My iPad: An Obituary

On Saturday 31st July, encouraged by reports from @vonprond, @klillington, @catherinecronin and @jamesclay, I went out and bought myself an iPad. I knew more about it than the sales guy in Curry's, Galway. I took it home and from the first moment I held it in my arms and connected it to iTunes, it was love.

I should explain that I never, ever, have done anything like this before. I don't buy expensive gadgets for myself. This was a completely irrational move for me. Even my trusty iPod, now 4 years old, was bought as a present by my husband, after much hinting.

For the next week, I proudly showed off my new purchase to family, friends and colleagues. I spent time considering apps, reading reviews, thinking about how I could use it for teaching and work, as well as having a bit of fun. I installed not one but four twitter apps: twitterific (good), tweetdeck (not great), osfoora (very nice) and flipboard (fantastic). I started to use it for reading (iBooks and Kindle) and was looking forward to my first train journey. I bought productivity apps Keynote and Pages, and started thinking about how to use them. I even began playing with iNow and enjoying the little emails telling me how much I'd got done during the day.

Then, on Tuesday evening, 10th August, a mere 10 days after the iPad entered my life, disaster struck. While showing my mother-in-law our holiday photographs (all 477 of them) the screen froze. I can't even blame my mil, I was closely supervising her at the time. After some time, the "connect to iTunes" screen appeared and, like a concerned parent when her child is ill, I immediately followed instructions.

iTunes told me it had "detected an iPad in recovery mode" and that the poor darling needed to be restored. Ok, I've only had it 10 days, it's not a big hassle. But then, during the restore process, I got the dreaded error 1611 and was directed to a page full of diagnostics. I sat up until well after midnight, restarting the machine, trying different usb ports, even creating a new user on the pc to get a clean iTunes profile. No improvement.

After a fretful night, I contacted Apple Technical Support during lunchtime on Wednesday. A brusque chap named William, who sounded straight out of the US military, and kept calling me Ma'am, told me I'd done a good job with the diagnostics, but that I had omitted to un-install my anti-virus software! Not likely to happen while on the university network, but I said I'd give it a go at home. He also talked me through some complicated holding down of buttons while connecting to iTunes, but none of this solved the problem.

That evening I again rang support, this time talking to a young lady whose name I didn't catch. She wasn't much help at all and seemed incapable of reading the notes left by William. She suggested that I un-install iTunes, and all its associated programmes, then re-install and try again. She then hung up. I did all this (it took an hour) but still no improvement.

Finally, yesterday morning, I got through to a very understanding young man named Peter. He very gently told me that we'd tried everything, but we couldn't restore the iPad. He explained that he would send a courier to take my iPad away in a box, and that I would receive a new one within a few days. He also asked if I'd dropped it, but I explained that it had been (almost literally) wrapped in cotton wool since the day I brought it home.

So, here I am, waiting for the courier to call. The darling device is back in its original box and I'm feeling a hole in my life.

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Update (19th August, 3.30pm): My replacement iPad has just been delivered. Oh joy!

CELT supports the Rahoon Youth Project Multimedia Camp

Fiona Concannon and I were delighted to participate in the Rahoon Youth Project Multimedia Camp which was held in NUIG Galway from July 19 - 23.

Coordinator Kerry E'lyn Larkin kindly asked if we could facilitate a Web 2.0 session as part of an action-packed schedule incorporating audio, video, digital literacy and safety, as well as working with NUIG's Flirt FM.

The 13-15 year-old students were amazingly talented and motivated (thanks to the programme and support offered by Kerry and her team), and we were delighted provide the students with a chance to use clickers, flip cameras and post to a private blog online. We also gave them a whistle-stop tour of the CELT recording and production facilities to add a bit of 'wow' factor to the proceedings.

Well done to one and all involved. We are looking forward to next year's Multimedia Camp already!

Using Turnitin with large classes to support student writing

Back in June I gave a presentation at the 4th International Plagiarism Conference on using Turnitin with large classes to support student writing. The full paper and the powerpoint presentation are now available on the conference website.

The paper describes a pilot study in 2008-2009 involving 3 case studies with large undergraduate student groups, from 120 to 600 students, and addresses the use of Turnitin to support student writing and offer formative feedback, rather than focus purely on plagiarism detection.

Using Turnitin with such large student groups (in 2009-2010 we successfully used it with a class of 950 students) really requires that Turnitin be integrated into the VLE, allowing the students self-submit their work. At NUI Galway, we are using Blackboard, which in turn is integrated with our student records system, thus reducing the administrative overload for staff.

We found that Turnitin can be used to support academic staff in their teaching and assessment. Some of the initial motivation for using Turnitin was that staff were concerned about perceived levels of cut-and-paste plagiarism and collusion within the student groups. With multiple tutorial groups and large numbers of postgraduate tutors, this can be difficult to manage across large cohorts of students. The case studies found that, using Turnitin, tutors were able to identify problems with referencing, to support plagiarism detection, to identify excellent work, and to raise issues generally around student writing. For course co-ordinators there was better visibility into the student group as a whole.

In one (first year) student group, where students were given access to their originality reports for draft submissions and could use them to improve the final versions of submitted work, Turnitin was found to be particularly useful to highlight the importance of originality, and as a way of helping students understand what is expected of them at University level.

The role of the teaching team in each of the case studies was vital to the success of the intervention. Each case-study was academic-driven, brought into the classroom as part of the assessment practice, and not treated as an add-on to teach literacy skills. In each case, teaching teams were brought together to agree a consistent approach to dealing with academic integrity within the discipline. In this way academic honesty became a shared value across the teaching team, giving a consistent message to students.

We found that the best results followed where Turnitin was not being used purely for plagiarism detection. In fact, contrary to our initial expectations, there was little evidence to suggest that its use was a successful deterrent. Rather, it supported the discourse around good writing skills and gave an opportunity to raise awareness of academic writing within the classroom.

I am now interviewing academic staff who used Turnitin in 2009-2010, in the second year of the study. Some of these were involved in the original case studies, and it is interesting to get their perspectives after a second year.

I'm hoping to update the case studies and also describe how Grademark has been used within the discipline of English to facilitate online grading of student work. Cath Ellis has written a very good post of her experiences with Grademark. Her observations certainly match with our experiences here.

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