COOMs and peer feedback

I signed up for Eric Rabkin's Fantasy and SF course a while ago, partly to get some ideas for my own forthcoming fantasy course, partly to see how Coursera handle massively multiplayer open online courses (MOOCs), but mainly to have fun being a student and hanging out in the forums discussing fantasy and SF. The main thing I have learnt so far is how difficult it is to do course work on a tablet while travelling around Turkey (even the part of Turkey that tends to have Wifi in hotels). The tablet revolution is some way in the future, folks, and for once I find myself in agreement with Bill Gates: for school work you really want a good old-fashioned desktop computer.

I also learnt something about peer grading, and not just that it is a PITA to write feedback on four of your fellow students' essays on a tablet using a dodgy Wifi connection in a hotel lobby. What the Coursera experiment shows is that peer feedback (also called "peer review", but I prefer to reserve that term for academic journals) can be made practical, but it cannot be made reliable. The way it goes is that if you submit your essay by the deadline (a hurdle I failed to clear on my first essay due to the aforementioned technical problems) it gets sent to four other students, who write comments and grade it for "form" (style, grammar, organisation etc.) and "content" (basically whether it has an argument worth reading). If you fail to give feedback, your own grade is lowered (and indeed mine was, for the aforementioned technical reasons). It's actually a pretty neat system, but unsurprisingly there were plenty of complaints about it on the forums, largely from people who thought (often correctly) that their peer graders were as qualified to assess academic writing as they were to assess microcircuit design. If this were a proper credit course, then I too might have been as annoyed as some of the forum posters, but since I was doing it largely for fun, I just enjoyed bad feedback as entertainment. My favourite comment was that my essay read too much like a research paper and I would be better off finding my own voice. Unfortunately there is no way to give feedback on feedback; otherwise I would have pointed out that (a) in proper universities, essays are supposed to read somewhat like research papers, and (b) I write research papers; that is my own voice. I was also criticised for citing works the reader may not have read. Sure, when I'm reading a journal article and come across an unfamiliar citation, I put it down right away, just like I never follow a link unless it's to a website I've already looked at. Anyway, the experience has encouraged me to do more with peer feedback in my own courses but never to allow students to actually give grades.

The oddest thing, though, was the fact that some students actually plagiarised their essays, which has made Prof. Rabkin's course notorious (at least among the people who read The Chronicle of Higher Education). Why a student would plagiarise an essay on a course for which they get no credit is puzzling. I suppose there are a few who plan to put the course on their CV, but that doesn't seem a big enough incentive to plagiarise. It's not as though someone is going to give you a job because you took an online course in fantasy and science fiction. Some people suggested in the forums that it was the result of students from "other cultures" not really knowing what plagiarism is. I've come across this argument a lot, and I don't find it very convincing. Anyone who knows how to use the Internet knows that pasting a Wikipedia article into your essay is cheating, and not at all like the clever uncited allusions to classical writers that some "other cultures" encourage. Maybe it's just a habit students pick up in high school and find hard to shake, like shoplifting.

Fantasy/SF Micro-essay #1: Grimm's Household Tales

[Just in case anyone is interested in what I've written for Rabkin's course, here's the first essay (the one I missed the deadline for while trying to paste from Evernote to Coursera using a tablet).]

With regard to fairy tales, the brothers Grimm were to the 19th century what Walt Disney was to the twentieth: they set the prototypes for particular fairy stories and for fairy tales in general. Just as a robin is a prototypical bird (as Eleanor Rosch pointed out) the Grimm's version of, say, "Little Red Riding Hood" is a prototypical fairy tale, in that when we think of Little Red Riding Hood, we will probably think of something akin to the Grimm version even though it was called by the less familiar name "Little Red Cap") not Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" or the recent film Red Riding Hood. Yet this is not because the Grimm version is the original from which all others are mimetically derived. The Grimm brothers did to earlier versions of LRRH what Disney did to the Grimm version of "Snow White": the prototypical centre was shifted so that the new work became more influential than the work it was derived from (think "Snow White" and you will almost certainly see a scene from the Disney film).

It is tempting to get Baudrillardian here and talk about simulacra, hyperreality and so forth, but this would be a mistake. It is not the case of a fake becoming more real than the real thing, because fairy tales occupy a cultural space which is by its nature blurry. A published fairy tale is half way between a legend, which is common cultural property, and fantasy as we normally understand the word, which is the product of an individual (even though it draws heavily on common folkloric tropes). Thus, while we may not personally like Disney's bowdlerising Grimm's "Snow White", it is just as valid as the Grimm brothers' insertion of their own moral ending to LRRH in preference to earlier versions where the girl dies or escapes by pretending to go out of her grandmother's house to urinate. Each fairy tale is the product of its author, its authors culture, and the authors and cultures preceding it.

Fantasy/SF Micro-essay #2: Alice in Wonderland

[Another essay I wrote for Rabkin's course. This is the one my peer graders found too academic.]

It's an old adage of uncertain origin that in fantasy or science fiction you need strange people, strange things or strange places, but if you have strange people doing strange things in strange places, you have too much strangeness, and you end up with surrealism, nonsense rhymes or dream narrative. Alice In Wonderland comes very close to this; it is surreal in places, contains several famous nonsense rhymes and at the end is revealed to be a dream. It is certainly dream-like and follows the warped logic of dreams with its gleeful absurdity and incessant punning, rather than the logic of fantasy, which changes a few things (notably magic) but sets these strange things in a world which generally behaves quite normally - what Melissa Thomas calls "the ‘Blue Skies, Green Grass’ theory" (60).

What keeps Alice just inside the boundaries of fantasy literature is the character of Alice and her responses to the worlds she is hurled into. "Curiouser and curiouser" is not the response we would expect from someone whose body was being stretched out "like the largest telescope that ever was"; blind terror is. Alice does not go mad like the heroes of H.P. Lovecraft, nor does she suspect she is mad, like Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant. Rather, she accepts that something is strange and continues with child-like logic to elaborate on the implications of the strangeness, as when, having been telescoped, she contemplates the absurdity of sending presents to her feet. Even when she is presented with events which should be terrifying, like the giant dog in Through the Looking Glass, the narrative merely notes that Alice was "very frightened" before she returned to her normal state of bemused curiosity.

This continual harping on the strangeness of her experiences actually makes Alice a pillar of normality, placing her in a tradition that starts with fairy-tale protagonists and continues with fantasy characters like Bilbo Baggins, all of whom provide an amusingly normal perspective on abnormal events.

Thomas, Melissa. "Teaching Fantasy: Overcoming the stigma of fluff." The English Journal 92.5. pp. 60-64.

(no subject)

After picking up an old copy of Swords Against Death I googled Fritz Leiber only to find out that he's been dead for 20 years. Damn. Well I suppose that explains the lack of new Swords books.