The idea of iVideos connects with a couple of strands of work that I have been involved in. These include, the TPACK framework, and the learning by design approach. We have written about this in a variety of articles but the specific one that Dr. Kearney points to is:

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Siebenthal, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. In M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press.

In this article we argue that there is great value in having teachers engage in such creative, design tasks since it allows them to “transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics.” Some evidence of this comes from a blog post by Dr. Kearney, based on his experience of having his students create their own iVideos. He says that,

We noted a high degree of emotional investment, motivation and interest in these tasks amongst our student teachers and postulate that these outcomes were a catalyst in their TPACK development. [You can read the entire blog post here.]

As in the previous year, Dr. Kearney’s students have been busy working on working on a new set of videos for 2011. In this years edition students created iVideos in three main areas related to the use of ICT in education. These topics include, Teacher professional learning; Curriculum; and Social, Ethical, Legal and Equity issues around ICT. There are over 2 dozen videos on the site and you can access them by going to

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/

Incidentally, you can see last year’s videos by following this link

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/2010-ivideos

Click the links above to see the these iVideos and, if possible, take a moment to write a comment or response to the videos. It will take you just a few minutes of your time but I know this will be greatly appreciated by the students.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.” – Jim Jarmusch

More Jim Jarmusch quotes here. Nice design of a layout for this quote here. Photo credit Emily Smith from flickr.

One of the interesting points he makes about the Content ID technology that YouTube uses to identify copyright infringement. As he says:

At its heart, Content ID is like a souped-up version of the FBI’s fingerprinting database. The entertainment industry keeps sending YouTube new reference files for movies, TV shows, songs, video games, and other content. YouTube scans every new upload and the millions of videos in its database against each of these files. David King, a YouTube product manager, told me that the system can find extremely fuzzy matches. It can spot when a copyrighted video has been transformed in some way by an uploader—for instance, it can finger a basketball game even if you pause, rewind, and then replay a clip from it, and it can identify Eric Cartman if you record a clip of  South Park by holding your camera up to your TV.

How amazing is that! Also Manjoo points out that one of the smartest things that Constantin films could have done is take advantage of this free publicity to run advertisements for the original movie/DVD. As Manjoo says,

Constantin never bothered to exercise its rights to run ads on the Downfall clips… according to YouTube, the vast majority of content owners who take part in Content ID are now recouping revenue from videos rather than pulling them down. Constantin would have earned a lot of money—not to mention avoided a lot of bad publicity—had it done the same thing.

It appears that some of the clips have started coming back, as users complain about their videos being taken down. YouTube policy automatically posts videos back if a copyright infringement claim is contested.

Personally, this has been a video / remix that has already given me hours of entertainment. It is a simple idea but with great potential and a wonderful example of the creative possibilities of giving people the opportunity to appropriate, mix and publish media.

I recommend reading the full thing but here is a quote that sort of captures his vision (though there is more, much more). Here is a great quote:

WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created.

In another section he speaks of the page that results when you do a Google search for the word “journalism.”

Who is the “author” of this page? There are, in all likelihood, thousands of them. It has been constructed, algorithmically, by remixing small snippets of text from diverse sources, with diverse goals, and transformed into something categorically different and genuinely valuable. In the center column, we have short snippets of text written by ten individuals or groups, though of course, Google reports that it has 32 million more snippets to survey if we want to keep clicking. The selection of these initial ten links is itself dependant on millions of other snippets of text that link to these and other journalism-related pages on the Web. Along the right side of the page, we have short snippets of text written by five advertisers, mostly journalism schools as it happens, though they are in a silent competition with other snippets of text created by other advertisers bidding to be on this page. And then we have the text in the search field, created by me, which summons this entire network of text together in a fraction of a second.

What you see on this page is, in a very real sense, textual play: the recombining of words into new forms and associations that their original creators never dreamed of. But what separates it from the textual play that I was earnestly studying twenty years ago is the fact that it has engendered a two hundred billion dollar business.

What is the relationship of information technology and cognition? What about human creativity? What role does technology play, if any, in getting us to be less or more creative?

One aspect of creativity that is often discussed with reference to technology is that we live in a culture of remixing. This was brought home to me recently while reading an article in the NYTimes titled Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism, where Helene Hegemann’s award willing bestseller (Axolotl Roadkill) was shown to be plagiarized from other books and blogs. What was interesting was what the author had to say about this. After apologizing for not being more forthcoming about the sources of her ideas, Hegemann defended herself as being

… the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

Incidentally, I took this quote from Hagemann and made if my Facebook update. It was interesting to see just how many people agreed with it (either by pushing the “Like” button, or by actually commenting on my status), and that bothered me somewhat – because I wasn’t sure I totally agreed with it. As an academic I make a living through my ideas – and their value comes from other people quoting and citing me. No citations, no tenure, if you know what I mean! I have also taken a very public stand against plagiarism on this very blog by catching and publicly humiliating a plagiarist. (An overview of that entire saga can be found here).

On the other hand I have also indulged in the pleasures of remixing. See this spoof of Harry Potter (Hari Puttar & the Magic Wand on Youtube) that I had created with my kids a couple of years ago. I have also written positively about initiatives that allow students to “cheat” (by using the Web) during exams. I would be the last person to claim that there is something like true creativity – as in an idea that never existed before. I have read enough of the creativity research (psychological and historical) to know that ideas always emerge from older ideas, that have been remixed together. In that sense our brain is the ultimate “remixer.”

That said, we have to agree that actual physical remixing (as opposed to the “in brain remixing”) has become vastly easier with the advent of digital technologies. In that sense, Hagemann is right, we live in a remix culture – a culture where mixing and matching from diverse sources leads to creative products. And creating such remixes is becoming easier by the day.

And living in the remix culture has consequences of how we think about authorship, and creativity.

But I think there is more to it than just the ability to “cut and paste” from existing media (be it print or music or video). The kinds of tools we have today can take us one step further – towards computers becoming partners in the creative activity itself. For instance read this post Exploring visual space with mathematics where I argue that “a designer with a good visual sense AND a knowledge of programming and mathematics is going to be much more efficient and generative (in terms of total ideas) than one with just the former.”

All of these issues came to a head (in my mind at least) when I read this absolutely fascinating article Triumph of the Cyborg Composer which profiles composer David Cope and his experiments with writing computer programs that create original music. This article is a must-read for anybody interested in issues of creativity and technology, so go ahead, click on the link above, and come back here when you are done. More relevant to the argument being made here is what David Cope says about what his experiments with digital creativity had led him to believe about all creativity. As the article says,

In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination…

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

So who makes the music? This is what Cope says in answer to that question:

He just thinks of her as a tool. Everything Emmy created, she created because of software he devised. If Cope had infinite time, he could have written 5,000 Bach-style chorales. The program just did it much faster.

“All the computer is is just an extension of me,” Cope says. “They’re nothing but wonderfully organized shovels. I wouldn’t give credit to the shovel for digging the hole. Would you?”

As it turns out, Cope in a while got tired of his first program, successful though it was in composing pieces in the style of several composers (including himself). He felt that these compositions were not “special” enough. So he deleted the software and the databases he had generated… and began experimenting with a different kind of virtual composer. This time he wanted to build something “with its own personality.” This program

… would write music in an odd sort of way. Instead of spitting out a full score, it converses with Cope through the keyboard and mouse. He asks it a musical question, feeding in some compositions or a musical phrase. The program responds with its own musical statement. He says “yes” or “no,” and he’ll send it more information and then look at the output. The program builds what’s called an association network — certain musical statements and relationships between notes are weighted as “good,” others as “bad.” Eventually, the exchange produces a score, either in sections or as one long piece…

He compares the process to a sculptor who chops raw shapes out of a block of marble before he teases out the details. Using quick-and-dirty programs as an extension of his brain has made him extraordinarily prolific. It’s a process close to what he was hoping for back when he first started working on software to save him from composer’s block.

These partnerships, to me herald a new form of human-computer partnership. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the future.

I would like to end with an example (far simpler than David Cope’s programs) that I have been involved with. A few years ago my partner in crime, Matt Koehler and I wrote a computer program, called Inverso, to create Haikus. Essentially, Inverso was a simple (almost trivial) computer program that created haiku-like poems by randomly combining pre-existing lines of poetry and presenting them dynamically in different fonts and layouts (again randomly selected from a range of possible fonts and layouts). Being academics we also wrote a journal article about it in which we situated Inverso in a historical frame that looked at the role of randomness in creative works and questioned how it problematized issues of authorship and creativity. You can read the article here:

Koehler, M. J., Mishra, P. (2002). Art from randomness. How Inverso uses chance, to create haiku. Interactive Multimedia Electronic Journal of Computer-Enhanced Learning. Note: You will need the ADOBE Shockwave plugin to view Inverso, which you can get as a free download from here.

Students in my Learning Technology by Design seminar read this article and are asked to discuss the following question (paraphrased slightly for this posting):

Inverso writes poetry by reordering words and as Douglas Crimp says in his book On the Museum’s Ruins (1993, p. 71), “the artist invents nothing. He or she only uses, manipulates, displaces, reformulates, repositions what history has provided.” Are we creating something new when we design existing knowledge in a new way, or just using standard design conventions to organize and present? Who would you credit with authorship of a poem created through Inverso? And finally, how does this affect the way you might view yourself as the author of your project web sites (or your lesson plans)? What does this mean for your role as a designer of learning?

Often when we speak of art we describe it as “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.” What we mean by this is that the the piece of music is more than merely placing individual notes and pauses one after the other.  There is a certain integrity and completeness to a creative work that goes beyond the mechanical – that we often consider as being mystical or beyond reason. However, it appears that our view of the mechanical as being dull or uncreative may not be the entirely correct. Maybe the what we need to be asking (taking an idea from Douglas Hofstadter’s book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) is whether “the soul is greater than the hum of its parts?”

I think as we continue to work with (and co-evolve) with our machines, these questions regarding originality and authenticity will continue to trouble us. They will also provide insights into the very nature of creativity – even while, maybe, revealing its mechanical nature. I will let Cope have the last word:

“The question,” Cope says, “isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”

Hmm…

As readers of the blog know, Matt Koehler and I work together quite a lot. In fact we just rotate author-order in our papers since it is hard to keep track of individual contributions. (I would like to claim that the cool ideas are mine – but again he is bigger and stronger than me so I don’t often do that, at least not any more.) We are also huge fans of Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (which consists of 4 books, something that makes perfect sense if you have ever read Adams). Anyway, a bunch of years ago we decided that we needed to act on our love for this man, and his writings, by citing him in an academic paper. To our great pride, we did it! In fact we started the article with a citation to Adams.

Here is a citation to the article…

Koehler, M. J., Mishra, P., Hershey, K., & Peruski, L. (2004). With a little help from your students: A new model for faculty development and online course design. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 12(1), 25-55.

… and this is how the article began!

The late Douglas Adams (1997), author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, uncovered an important principle relevant to educational technology—The Someone Else’s Problem (SEP) field. The SEP is a fictional technology that can make something “virtually invisible” because we think it is somebody else’s problem. It is not that the object in question really vanishes. It does not. It may in fact even catch you by surprise out of the corner of your eye. The idea of the SEP is that once we consider something as being outside of the arena of our concerns, that something, for all practical purposes, ceases to exist.

Douglas Adams, image credit National Library Board, Singapore

How cool is that! Now, it turns out that our connections with Adams are even deeper than we knew. Recently we wrote another article…

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2009, May). Too Cool for School? No Way! Learning & Leading with Technology, (36)7. 14-18. [PDF download].

… where we wrote the following:

Someone once suggested that technology is all the new stuff that appeared after we were born! The stuff that was around before we arrived on the planet we often take as a given. For instance, to most of us a car is not really a technology, while a website is. To children born in the 1990’s neither cars nor websites are examples of technology, iPods and Wii gaming systems are.

Image credit, from littledan77

Now I remember writing this sentence (or do remember first reading it in Matt’s draft?). The point is that when we wrote “Someone once suggested…” we didn’t really think that someone had suggested it. That was just a rhetorical move, a way of sounding credible and being modest all at the same time. But guess what? Douglas Adams did say something exactly like this – only better. In his last book…

Adams, D. (2002). The salmon of doubt: Hitchhiking the galaxy one last time. New York: Harmony Books.

… which is actually a collection of pieces he had written here and there I came across the following:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.  (p. 95).

Isn’t that just perfect! I now have another cool quote to use from Douglas Adams, and I don’t have to go the wimpy “Someone once suggested…” route.

The problem is that, I would still like Matt and me to take credit for this, I mean, so what if Douglas Adams wrote this years ago!, we came up with it independently (our weasel language notwithstanding).  My colleague Patrick Dickson has a phrase he uses that I think may help solve our problem. According to him, we deserve full credit for the idea, because Adams committed “anticipatory plagiarism.” Dickson defines Anticipatory Plagiarism as occuring “when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.”

Somewhat appropriately, and for some strange reason, the Interwebs claim that this definition of “anticipatory plagiarism” was  first written by Robert Merton (for instance see this page). It is any surprise that Dickson is claiming anticipatory plagiarism by Merton!

Imaginary Friend From Terry Lynch’s Math Jokes Page

The Mathematical i

The negative numbers were full of dismay
We have no roots, they were heard to  say
What, they went on, would be the fruit
of trying to find our square root?

Matters seem to be getting out of hand
Since the negatives have taken a stand,
On the fact that positives have two roots, while they have none
They plead, would it have killed anybody to give us just one?
The square roots of 4 are + and – 2! As for -4? How unfair,
He has none! None at all. Do the math gods even care?

This lack of roots, our value does undermine
Is it some sinister plan, ‘cos we’re on the left of the number-line?
Among the more irrational negatives, one even heard cries
It is time, they said, it is time, to radicalize!!

Hearing this non-stop (somewhat justified) negativity
The mathematicians approached the problem with levity
And suggested a solution, kinda cute and fun
Lets rename, they said, the square root of minus 1!
In essence lets re-define the problem away, on the sly
by just calling this number (whatever it may be) i.

i times itself would be one with an negative sign
Every negative could now say, a square root is mine!
This simple move would provide the number -36
With two roots, + & – 6i, what an awesome fix!

The positives grumbled, what could be dumber
Than this silly imaginary number
But it was too late, much too late you see
To bottle this rather strange mathematical genie
i was now a part of the the symbolic gentry
Finding lots of use in, of all places, trigonometry.
With time i began its muscles to flex
extending the plane, making it complex!

In fact, hanging out with the likes of e and Pi
i got bolder, no longer no longer hesitant and shy.
And combined to form equations bold and profound
That even today, do not cease to astound.

Consider for a moment the equation
e to the power Pi i plus 1
It was Euler who first saw, how these variable react
To come up with a beautiful mathematical fact,
To total up to, (surprise) the number zero.
Could we have done it without our little imaginary hero?
Even today Euler’s insight keeps math-lovers in thrall
One equation to rule them all.

So if you want to perceive the value of this little guy
I guess you have to just develop your mathematical i.
It may also help you remember how often we forget to see
The significance, to human life, of the imaginary.

(e to the power Pi i plus one = zero)

is maybe the most elegant equation in mathematics. As a page on MathForum states, in this equation:

… you combine the five big constants in mathematics: 0, 1, i, Pi, and e. You also get the three main operations: +, *, and exponentiation. And you get the notion of equality, which is so key in mathematics.

And I just discovered a wonderful page that attempts to explain this equation in plain English, check out Understanding Without Proof.

Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying:

Do you have any words of wisdom or resources on how to create appropriate questions? This sounds great, but easier said than done in my humble opinion.

I started writing a response to his comment, but as I wrote on, I realized that it was better as a post in its own right. So here it is…
Patrick, I agree that this is not easy, at least not as easy as pulling out a set of multiple choice questions. However, it is not all that hard either. What we need to do as educators is look for open-ended questions, questions that test for understanding require reflection on the part of the learner. For instance in the courses I teach here at MSU (undergrad and grad level) we strive hard to develop assessments that students of this nature. There are many examples I can give but here’s one.

In a fully-online undergrad course on educational psychology we ask students to view a series of video clips taken from popular movies and documentaries that deal with different aspects of learning. This happens at the very beginning of the semester (sometime in the first week or two). Students are then asked to write their response to these clips speaking to “what they see” that is of educational relevance.

Students then go through the semester and then at the end of the semester are asked to do this again. This time the comments they made the first time around are hidden from them. Then we reveal what they had written the first time around. They are then asked to go back and read what they had written the first time around (as well as what other students had written). Finally, they write a response discussing what has changed in “what they see” – providing examples from their own writing and those of their classmates.

This task – spread out as it is over a semester – does a bunch of things. First, it allows us to see how much students have learned. If there is no significant difference between what they wrote the first time and the second, it is clear that not much learning has happened. Second, and more important, this is not something we need to tell them. They can see it for themselves, particularly when they compare it to what their classmates have written.

Now we could give them an end of semester exam that asks them all kinds of questions about different theories of learning and development – but don’t you think this is much better?

As for using (or not using) the Internet… it is not an issue at all. There is nothing they can do to cheat to find the right answer. They can use the Internet (and we recommend that they do) to reference and justify what they write but that is neither here nor there. If they don’t “see” the clips through ed-psych eyes, they won’t know what to search for in the first place.

An important question here is whether this assignment will  fit for each and every course we teach? No way. But that is what makes this interesting to me as an educator. These assessments have to emerge from the instructors deep understanding of course content and course goals. We need to keep asking ourselves what do we want our students to take away from this class – and try develop assessments to match. In this class, our goal is the help students develop an ed-psych way of thinking and looking at the world and this assignment does that, I think. As we have written in our TPACK related work, there is no general solution to the problems of teaching. Solutions are local, unique and depend on finding the “sweet spot” (so to speak) that connects content, technology and pedagogy. This solution works best in an online course, it would have to be modified somewhat in a face to face version (particularly the part where students can read all of the other students’ responses). Can it be done? Sure. Will it be the same? Not really. This is where teacher creativity and innovation comes in.

I must add that this is not the only assignment in this class. There is a book review, an interview of an educator and a bunch of others. So all of these work together to help us (and them) develop a better understanding of all the ideas we cover in the class.

Image: Wikimedia

Dr. Punya Mishra of Michigan State University asks DePaul faculty to consider the role of the professor’s identity (or persona) in course design. What are the challenges, benefits –and limits — of bringing personal experiences, values and interests into one’s teaching? We want our students to see us as “being knowledgeable yet accessible, wise but funny, cerebral but warm, benevolent and yet firm.” How can we do this in an age where we are increasingly communicating via electronic media that alter, extend and/or challenge the teacher’s identity?

The sequence continued as follows: Emailing a plagiarist | Plagiarism, note to Root-Bernstein’s and Creativity Portal | David Jiles plagiarism issue, update | Plagiarism, update II | Update III | Update IV | Update V

This has been an interesting experience – both in terms of tracking these issues down and seeing people’s responses to my blogging about it. Some quick updates:

First, almost all of David Jiles Ph.D.’s writings (at least those I had found on the web) have been pulled off. Some people did it just on reading my postings, while others did it after getting the Root-Bernstein’s book and checking for themselves. Those who did the latter were blown away by the extent of the plagiarism. I am not kidding when I say that this is the most blatant plagiarism I have ever (and I mean, ever) come across.

Second, most websites chose to merely delete the offending passages (as I said, usually taking me at my word, which is kind of funny given that that is how they had gotten fooled in the first place, taking someone who sent them a note at his word!). The only exception is the Young Bright Minds & Inventors Academy, who have been skeptical of my statements, and only upon realizing that what I had written was just the tip of the iceberg, did they take action. They did that in a transparent manner, posting a note on their front page (here).

Third, the book authored by David Jiles, Ph.D., on Lulu Press has been pulled off. It appears that Lulu press is refusing to reveal the contact information (apart from the gmail address which was publicly available) of Dr. Jiles. However, this is not something I have pursued, I just got this information second hand.

Fourth, I now have with me copies of lots more articles that Dr. Jiles was trying to get published. This adds to all the other articles I had downloaded on to my computer.

Finally, I have some possible background information about Dr. Jiles, that I am not revealing at this time. Anyway my interest was never in tracking him down. My goal was to have these pieces removed from public view, and due credit be given to the real authors, and I think in that I have been successful. As to whether Dr. Jiles should be charged legally I leave to others, the authors, the website owners who were directly harmed by his cheating behavior.

All in all this has been an interesting experience – and one that I have learned quite a bit from. I really wish I didn’t have to do it – but once the scope of the copying became clear there was no way one could let it go.

I include the complete email below (with her permission). What has been impressive, in my mind, is Rita’s approach to this entire mess. Not seeking to place blame (or cast aspersions) where they are not due, Rita has shown a transparency and a willingness to learn from this experience that speaks volumes to her open-mindedness. Isn’t this, at least to a large extent, what creativity and a creative mind-set is all about? This is, of course, in sharp contrast to some of the other emails I have been receiving from people who had hosted articles by Dr. Jiles.

Rita read my email and posting, but did not take my word for it. For all that she knew, I could be the fraud, seeking vendetta against David Jiles, Ph.D. for some reason. She ordered the Sparks of Genius book and checked it against Dr. Jiles’ writing and came to the same conclusion I did. But that’s not all. She will be pulling all of Dr. Jiles’ articles from her site AND will be adding a note and a link to my website about this unfortunate incident. She will mention it in her weekly newsletter and add a link there as well.

What a contrast to others who have attempted to merely sweep this issue under the carpet, or better still cast my actions as being nothing but “naming and shaming.” As she said in another email to me, ” If there is a wrong doing – it needs to be addressed and furthermore, justice claimed.”

In conclusion, I must say that if there is anything good that has come of this, as far as I am personally concerned, it is getting to know that people like Rita exist. She is truly deserving of my thanks.

For the record here is the email that she sent to me:

Punya,

I have double checked “Sparks of Genius” with the text from Dr. Jiles, and YES, you are right! Your findings are indeed incredible and mind-boggling!

I have attached some more articles from Dr. Jiles for your further research. In the Articles.DOC attachment are some additional articles then the once [sic] you compared along the book from the Root-Bernsteins.

[I have added these documents, which I have not had the time to read, to my list of downloaded files: Punya]

All articles from Dr. Jiles will be taken down from my website along with a note and link to your website. In addition, I will mention it in my weekly newsletter and put your link there as well.

I will also email Dr. Jiles to express my utter bewilderment and disappointment by your findings along with my encouragement to clarify things and to take a stand to his criminal actions. According to the Bible we’re all sinners in the one or other way and fallen short; it’s the confession of the wrong doing and bringing things in order again.

Thank you again for taking the time to research this all and for your devotion to not just sweep this under the carpet! May the LORD bless you for all your effort!

Please let me know of the further development. Thank you already.

Have a good day,
Rita

Just a couple of points. First, I have not received the email they sent me (I do not question the fact that they did send it) – just that I did not receive it. I checked my log again and did not find it.

Second, the comment suggests that I have been in a “rush to judgment” and have assumed that everybody is in this “plagiaristic conspiracy ring.” That is just not true. I have not blamed anybody but David Jiles Ph.D. and even there I have asked him to offer his take on what has happened.

Third, they say that their response was “pretty good for an average dot com Web community not in the business of peer-reviewing articles for professional publications (nor expected).” I am not sure about that. I think in the age of Google the least we can do is check up on this person – get a copy of their vita or whatever. Look at their profile on Linked in? Was that done? I don’t know.

But that is neither here nor there.

What is important in all this is what is NOT being talked about. In all this I see no concern on the part of the “average dot com Web community” to the rights of the the Root-Bernsteins.’ Their work has been completely ripped off and these people have been (inadvertently or whatever) party to this. Yet, I hear no one speak to how their life’s work has been stolen.

So I must say that the sentence, that I “have done a fine job in quickly naming and shaming innocent parties to the ‘deception’ of this author” is the one that bothered me somewhat. It is kind of ironic that protecting the rights of content creators is seen as being an unkind act.

I am sorry I did not receive the note from Chris at Creativity Portal. I would have quickly noted that they were acting on this. Let this be a statement to that effect. That is indeed the fair thing to do.

It is not clear to me what “settled” means. I doubt that David Jiles Ph.D. is emailing me (or anybody else) anytime soon (despite my shout out to him to clear up any misconceptions we may have).

I find this response somewhat problematic, akin to sweeping the issue under the carpet and an unwillingness to engage with the core problem – that of how we “verify” someone’s credentials and quality of work in a world where more and more connections we make are mediated by technology. How do web-based organizations that depend on outsiders to develop content make these decisions? Clearly not by just ignoring the issue, and surely not by dealing with it as if it were SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem).

(Please note the David Jiles referred to in these posts is NOT Professor David Jiles of Iowa State University and Cardiff University.) 

I have heard back from some of the websites that had hosted his articles. [Copies of the email I sent can be found here.]

The first note was from Brain Bank, and they quite clearly demonstrated that they were as much a victim of this as everybody else, and that they would be removing these articles as soon as possible.

I haven’t heard back from Creativity-Portal (a site that contained the largest repository of articles by David Jiles, Ph.D.) but a visit to their website today shows that they have deleted all the webpages that had these writings. Funnily enough, a web search on their site still lists these articles. I guess Google will take care of it over time.

I also received a very nice note back from Young Bright Minds and Inventors Academy showing concern at what I had written but also not willing to take me at face value. They are ordering the Sparks of Genius book to check the content for themselves. I applaud them for that.

I have been asked by some to remove links to their websites because they feel that this in some way implicates them in the scandal. I said that I would not do that. I think it is important that a web-trace of this misconduct be maintained. Providing a link to a site that for whatever reason was tricked by David Jiles Ph.D. is not to apportion blame. I believe that we need an acceptance of the fact that anybody and everybody can be screwed over by any ethically challenged person and that identifying episodes such as these are really important. If there is no record of this, David Jiles Ph.D. will do it again, with someone else.

For this reason the Creativity Portal’s decision to remove all traces of Dr. Jiles’ text from their site, without acknowledgment of their errors is problematic. The response of the Young Bright Minds and Inventors Academy seems so much more appropriate. They have noted what I have written but are willing to go the extra step to check for themselves. We need more organizations willing to take this stance – rather than sweep it all under the carpet.

Hang in there… hopefully more updates coming soon.