending-preposition person, a survey was recently conducted and the results were just reported for your amusement.
SURVEY PURPOSE
One hundred college professors across this vast wasteland with a few cities sprinkled in for change of scenery were surveyed on their favorite 2010 Winter Olympic events in Vancouver. This is kind of an academic version of the popular TV game show “Family Feud,” just without the family, the feud, and the game.
RESEARCH STANDARDS
For those of you who are quantitative researchers, the technical aspects of this survey study are described below to allay any concerns you might have about its quality. The rest of you probably don’t care because you know of my incessant longing to write fictional, humorous blogs.
SURVEY DESIGN
Here are the steps in the execution of the study:
1. The sample was nonrandomly and wildly selected from the subscriber list of The Chronicle of Higher Education to yield an unrepresentative, biased collection of professors.
2. The survey was administered online by MonkeySee-MonkeyDo.com to maintain anonymity with a 24-hr response window (Is there any other?).
3. Faculty members only were asked one question: “Have you renewed your subscription to The Chronicle?” Wait, that wasn’t the question. It was: “What are your 3 favorite events you have watched during this 1st week of the Vancouver Olympics? (If you haven’t seen anything, wing it.)”
4. Respondents clicked their 3 faves from a list of all events to avoid spelling errors with words such as loogy, kurling, slalhom, moogles, and bathalonlon.
5. Based on an overall response rate of 39% (similar to my anticipated approval rating for this blog), frequency distributions of all events were computed. (Note: Stat has to be included somewhere here, right?)
6. The top 10 events were identified so they could be presented because I’m running out of blog material.
OOPS! I’ve just exceeded my word limit. The Top 10 will be presented tomorrow. Sorry. The bylaws of bloggering tell us not to exceed 300 words or we can be smacked by the owner of this network.
I bet you’re really excited. You don't want to miss this list. I've probably spent more than 5 minutes writing it.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
1. Carry Work When Traveling
If you really want to stay in control of your workload or jump ahead, carry work materials when you’re on the move. This time saver is one of the most effective time management techniques you can possibly use. Before jumping, whenever you leave your home, office, ship, or football field to go anywhere, take a briefcase, bag, or backpack with work materials and laptop with you. Don’t leave without something (including your American Express card—ya never know what will pop up), but don’t take everything, especially any vertebrae-breaking, cartilage-tearing monster course textbooks or complete dissertations.
SAMPLE OF TASKS
Today, as you travel to almost every destination, wait time will be involved. During that travel, you could complete the following 20 tasks:
• grade papers
• edit term papers or essays
• edit thesis chapters
• respond to e-mails from students and colleagues
• read articles for an article or chapter you’re writing
• write a section of an article or book chapter
• edit a manuscript
• write a review for a journal manuscript, grant proposal, or book chapter
• write a course lecture or student activities
• write an agenda for an upcoming meeting
• write the minutes from a past meeting
• write a letter of recommendation for a student or colleague
• write your letter of resignation
• write pink slips to whack your staff
• add a few items to your “to-do” list
• write a blood curdling murder mystery
• plan how you’re going to spend your federal stimulus check
• read The Chronicle of Higher Education for job options
• write a blog
• revise your profile on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn
You may have noticed that about 65% of those tasks require writing. That seems to be a significant component of our job description. Estimate your wait time to decide how much and what type of work to take. Depending on how you travel, your work opportunity will vary. Several travel options will be examined in the next blog.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC & Coventry Press
I just finished reading an article entitled “CSI: Plagarism” by M. Garrett Bauman in the latest edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 9, 2009, D20, The Chronicle Review). It focused on plagiarism by students and its damaging consequences on the integrity of education. The author describes his classroom experiences with a couple of his students. The Internet has contributed significantly to the proliferation of plagiarism by students, regardless of their motivations and rationales.
Let's shift targets for a few paragraphs. What about faculty, administrators, and other professionals who are under the gun to produce articles, chapters, books, conference presentations, e-zines, blogs, and other written products? The same temptations available to students are also available to our unscrupulous and evil colleagues. How do you protect your intellectual property? Once our work is published, most of us assume it’s protected by copyright and that’s it. We neither have the time nor inclination to investigate CSI-style whether anybody has stolen our work.
However, the rules of the game have changed markedly with Internet access. Virtually everyone in cyberspace has access to everything we write. Google your name and you will find papers you wrote decades ago pop up. You’d be amazed.
(Personal Sidebar: Over my career, I’ve had my books stolen from university libraries, sections of articles plagiarized, punch lines in my bio appearing in other faculty bios, and, most recently, one of my blogs stolen verbatim as someone else’s blog. As a writer, my first response is usually “Hummm. It’s nice to know someone finds value in my work to risk fines, imprisonment, and an almost certain torturous and excruciatingly painful death.” Not exactly. Although swiping my work provides a sense of validation that’s more flattering than the peer review process, it's also a feeling of personal violation. That makes me angry. Seeing my blog 2 weeks ago on a blog site with someone else’s name under it made me furious. End of Bloated Sidebar.) So what’s the solution?
Please share your plagiarism experiences involving your work. What do you do to minimize violations?
My next blog will reveal how to track down the perp and prevent future violations. Don’t miss it.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
