And Here I thought I was going to beat Josh in the "poky-little puppy sweepstakes" Oh, well here's my abtract and blog entries for the week

Copy-Lefting The News

This paper examines that part of the copy-left movement which produces copy-left news information. Copy-left is the spiritual opposite of the notion of copyright. Those who produce copy-lefted works intend for them to be copied and modified as people wish. Copy-left news challenges the notion that news information can and should be proprietary. This paper will examine the Asheville Global Report a print and online publication that uses “mainstream” news sources in a fair use fashion to essentially construct new news stories that highlight facts that may not have been the main gist
of the original story, but highlights important facts. This paper will examine how the
Asheville Global Report fits into the notion of copy-left and how it challenges the traditional concept of news.


and now, for the blog...........Among things were blogging about.............................................................

Deborah Halbert tries to make the argument that "textual poaching" is a distinctly feminist enterprise anf frankly, misses by a mile. poaching is the idea that people can and should apporiate texts and modify them for their purtposes. Her essay is long on assertion and short of evidence. She puts forth such bold assertions as,"Authorship was a method of establishing paternity over a text, the male creation" (p.113). I'm curious as to why she cites the Koons case (p.115) to prover her point, when Koons wasn't a woman (p.115). The seminal (and how's that for a masculinzation!) work on poaching of TV culture by Jenkins shows that while women are involved in such appropriated works as the Kirk/Spock texts, men approporaiate. Frankly, this essay is the sort of leftist-academic codswallop that makes people want to belt leftist-academics.
The essay by Clark deals with her surprise that Autralian academics foun the type of writing centers now common to American campuses to be "sanctioned plagiarism" (p.155). This essay also looks at survey research (!) condcuted at USC on the subject of plagiarism and Writing Centers. The survey results showed that the Biology, English, and Poli. Sci. departments all flet that plagiarism was a significant, while Expository Writing, largely did not (p. 163). The only department wich wasn't ambivalent about the helpfulness of the writing center was the English Department-70-% ofthe faculty in that department felt that the writing center WOUDL help the students. There s an interesting note toward the end of this piece, that CLark believes that Writing Centers are held to a very high standard of not being overly interventionist in helping students with their work. She notes the degree to which writers receive suggestions on their work (216). She then asserts (probably from experience that writing centers cannot do this and our seen as overly interventionist. A lot of the same ground is covered by Shamoon and Burns. They say that they opt for a social and rhetorical construct of the issue and say that instead of building walls around the issue people such as they "engage" it (p.192). I found these essays interesting, because I teach writing and it would never occur to me that helping my students was enabling plagiarism. I guess I jsut don't understand why Writing Centers got rapped with this.

My Question for the week is:

How interventionist are you in teaching writing and do you see yourself at all as a plagiarism enbabler?