This week’s readings:
From: Teaching to Transgress – by bell hooks – Introduction & chapter 1
From: An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel
Foreword and Introduction
“Critical Digital Pedagogy: a Definition”
“A Guide to Resisting EdTech: the Case Against TurnItIn”
I got to select our FLC readings for this week and chose the essay “A Guide to Resisting EdTech: The Case Against TurnItIn” because it’s an area of digital pedagogy where critical pedagogy has had a significant impact on how I foster classroom community in my courses.
When I first started teaching my own courses in 2012, I’d heard of TurnItIn, but didn’t think about or use it because the university where I was teaching, Loyola Marymount, didn’t offer it. It wasn’t until I came to CSUDH that I was made aware of it. Plagiarism hadn’t ever been a problem in my classes. Instead, TurnItIn was sold to me as a way around Blackboard’s poor and limited grading annotation tools. Specifically, I’d been using Garage Band to record comments and emailing students the mp3 files. TurnItIn offered recordings of up to 3 minutes as one of its features.
So I had students submitting their work by uploading it to TurnItIn for three years without really thinking about it. When I did hear negative things about the company and its lack of respect for student copyright, I justified my continued use by rationalizing that I’d disabled archiving and wasn’t using the similarity check.… Read the rest