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Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2014

 

Introduction to the 2014 Annual

by Clancy Ratliff

This issue marks ten years since the Intellectual Property Caucus and Intellectual Property Committee started publishing the CCCC-IP Annual. I’m proud to say that it has steadily grown since the first issue. While I do not have data about our readership, I can say that the number of articles has increased over time:

2005: three articles
2006: four articles
2007: six articles
2008: four articles
2009: nine articles
2010: nine articles
2011: six articles
2012: seven articles
2013: seven articles
2014 – this year’s issue: ten articles

We have also made progress as a field in our thinking about authorship, copyright, and intellectual property, particularly in the area of open access. At the March 2015 meeting of the CCCC-IP Caucus, Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), spoke to us about several developments in open access research and publishing. She mentioned the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) as the most progressive standard of open access, allowing not only copying and distribution of published research, but the uses now possible with new research methods enabled by software code, such as data visualization and topic modeling. For fully open access, as well as for accessibility (for example, creating audio recordings of the CCCC-IP Annual for people with particular disabilities) derivative works should be allowed. Since 2007, we have used the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Use-No Derivative Works license, which is really only one step up from fair use: readers simply had permission to copy and distribute the full CCCC-IP Annual. We have now decided, though, to adopt a CC-BY license.

The Caucus and the Committee continue to work to keep the CCCC membership informed about intellectual property issues that work in favor of, or against, the interests of students and teachers, and readers and writers more generally. We recently applied for and received status as a CCCC Standing Group, and at the 2014 CCCC, we presented a panel about the history of the Caucus and our accomplishments. Many, many articles, book chapters, books, and special issues of journals have come out of Caucus meetings, as well as campus-specific advocacy. However, we still have work to do on several fronts, both legal and pedagogical. One of particular interest to me is plagiarism detection services, which I want to re-frame, as we go into the second half of 2015, as automated plagiarism detection. The Caucus proposed a CCCC resolution about the use of plagiarism detection services, which was passed in 2013:

Whereas CCCC does not endorse PDSs;

Whereas plagiarism detection services can compromise academic integrity by potentially undermining students’ agency as writers, treating all students as always already plagiarists, creating a hostile learning environment, shifting the responsibility of identifying and interpreting source misuse from teachers to technology, and compelling students to agree to licensing agreements that threaten their privacy and rights to their own intellectual property;

Whereas plagiarism detection services potentially negatively change the role of the writing teacher; construct ill-conceived notions of originality and writing; disavow the complexities of writing in and with networked, digital technologies; and treat students as non-writers; and

Whereas composition teacher-scholars can intervene and combat the potential negative influences of PDSs by educating colleagues about the realities of plagiarism and the troubling outcomes of using PDSs; advocating actively against the adoption of such services; modeling and sharing ideas for productive writing pedagogy; and conducting research into alternative pedagogical strategies to address plagiarism, including honor codes and process pedagogy;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the Conference on College Composition and Communication commends institutions who offer sound pedagogical alternatives to the use of PDSs and encourages institutions who use PDSs to implement practices that are in the best interest of their students, including notifying students at the beginning of the term that the service will be used; providing students a non-coercive and convenient opt-out process; and inviting students to submit drafts to the service before turning in final text.

While the above resolution represents what many of us agree to be the case about plagiarism detection services, of which Turnitin is the main PDS provider, there is also this grim but correct observation from Rebecca Moore Howard, posted on the Writing Program Administration listserv (emphasis in original):

Turnitin has become like abortion and the death penalty: A topic on which people are making decisions based on deeply held beliefs inaccessible to logos. I visit faculties at several campuses every year, and in each audience are instructors who cannot imagine teaching without Turnitin. I am in a post-debate state with such people, unwilling any longer to search for the common ground on which we will exchange principles and consider possibilities, at the end of which these folks will return to Mother Turnitin against all reason. I just tell folks why I don’t use it, and turn to another topic. No one has ever said to me, “You know, I thought about what you said, and I changed my practice.” No one.

IIn tandem with the discourse about Turnitin is the discourse about the Common Core State Standards Initiative and its assessments of writing, which according to some reports are set to use AES, or Automated Essay Scoring. Teachers and administrators in K-12 and higher education, as well as students and parents, have expressed serious concerns about this plan. I see an opportunity to re-frame plagiarism detection services in order to show what those of us studying intellectual property and composition have understood for years: that AES and PDS are basically the same – artificial reading that replaces quality instruction and contextualized feedback on student writing. Hence I propose automated plagiarism detection. Also, because I included image macros (known more commonly as memes, though these are only one kind of meme) in the introduction of last year’s CCCC-IP Annual, I will end with these two image macros I created for the occasion. Though facetious, they are yet a potent way to communicate a point.

    

Table of Contents
 1 Introduction to the 2014 CCCC-IP Annual
Clancy Ratliff
 5 Plagiarism and PTSD: The Case of Senator John Walsh’s Plagiarized Paper
Steven Engel, Kerry Howell, Jacklene Johnson, and Jessica McGinnis
 11 What We Can Learn from Two Plagiarism Accusations in 2014: Slavoj Žižek’s and Nic Pizzolatto’s Summer Scandals
Wendy Warren Austin
18 3D Printing and Patent Theft: New Challenges to the Creative Commons
Chet Breaux
 21 Keep on Keeping On: Georgia State Fair Use Case Faces a New Metric for Assessing Fair Use
Jeffrey R. Galin
30 Open Data, Environmental Conservation, and the Digital Humanities: Mapping the Mangroves
Amy D. Propen
 34 Another Piece in the Open-Access Puzzle: The California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB609)
Karen Lunsford
 38 Will Taylor Swift and Spotify Ever Get Back Together?
Laurie Cubbison
 42 The Case of the Missing Copyright: Sherlock Holmes and the Acerbic Judge
Kim Dian Gainer
52 How the Law Can Cost Composition Instructors a Lot of Money, and What You Can Do About It: The EFF’s White Paper on Civil Penalties for Copyright Infringement
Mike Edwards
55 Review: The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014)
Traci A. Zimmerman
60 Contributors

 

Prompts, Props, and Performativity: Commemorating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Mark McBeth, Ian Barnard, Aneil Rallin, Jonathan Alexander, and Andrea A. Lunsford

 

 

Abstract:

Commemorating the lifework of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and insisting on her ongoing importance to the field of rhetoric and composition, this cluster of perverse tributes performs the spirit of Sedgwick’s own playfulness and experimentation as scholar, (creative) writer, and teacher and stages her frequent reflections on performance as an ontological project as well as performativity as a linguistic act.

Full Text

 

Authors:

Mark McBeth is an Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he has previously been Deputy Chair of the Writing Program as well as the WAC Coordinator.  His scholarly work looks at the intersections between language (composition and rhetoric), queer theory, and pedagogy.

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Aneil Rallin is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and Affiliated Faculty in the Humanities at Soka University of America. He is especially interested in experimental writing and unruly/perverse/activist rhetorics. He grew up in Bombay and lives in downtown Los Angeles. He does not drive.

Jonathan Alexander is Professor of English and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine.

Andrea Abernethy Lunsford is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English and Rosenberg Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University.  She has published twenty books and many essays. Her most recent publication, with Lisa Ede, is a collection of their essays spanning the last thirty years, Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice.  

 
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Remembering Ghosts and the Rhetoric of Collaboration: A Play and Text for Teachers and Writers

 Keith Dorwick, Bob Mayberry, Paul M. Puccio,

and Joona Smitherman Trapp

Abstract:

A collection of interwoven visual, oral, and written texts, “Remembering Ghosts and the Rhetoric of Collaboration: A Play and Text for Teachers and Writers” looks at our memories of those teachers and students who come before and after us, as both am critical essay and a play of voices that haunt us.

Full Text

Authors:Keith Dorwick, Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and editor of the online journal Technoculture, explores queer studies, drama and other hauntings. These appear as video/audio installations, as critical articles in journals such as Computers and Composition, and The Journal of Bisexuality, and as book chapters in edited collections.

Bob Mayberry is haunted by ghosts of his former self. As the former composition director at four institutions (most recently, Cal State Channel Islands, where he still teaches), he has buried many skeletons in institutional closets. When he enters a classroom, he sees ghosts. As a playwright, he just completed a project that has haunted him for 25 years—a cycle of eight plays about the Donner Party. The ghosts of those unfortunate emigrants whisper to Bob in the dark.

Paul M. Puccio is Associate Professor of English at Bloomfield College in New Jersey. He also serves as dramaturge for 4th Wall Theatre Company. His current research involves memory, ghosts, and narrative structure in musical theatre.

Joonna Smitherman Trapp is the Chair of English and Foreign Languages Department at Waynesburg University. She also co-edits the Journal of Expanded Perspectives on Learning (JAEPL). With a keen interest in the gothic, she is aware of the rhetorical power of ghostly visitors.

 
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CCC Online Issue 1.1: January 2012

The Turn to Performance


photo by Mick Orlosky
used with permission
Table of Contents

Bump Halbritter and Jenn Fishman


Daniel Anderson, Jackclyn Ngo, Sydney Stegall, and Kyle Stevens 

Mark McBeth, Ian Barnard, Aneil Rallin, Jonathan Alexander, and Andrea A. Lunsford

Keith Dorwick, Bob Mayberry, Paul M. Puccio, and Joona Smitherman Trapp 

Kevin DiPirro

Jim Henry

Jamie “Skye” Bianco

Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander

CCC Podcasts–Jeffrey M. Ringer

A conversation with Jeffrey M. Ringer, author of “Working With(in) the Logic of the Jeremiad: Responding to the Writing of Evangelical Christian Students” (11:31)

Jeffrey M. Ringer is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he directs the composition program and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric and writing. He is the author of Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse: The Religious Creativity of Evangelical Student Writers (Routledge, 2016). With Mike DePalma, he edited Mapping Christian Rhetorics: Connecting Conversations, Charting New Territories, which won the Religious Communication Association’s 2015 Book of the Year award.

 

 

 

College Composition and Communication Online

The debut, special issue of CCC Online is available NOW!

“The Turn to Performance”

guest editor: Jenn Fishman

photo by Mick Orlosky

used with permission

Editor: Bump Halbritter

Michigan State University

Email: ccconlineeditor@gmail.com

 

About CCC Online

College Composition and Communication Online publishes stand-alone webtexts comprised of digitally-mediated research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies that supports college teachers in reflecting on and improving their practices in teaching writing and that reflects the most current scholarship and theory in the field. The field of composition studies draws on research and theories from a broad range of humanistic disciplines—English studies, rhetoric, cultural studies, gay studies, gender studies, critical theory, education, technology studies, race studies, communication, philosophy of language, anthropology, sociology, and others—and from within composition and rhetoric studies, where a number of subfields have also developed, such as technical communication, computers and composition, writing across the curriculum, research practices, and the history of these fields.

CCC Podcasts–Tara Wood

A conversation with Tara Wood, author of “Cripping Time in the College Composition Classroom.” (8:57)

Tara Wood is an assistant professor of English at Rockford University, where she teaches courses in rhetoric, body studies, and gender. Her work has appeared in several essay collections and journals, including Composition Studies, Open Words: Access and English Studies, Kairos, and JAC. She has been honorably recognized by the Committee on Disability Issues in College Composition, by the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition, and by Computers and Composition Digital Press.

 

 

 

 

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