THE COLOURS OF COLLEGE....../

The Students Union Building hosted Langara’s
~ multi-cultural celebration showcase on Tuesday

INSIDE LOOK

DATE MATRIX. .ccccccccccccecccceeccceeereeneneed
Langara business grad and NPA council
candidate Jason Lamarche is in hot water

HIPSTERS. ..0ccceccceetceeeteceeecceesceee A/S

Ever wonder how to define a hipster?

Anti-plagiarism service gets the gears

College staff debate the merits of Turnitin, a U.S. website that promises to fight cheating

By SHAWN GILL
angara’s instructors are review-
ing Turnitin, an academic plagia-
rism detector, with a view to pos-
sibly adopting it next fall.

Turnitin, a California-based website,
is increasingly popular with some edu-
cators as a tool to combat plagiarism in
the Internet age. Students submit their
work to the site where it’s compared to
over 150 million student papers and 14
billion web pages in the company’s
database.

The problem some instructors have
with it is that students’ work goes into
the hands of a private U.S.-based corpo-
ration that may have obligations to U.S.
Homeland Security. Also, they say, the

site could be breached by hackers.

The college’s administration is leav-
ing it to instructors to decide if they
want to introduce the $24,000-a-year US
service. If they do, it will come up for
budget review next year.

Garyen Chong, the department chair
of Langara’s health sciences and the
instructor responsible for introducing
the idea of bringing Turnitin to the col-
lege, said “Students [will] have to be
notified well in advance.”

Classes that use Turnitin will proba-
bly be indicated on the course calendar,
he said.

Chong also said that Langara stu-
dents would have the right to refuse to
submit their work to Turnitin. He cited

the example of Montreal’s McGill Uni-
versity where professors manually
mark the work of students who refuse
to submit their work to Turnitin.

Wendie Nelson, department chair
for history and political science, said
most of her department favours using
Turnitin because, “there seems to be
more and more plagiarism and it is an
immense drain on instructor’s time to
try to ferret it out”

However, she too has privacy con-
cerns.

Chong said: “If you’re doing a PhD,
in a field like high technology or bio-
tech, where you are creating original
work, there’s a paranoia that some-
thing that has monetary value may

leak out.”

Tess MacMillan, department chair
for English, says her department is lin-
ing up against Turnitin partly because
of concerns like that.

However, both she and Chong agree
that for Langara’s purposes those is-
sues would not be too problematic.

“Tt’s not a huge concern at Langara,
since we’re a two-year institution,”
MacMillan said. “Courses like creative
writing [that contain original student
work] likely wouldn’t have their course
work submitted to Turnitin.”

“We're a junior college. Does this is-
sue matter?” said Chong, “I don’t think
so, but some would say ‘Yes it does’,

BY THE

numbers

TURNITIN BOASTS
THE FOLLOWING:

* 5 million student
papers archived

* a database of more
than 90,000 journals and
articles

* More than a million
instructors using it

+ 14 billion web pages
crawled

+ Used in 126 countries

Source: Turnitin website

because it’s a rights issue.”

Teacher
takes it
one pedal
at a time

Round-the-world cyclist
Michael Schratter invites
you to welcome him to
Langara on Saturday

By MATT HYNDMAN

neouver schoolteacher Michael
fortes finishes an around-the-
world cycling trip in support of
mental health awareness on Nov. 12
with a home-stretch ride that takes him
past Langara College.

Schratter will start the day at the
South Delta Recreation Centre at 8 a.m.
with stops at the Richmond Oval at 10
a.m. and Langara College at 11 a.m. The
public are encouraged to join him on
their bikes at any of the stops.

The trip, dubbed Ride Don’t Hide, be-
gan 15 months and nearly 40,000 km
ago and will conclude with a celebra-
tion at Rogers Arena at noon, featuring
Vancouver Canucks general manager
Mike Gillis and Canucks alumni.

Schratter, who struggles with bipo-
lar disorder, set out on the trip trying
to reduce the stigma attached to men-
tal illness that he has seen personally.

“Tt’s the ostracization of those who
don’t understand it,” Schratter said.
“Tt’s the loved ones telling you ‘Why
don’t you just say you dropped out be-
cause your grandmother was sick?’ It’s
like, wait a sec, is there a mark against

)

my character? I found that really un-
just and unfair, fear was running the
program.”

The journey was born out of another
painful aspect of Schratter’s life. In
1993, his father, who in years past had
taken the family on bike trips through
B.C. and Europe, died in a bicycle acci-
dent. Schratter dealt with his grief by
cycling across Canada, and after hav-
ing a great time doing it, told himself
he would one day cycle around the
world.

But it wasn’t until 1996 when Schrat-
ter had a manic episode while studying
at UBC that he decided to put the two
together.

“T had this idea that if I was going to
cycle around the world, I would do it to

Vancouver teacher Michael ~=
Schratter has spent the last |
15 months on his bike raising. |
awareness of mental illnéss-—
He’ll be making a brief stop at =|

Langara on Saturday at 11 a.m.

2

HANDOUT photo

draw awareness and bat-
tle the stigma, the prejudice, that sur-
rounds mental illness.”

Schratter says the source of the stig-
ma is in the way we are hard-wired to
label the behaviour of those around us.

“We fear what we don’t understand,
and we hate what we fear.”

He says the myriad slasher movies
dating back to Psycho and T.V. shows
like C.S.I. and Dexter reinforce that
fear.

Schratter discovered on his trip that
poorer cultures are actually better suit-
ed to dealing with mental illness.
“You've got larger families living in
houses, you’ve got that support, that
love. No one looks after you better than
your own genes.”

66

We fear
what we
don’t un-
derstand,
and we
hate what
we fear.

MICHAEL
SCHRATTER,
cyclist and mental
health advocate

Faculty set
to bargain

By RUMAN KANG

looking for higher wages and bet-

ter benefits in the next round of
contract negotiations with Langara
College in March.

The LFA signed an agreement with
the college that increased the faculty
professional development fund and
implemented a one-week spring break
last June. However this did not improve
wages and benefits. The LFA contract
expires March 31,2012.

“Vancouver is a very expensive place
to live for those us who live and work in
the Metro Vancouver area, it’s increas-
ingly so and yet we haven’t seen any
pay rise in several years,” said Lynn
Carter, president of the LFA. “We are
really looking at improvements in our
wages and benefits in this next round.”

Last March the faculty association
voted unanimously in favour of holding
a strike vote and participated in job ac-
tion by withholding student grades.

When negotiations begin in March
the LFA does not plan on participating
in job action but will take the steps nec-
essary to ensure that the needs of the
association are met.

“In the last few rounds the college
has not been forthcoming in terms of
any significant efforts to offer anything
to settle our grievances,” Carter said.
“So usually we need a strike vote to
kind of leverage some energy and in-
terest on the other side in finding an
agreement. It’s unfortunate but it’s
true.”

The LFA wants to reassure students
that the upcoming negotiations will not
affect their education.

“In the past whenever we have en-
gaged in job action it has never actually
cost students anything. Students have
never lost a semester here. We have a
history of never hurting our students,”
Carter said.

Te: Langara Faculty Association is