Okay ONE last thing! Here is an email I received from someone today and I share it here with his permission (he does NOT want this shared on Twitter though so please respect that): Hi Amanda-- You dont know me, but a friend recently forwarded me your two-part piece about the academic job market, specifically because it seems to have been lifted by Rebecca Schuman at Slate. I just wanted to tell you thank you for saying something on Twitter. Oh, and that youre not crazy-- Schuman really did steal from you. I know this because she did the same thing to me last fall. I wrote a piece about MOOCs for Salon in October (salon/2013/10/28/moocs_corporate_welfare_for_credit/) with a fairly novel thesis (at the time)-- MOOCs have been touted as a solution to providing college educations to students who cannot afford them, but when you look at results, its poor students who do the worst studying under MOOCs. As I put it in the my piece, And now weve met the MOOCs second paradox: the at-risk students they propose to serve are the ones most unprepared to benefit from online education. Three weeks later, Schuman posted her own column about MOOCs (slate/articles/life/education/2013/11/sebastian_thrun_and_udacity_distance_learning_is_unsuccessful_for_most_students.html), with the same thesis: The problem, of course, is that those students are the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. At the time, I thought-- the phrasing is a close paraphrase (with no link to what I wrote), but I dont really care. (I work in an academic library, so I tend to say serve my patrons rather than teach my students. Its a little strange that a professor would say serve rather than teach?) I was genuinely glad to see the issue get a little more attention. Its certainly not the last time Ive had something stolen online, and I didnt want to make a big deal out of it. And journalistically speaking, its not quite plagiarism, but I dont think its quite ethically sound, either. But if its okay with you, Id like to send your piece to Gawkers tips line, suggesting that they look a bit closer into Schumans columns. If it happened to both of us, Im guessing that we arent isolated cases. If you have any reservations about this, please let me know. Im not trying to make this a big thing (I really dont want to stress you out), but itd be nice if she was held accountable for her borrowing. Best, Christian P.S. I really enjoyed your articles. Thanks for writing them!
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 14:53:54 +0000
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