I have made my first substantive contribution to the blog of the Historians Against the War. See

http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/blog/2008/03/islamo-fascism-in-history-classroom.html

a report on my classroom discussions of the term "Islamo-Fascism".

Frustrated with the need to thoroughly document a paper, a student of mine recently wrote to me to talk about citations. An example of something the student didn't want to cite was his/her opinion that Hinduism makes believers docile through the belief in reincarnation. The latest e-mail is in italics, my responses in normal print:

Hmmm, no offense meant towards you professor, but it sounds like when in doubt, cite a source, and I really hate that.

I mean, why aren't my opinions valid? Why do I have to find something someone else wrote and note that next to everything I say? Maybe my parents are Hindu, and I just know things that seem like common knowledge to me, or maybe I was very well-educated...

Education is not about opinions, but informed understanding. Opinions are "valid" if they are based on real information. Then they become informed understanding. What you think is in and of itself of little interest. What you show, demonstrate and argue are of great interest.

Why can't I state opinion born of 100 resources that I read over the course of growing up and thus, don't need to go look anything up...

If you have 100 resources that you read while growing up, then you know the material quite well. Tracing your information back or finding that information should be no problem.


I mean, if I were writing that 1+2 = 3, do I have to cite a math book? If I write a really long equation that most people wouldn't understand, do I have to cite where I went to high school and who my math teacher was?

Mathematical equations are manifestly true or false. They _are themselves_ the proof of their own validity. The underlying assumptions would need to be ironed out and cited if that is what the paper is about, of course.


I just think it's kind of offensive and counter-productive to learning. It seems to encourage a copy-and-paste attitude. Like my opinions aren't worth anything, but if someone wrote a book on something, they must be experts, so my paper has to be a collage of quotes by other people. Where's the original thought? The proof that you learned something and found your own opinion and no longer need the books to rant on and on about a subject?


Again, you are not learning to voice an opinion. We can do that on internet forums and talk shows. Nobody needs to go to college to learn that. You are learning to research and formulate informed understanding.

Your original thoughts are fine. You don't need to cite them. But there is of course a line somewhere. You need to find the level where the expected reader is. If the paper is so basic that the reader is not even assumed to know that Hinduism is predominantly in India, then you will be footnoting rather banal stuff. If you are writing on subtle doctrines hidden within the Vedic texts, you do not need to cite the claim that "Hinduism is the dominant religion of India". On the other hand, it might then be an issue of why such a claim is in such a paper.

So cite:

- ideas and conclusions you borrow
- facts that are not based on direct observation on your part

Claims such as "Hinduism makes people docile" will either be anecdotal and hence highly suspect or based on a broad study. Cite the study or take the hit for spouting anecdotal evidence to make broad assertions.

There is, of course, little difference between your opinion and just any other person's opinion. Just because someone wrote a book or a webpage on something does not mean that their opinion is somehow better. On that we agree. Just citing any old book or webpage is not much better than not citing. That is why we university profs insist on scholarly sources. That means sources which allow the reader to trace the information directly or by way of several steps back to the raw data at the basis of the "opinion."

Without specific examples it is hard to make a general case for what to cite and what not to cite. Do not get all hung up on footnoting. If it is banal and obvious, just connect it to a general history (the textbook, an encyclopedia, a general history of the topic) or don't cite it. But a conclusion about something - that Hinduism makes people docile, for example - is not of that nature.

There are, of course, times when it really does slow things down. I had the issue recently with an article I submitted. It was on a subject I know well (my dissertation). But the editor sent it back saying I need to better document some of my claims on the last several pages. I had to go back to my files and anchor what was for me "knowledge" to the sources (primary and secondary). It was tedious, but that's the way it works.

That is what differentiates the "opinions" of some (like the rants of Bill O'Reilly) from the "informed understanding" of scholars.

You know all those profs over at Rate Your Students who bitch and whine about the stuff their students do? The students come to class in their pajamas. They are hung over. They are stupid as buckets of nails. And the excuses their students have for not turning in their best work or not being in class are simply tedious: relatives dying, traffic jams, girlfriend issues. What can I say? Yawn.

Where I teach, the students have made other life decisions and are facing other issues. These are both e-mails I got today:

Exhibit A:

It is my duty to inform you that I have had a pretty bad stroke of luck. As of last night my foot was nearly ripped free of my leg. It looks like I won't be walking for a long time, in two months they will do a surgery that may change that but until then I am bedridden and I cannot drive or do much of anything for myself. I am writing because I am having a brief moment of lucidity. The painkillers I am taking seem to be affecting everything EXCEPT my pain.. It sucks big time, my whole body won't quit hurting. I believe I will be able to continue our courses though, and this Sunday I should be able to submit the usual discussions.

Just wanted to give you all a heads up in case something happens.


Exhibit B:


I just wanted to let you know that I just got back from a mission that had me "outside the wire" for a couple days. I am in charge of a sniper team so we occasionally have to be out for days at a time. I am going to get some sleep and do my best to catch up with what i missed. I know taking these classes will be a challenge with my particular job but I am sincere about this and I will always catch up whatever i miss. ...

So your students are drunk? Mine are "outside the wire." Your students are hung over? Mine wear Purple Hearts. As it turns out, that student with a torn foot did not step on a landmine or get acquainted with an IED or get run over by a tank. It was a civilian accident. But where I teach, the first assumption is _violence_. He was an Iraq War veteran, but got hurt playing volley ball!

One of my students got behind in class because his tent in Kuwait burned down and destroyed his laptop. He is doing his college education from a _tent_ in 100-degree and higher heat! I had a student whose final exam went missing. We couldn't track it down for a while because the location he had taken the test in no longer existed: It was a "Forward Operating Base" in Pakistan! Take that problem to your "Bible College of the Prairie" or "Big State Football University"!

Check out the photos of some of these people - including the torched tent - at http://hatlie.de/teaching/teaching-studentsallover.html.

I just discovered - unfortunately, a student paper led me to it - echeat.com, one of those sites that sells papers to students. The language on the site is interesting. It reads,

Welcome To Echeat.com. There is no reason to cheat or plagiarize when struggling with an essay. We offer over 60,000 well written model essays to assist students writing a paper for school. We guarantee that you'll find an essay on your topic quickly or we'll write a brand new customized example essay on your topic ..TODAY!!

All pre-written model essays and term papers are only $9.95 p/pg with a FREE Bibliography or Work Cited page. All essays are available for same day delivery via e-mail or fax. Receive the help that you deserve, search through our essays and order one NOW!!!

First, they name the site for cheating. Then, the first thing they say is that you don't need to cheat! They offer "model essays," giving the site visitor the strong impression that the point is to give you a kind of outline, something to paraphrase perhaps. For one thing, if you don't cite it, paraphrasing is still cheating (and if you do cite it, any prof worth his salt will nail you for trusting this source). More importantly, it is OBVIOUS the service will not be used to paraphrase or get ideas. Most people who use a site like this will simply copy and paste their essay and turn it in to their school or college. It reminds me of those music pirating sites or lude pornography disguised as art: The real purpose is obvious, but labeling it with another purpose somehow makes it different.

When I decided to try the "service," I entered my dissertation topic ("Riga") as a search term. Here is what it told me:

We have sooooooooooooo many papers that would help you! We just didn't find anything based on your specific search criteria. Please try your search again with different key words. If none of the results are appropriate, use the "Customized Essay" option to have us custom-create a NEW paper on ANY subject YOU specify! Regardless of your selection, we CAN help YOU complete your own paper...FAST!!!!

Students: If you are struggling with your paper, get REAL help. The kind of help will depend on the problem:

• Having trouble picking a topic? Look through the textbook for things that look interesting or just ask the prof to talk about it with you.
• Having trouble organizing your notes and citations? Check out my help page on that (pdf)
• Having trouble formatting properly? If your syllabus or university doesn't have a guide, ask your librarian or check out one or more of the sites linked here.
• Having trouble writing? Start EARLY and use the writing center at your school.
• Hell, write me an e-mail, even if I'm not your prof or even at your school. I might be able to help.

DON'T use echeat.com. Short cuts like that will not help you in the long run and may get you VERY busted in the short run.

Here are some quotes from the discussion forum at echeat:



- "My teachers are so stupid I could probably just print out an article directly from encarta.com and hand it in for an A. Why waste my time?"

- "I got caught once, but I was too sly to get in any trouble for it. Just acted like I didn't know what I was doing and the teacher let it slide... :lol:"

- "Anyhow its better to cheat and enjoy doing wat u wanna do... Why waste time on projects and suffer through it. Why not just plagiarize and enjoy whatever u wanna do after all we only have 1 life to live."


That last one reflects an unbridled _arrogance_ that is hard to fathom. It is based on the assumption that the speaker already knows everything that is worth knowing. This person has a _total_ lack of curiosity or desire to learn.

Over two years ago I formulated a policy on how to talk about religion in my western civ classes. I have been modifying it since then and have now decided to publish it at hatlie.de: http://hatlie.de/teaching/teaching-policyreligion.html.

My classes probably contain more about religion than most history classes, but it naturally depends on the course subject. I do a lot of religion in western and world civilization surveys and my course on the Renaissance and Reformation, but relatively little in the other courses. See http://hatlie.de/teaching/index.html for a list of course titles and links to course descriptions.

Of the 28 discussion units that make up the interactive component of my Western Civilization I (to 1650) class at the University of Maryland, about a third are explicitely about religiously-related themes:

• unit 2: origins of monotheism
• unit 3: first laws (a comparison of Exodus and the Hammurabi codex)
• unit 13: the suppression of Christianity
• unit 14: Christians as citizens ("Bible" readings are again required here.)
• unit 15: a reading from St. Augustine
• unit 17: papal power in the middle ages
• unit 19: the Crusades (although the emphasis here is not totally on religion)
• units 24-26: three units on different aspects of the Reformation

Several others are potentially about religion or have that as a component. Ironically perhaps, my unit on the Thirty Years War is a reading I chose to purposely de-emphasize the religious aspect.

Overall, I think religion should be taken seriously in the classroom, confronted head on, and not avoided. A clear line should be drawn, however, between conclusions reached by adherance to standards of historical evidence and those drawn by "faith." The former are what class is about.

Here are some of the things my students recently wrote about Wikipedia after being assigned to analyze the discussion page of an article of their choice. Many remarks were outright negative:


- This causes Wikipedia to turn from the original intention of being a free encyclopedia as it so claims into an online social network devoted to pseudo-scholarly bickering….In addition to its instability and often emotional rants, Wikipedia is simply in plain terms run by people who know almost as little about the subject as those searching for information.



- With this Wikipedia assignment I learned that it is similar to a gossip board, where people can come to get their thoughts on a particular topic off their chest.



- Both people in the discussion sound very intelligent in this argument, but I still see no evidence of citation. So far Wikipedia seems it is more like a sophisticated place to rant about past icons.



- It seems to be a debate on who’s right rather than actually getting anywhere with the article… Everyone in the discussion section seems to care more about whether they are right or not, than on whether the information is trustworthy or not.



- Much argument is dedicated to the issue of point of view, something a traditional encyclopedia would be devoid of.


That remark is telling. There were several students who commented similarly. There is a widespread belief that the Wikipedia program of producing articles with "No Point of View" is actually possible and is, in fact, what "real" encyclopedias achieve. There is, of course, no such thing as a "view from nowhere," a portrayal of history, or anything for that matter, without a perspective or point of view. Normal encyclopedias are written by people. And they cite sources which are also produced by people. All these people not only have all the normal attributes we attribute bias to (race, class, gender, education, nationality, etc.), even if they write "only facts" and no opinions, their very choice of which facts are important are expressions of opinion and perspective. It would be an interesting discussion to try to take a room full of scholars and "normal" people and try to arrive at a consensus for what constitutes reliable information. The scholars would have to try to convince the others of their criteria for designating content experts, believability, etc.

Back to the students...


I would not expect to find such a discussion in a traditional encyclopedia because encyclopedias are usually a primary source of information, not a secondary or even, as Wikipedia admits to being, a tertiary source.


This remark that encyclopedias represent a "primary source" is odd indeed. Encyclopedias are primary sources for the era in which they are written, but they are usually used as secondary sources, of course. I am not sure what a "tertiary" source is.

What this remark also reflects is that in a normal encyclopedia, we just don't see the arguments. We don't read the scholarly debates at conferences and then the "bickering" in the editorial rooms that might be behind the "facts" in the Collier's or Britannica article.

That is of course related to the idea that an encyclopedia can be neutral. I would encourage those interested to go to a controversial subject in Britannica or Collier's and then google the author of that article.

- The Wikipedia policies are many and very stringent. If someone tries to post a bit of sketchy information on the site, it will be checked and disposed of promptly. The discussion page of Wikipedia is where all the planning and corroboration comes together to make the article what it is. Aside from a few rookies, the majority of debating/discussing was of a very professional and scholarly caliber with just enough emotion thrown in to make it a little flavorful, but not enough to be biased.

There were several somewhat positive remarks like the one above. Most of the students complained that those involved in the debates were clearly not experts and were often not even identifiable.

The following kinds of remarks were meant as criticisms of Wikipedia, but I see them as compliments. They show an awareness by participants in the discussions that the project needs more substance than it has and that many involved actually see the point in having a stable, verifiable foundation behind an article:


- In the article discussion I studied, I observed people having more of a debate about what is an acceptable source rather than the veracity of the article at hand.



- The discussion was dominated by the haggling over reliable sources, which I found quite ironic, considering the website on which I was reading this debate.


Finally, one student reflected sentiment that I have posted on this blog before, why scholars aren't getting on board in large numbers:


- Perhaps the biggest failing of the Wikipedia project, is that despite the countless man hours put into different topic by arm chair fans and subject matter experts, there is little in the way of academic scholars posting to the website. Wikipedia just does not have the prestige of an academic journal, and no respectable scholar wants their work edited by a 14 year old know it all. Similarly it makes perfect sense that a serious researcher would not want to base their research on someone’s opinion rather than a fact that can be referenced.

One of my students wrote:

I have one question which I will pose to all my professors. Why is it that people can't write like they used too? Now there are all these rules put out by Universitites and Colleges telling what style, margin space, how to "organize" your paper, which way your citations must be done, ...etc. It would seem as though all student writers are being programmed to write a certain way which makes all thier papers similar and there lacks a uniqueness. I feel as though creativity itself is being taken away. Although, some people do need these "rules" to help them write for they may be lost without them. I may even be one of these people but I feel as though the freedom in writing has been taken away. What ever happened to free writing...aren't those the best to write and read?

It depends what you mean by "freedom." I don't grade real closely on citation format, margins, fonts, etc. I just want clarity and completeness. If you put a semicolon instead of a colon or whatever, I am not going to have a meltdown. I just want the citations to be there and to help me find the sources you used. If you use sources that don't have authors, or just give "msnbc.com" as the source and that URL has 1000 subpages, then I don't like it. But regardless, I think the very existance of such standards intimidates students who aren't used to dealing with any kind of citation.

I'll let you write your paper on just about anything. But we are within the bounds of a discipline here. I want you to learn a bit of something about that discipline: the content of course, but EVEN MORE IMPORTANT TO ME: I want you to experience the methodology a bit. Hence I want history argued about in the conferences instead of decreeing the "truth" and "facts" in lectures. And I try to guide papers towards questions and controversies, not just "facts."

Over and above that, there are rules to good writing. They are not arbitrary; they have been developed by experience over centuries. Some more, some less, but all profs try to impart those rules and habits on students.

Those are all restrictions on "freedom," of course. To some extent, it is getting you to "write a certain way." But I don't see it as very limiiting. It all serves the purpose of making the writing more effective: citations serve a purpose and the rules that guide them help them fulfill that purpose. The same goes for the prose of the paper and the formatting rules.

One of the books I have on good writing says something to the effect of, "Once you master the rules, you can be free to violate them." What that means is that Mark Twain can "cheat" and break all kinds of rules - because he is a master.

Factors which negatively effect student writing:

- English not being their native language.

- Students taking on too many courses, often a full-time load, even when they work full time and have families as well. Or taking classes in situations that are not conducive to academia. I had a student trying to do a grad course from an FOB in Pakistan. Doing history graduate work well requires a good library. It just does. For some things, there are no short cuts. Education is now seen by many in completely functional terms: It is something that can be done and "checked off" quickly to quickly result in higher pay. But the limits of human biology and the real depth and purpose of education contradict this. That includes writing well - it simply takes time.

- The e-mail/chatroom/internet forum culture. This has gotten lots of people to write who wouldn't have written anything after high school 10 years ago. The down side is that it has led to an increase in viewing writing as something fast and informal. Clearly expressing complex ideas in a complete and concise fashion - something that takes practice - isn't practiced.

- Cutting and pasting from the internet leads not only to accusations of cheating, but leads to a lack of practice in writing. Online forum arguments which are waged by simply posting links at each other are similar.

- We just google for everything. Google offers lots and lots of garbage for "free." This leads us to lower our standards for what we consider "good": good information, good writing, good art, etc.

- Students watch TV and read blurbs on the internet instead of reading a lot of good writing. I don't want to idealize the past too much. I grew up on TV in the 1970s and video games in the 1980s. My parents grew up in the 1950s playing outside, not reading great literature all day. But the new media are now a) more pervasive and b) faster paced and c) the culture of discourse (Bill O'Reilly) is in rapid decline. This all leads to shorter attention spans and a sound-bite approach to everything (news, entertainment, art, literature, etc.).

A few months ago, I reported on a new assignment I worked out to help get students to think more critically about Wikipedia.

This term, I tried it again, and noticed a few things:

- Several students commented that they had never used Wikipedia before. I found that astounding. Perhaps it is not so terribly pervasive as I originally thought.

- There is a strong tendency with this assignment to write in a casual, e-mail type style. They use more or less proper grammar and punctuation, but there is little of the distanced, academic tone. They write, "I never really knew much about Wikipedia until I had to write this assignment. When I went searching for an article to do my paper on, I stumbled upon..." at hatlie.de I try to remind students what that kind of writing sounds like to a distant reader.

Another issue has come in my teaching which may be related to the copyright issues involved with turnitin.com (see my earlier comments on that).

In two of the classes I teach regularly, I require students to publish original work at sites-of-memory.de. They are to go out, photograph a memorial site, research it, analyze it, and submit it to me. I then put it online at the site for them. (Student projects are listed their in their own section as well as within the main site.) This assignment is perhaps similar to those requiring students to contribute to Wikipedia articles or other online wikis, databases, or webpages.

Students own the copyright on the material they submit to university courses. So am I even allowed to do this? On the one hand:

- the projects are published under their names. They get full acknowledgement.

- they write it knowing that publication is part of the assignment. It is not the same as if I said, "Surprise!" and started publishing their term papers on line.

- they keep the copyright. They sign nothing over to me.

- I allow them to do so anonymously if they so choose (although other members of the same class section will know who the assignment is from).

On the other hand, it is "their's" and its appearance on a webpage could arguably detract from the value of the work with regard to other future uses of said work.

Several large classes just started at the schools I teach for, motivating me to finally overhaul my Students All Over The World webpage. The photos are now formatted as thumbnails in their own, orderly section. Futhermore, I have begun to collect links to my students' homepages and blogs. Check it out at http://hatlie.de/teaching/teaching-studentsallover.html.

New submissions of photos are always welcome from any and all of my students. Your grade will not be posted online!