Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

If you haven't seen The Five Stages of Grading, I heartily recommend it.

As I grade my students' first lengthy assignment, I am relieved, not for the first time, at how difficult it would be to plagiarize an assignment in my class. Close to impossible for this assignment, and difficult though possible for the final paper.

It's not that I suspect any of my students would plagiarize -- far from it! -- but I am relieved not to have to struggle with that fear.

On one mailing list which I'm subscribed, there is currently an active discussion going on about how the desire to prevent plagiarizing in computer science classes leads to faculty making rules that make it difficult to have any kind of collaborative learning. And I empathize with both faculty and students in that dilemma. It's become so much easier to cheat in the age of the Internet, and in computer science I can't imagine how either faculty or students cope with negotiating cheating in the new era. As an adult programmer, it's accepted and encouraged practice to solve specific problems by copying someone else's code and modifying it to meet your needs. Hell, that's the principle of FLOSS, right there. But with students, you do need to teach them how to write algorithms and solve problems themselves. I'm not saying it's impossible to negotiate that terrain, but it's difficult.

So I'm grateful once again that the risk of plagiarism is not one I need to worry about. When I look at a student paper that's better than I expected that student's work to be, I can be unreservedly pleased. And these papers are better than I had expected, for first papers. And so I am, unreservedly, pleased.

Nice to remember that there are joys from grading.

Although one of them is the cat on my lap.

This weekend, I attended Boston's first Accessibility Unconference. I expected to be going only for the networking opportunity, but I found the whole experience fabulous. Certainly there were some frustrations -- the location, for example, could have been more accessible by public transit. But overall, it was a great day.

I spoke about Dreamwidth, not surprisingly. Just as others have talked about the rich developer community that's built when you provide a development environment which is welcoming to women and encouraging to newbies, I talked about the accessibility gains that you get from creating a nurturing environment in your open-source community for people with disabilities. I talked about how being encouraging not just developers with disabilities but also newbies with disabilities made it more likely for your project to have a rich and motivated pool of testers using adaptive technology -- which prompted one participant to say something along the lines of, "you should rent those people out; everybody wants actual disabled testers!"

Other people's talks were also compelling. Jeanette Beal talked about low tech solutions for improving independent living, and gave us all a good reminder that adaptive technology isn't all about Web 2.0. I was sad the session on HTML 5 video was pretty brief, although that was all of our faults, because it shared a session with Flash video and we all asked too many questions of the people discussing Flash.

And the networking was nothing to sneeze at, either. I was thrilled to finally meet the blogger behind Dis/positional. I had long, enlightening talks with Judy Brewer (who was puzzled by my starry eyes) and Mike Gorse (lightvortex), a developer who works on Gnome accessibility. I learned that Patrick Timony, adaptive technology librarian at the DC public Library, is going to be presenting at SAA, and I promised to send those of my coworkers who will be attending the conference to talk to him. I didn't have enough time to talk to him about his interesting ideas about accessibility and archives, but I made the connection!

Above all, I was overwhelmed with being surrounded by more professionals with disabilities than I had ever in my life met offline. More programmers with disabilities. More female programmers with disabilities. At one point I was hard pressed not to start crying. Dreamwidth has been great for introducing me to other professionals, other techies, other female professionals and female techies disabilities. But I underestimated the emotional impact of being surrounded by that many of us in one room.

(ETA: One glorious moment happened when an attendee of the conference was chatting with me (note that my disability is mostly invisible) and she said "I see a lot of visually impaired people here. Are they here to learn about what kind of adaptive technologies are available?" And I responded, "No, they are mostly programmers and accessibility professionals," and she looked thoroughly taken aback. I think my little heart grew three sizes.)