Yerwhat?

 

Last week I wrote (Trust AI – to get it wrong…?) of Academia’s AI podcast of an article I wrote some 28 years ago, published in IASL’s journal School Libraries Worldwide in 1997.  I was disturbed by Academia’s use of the article without my permission on two counts: (1) because they gave the impression that iI had uploaded the recording (and thereby given my blessing) when I had not done either and (2) because the podcast gave a very false impression of my research methods (?) and also of what the article is about. The AI had misread and misinterpreted the piece and I was not impressed.

Just a few days later I got another email from Academia, this time telling me that their AI had  reviewed my article.  Reviewed? In their dreams! Nightmares!! Hallucinations!!!

Although presented as a peer review of sorts with these sections

    • Overview
    • Relevant references
    • Strengths
    • Major comments (two paragraphs headed respectively Methodology and Clarity)
    • Minor comments (one paragraph headed Presentation)
    • Reviewer commentary
    • Summary assessment

the review made no sense, from beginning AI Review of ” “ to end.

AI reviewThere was no title, no indication of what was being reviewed or, thankfully, authorship. The text makes no sense. I have checked some of the hyperlinks and URLs in the list of “relevant references” and they do lead to live web-pages. Some of them carry the title shown in the list though not necessarily the authors or other bibliographic details as shown and I cannot think what content on the pages might have contributed to any kind of article or paper.  Authors listed incidentally include Henry James and Alexandre Dumas.

reference listIndeed, it all sounds and reads as if this is an AI peer-review of a “paper” written by AI. Is that a bit incestuous?

As I read it, the review sounds learned but says little. I am reminded of Eric Morecambe’s comeback to André Previn, that he was “playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order** – the words in the review sound right but the sentences make little sense – at least, not to me. At best they are generalizations and stock phrases, pulled together to make some kind of narrative.

One thing is for sure,  a review of my work this is not. Whose work it might be, if anyone’s, who knows?

Once again, Academia, I am not impressed.

The advice to anyone using AI, certainly generative AI or large-language models, is to engage brain and verify, verify, verify. Academia.edu, are you listening?

* Graham McCann, The Prelude of Mr Preview: How André Previn won over Morecambe & Wise, 2020, Comedy Chronicles.

The review in full (PDF file)

ADDENDUM: After posting this report, I did what I probably should have done straight off: searched to see if anyone else had had similar experience.

I do not see anyone else having received notification from Academia.edu and reporting on it, but I did find a review of Academia.edu’s AI reviews. The report, by Miklós Sebők and Rebeka Kiss and published on the Prompt Revolution site, is titled Testing Academia.edu’s AI Reviewer: Technical Errors and Template-Based Feedback. Sebők and Kiss submitted several genuine papers for review by the Academia.edu AI Reviewer. Enough to say here, even with genuine papers they were not impressed either, noting, among other things including difficulty in uploading their papers, “the tool often returns repetitive and overly general suggestions, with little evidence of meaningful engagement with the actual content, methodology, or disciplinary context of the submissions”. Right!

Corrections (I don’t know how I made TWO errors in the opening paragraph – apologies. The errors have been corrected; for the record, the original paragraph read

Last week I wrote (Trust AI – to get it wrong…?) of Academia’s AI podcast of an article I wrote some 18 years ago, published in IASL’s journal School Libraries Worldwide in 1987.

Trust AI – to get it wrong…?

 

It has been some time since I put fingers to keyboard and posted anything here. There are many many reasons for my lack of activity, I will spare you the list.

It has taken something quite personal to get me writing again, almost a personal attack except that “attack” makes it sound deliberate. I do not think this is deliberate, I hope it isn’t.

just a few days ago I received an email from Academia.edu with the subject line An AI created a podcast of your paper “Surviving Information Overload:…”.  This was an article I wrote for School Libraries Worldwide, the peer-reviewed journal of the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL);  the article was published in 1997.  I probably/possibly uploaded the paper later as my “admission fee” to Academia.edu. (If it was not me who uploaded it, it must have been someone else, uploading it as a free pass for their registration; it is not unknown.)  If you are an Academia user, you can find the paper here.

Intrigued, I clicked on the link to be taken to a page in Academia.edu headed by the advice “Private to you”. Below that in bold is the title of the podcast “AI Podcast of ‘Surviving Information Overload: Lessons From the Reading Reluctance Research'”. Below that is the note “Uploaded by John Royce”. Falsehood #1.AI podcast 1

For the record: I did not upload this audio file (nor any other). It does not have my blessing nor even my permission.

I think this could be an attempt to have me subscribe to their Premium service and have the podcast available publicly; I have not clicked on the “Add this AI Podcast to my Academia profile” to find out, at least, not without listening to what AI had made of my article.

AI podcast2

What I heard decided me: there is no way that I would want my name put to this. The recording is full of misinterpretations of my article, full of mistakes. It rang alarm bells from start to finish.

I have to say, it is very well done. Without that first word in the title, “AI”. there is no indication that this is produced by AI. The voice is warm and engaging and very natural (as in “They found that, well, um, our brain sort of goes on a defensive mode…”), you could not tell, at least I could not tell, that it is an AI tool reading this.

The one giveaway might be in the opening lines, “Welcome to In Depth with Academia, I’m Richard Price, your host and the CEO of Academia.edu, here to take you through the wonderful world of academic research.”

The founder and CEO of Academia is indeed one Richard Price, according to his page on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardprice.  So is this Richard Price, voicing a piece written by AI promoting an article written by little me or is this AI impersonating Richard Price? I rather suspect the latter and I suspect that I am not the only writer whose work has been given the Academia-AI treatment.

Did Price give permission for his name to be used like this? I was not asked, it could well be that Price was not either. Is that impersonation? There is a podcast with the title “In Depth” but it is produced by First Round Review.

I have not found a podcast with this name produced by Academia. More deception?

The voice of Price goes on, “In today’s episode, we’re diving into a paper by none other than John Royce, an insightful academic who has really tackled a problem, I think a lot of us can relate to”.   Flag “a paper by none other than John Royce”. By none other than who? Me, I may be known by a few hundred people but that does not merit the “none other than …” treatment.

The podcast goes on to make several false claims about the article such as “John Royce and his team conducted a series of studies to understand this” and ” And you know, Royce used mixed methods research, blending quantitative surveys with qualitative interviews to gather comprehensive data”.

I worked alone. I did not conduct any studies. I did not use mixed methods research. I carried out no surveys, conducted no interviews. I did not collect data, comprehensive or otherwise.

Worse still, Price – or the AI acting in his name – has completely misinterpreted the article.  The voice declares, “At the heart of it, the paper asks, ‘How does the massive influx of information in today’s digital world lead to reading reluctance?'” and the whole podcast is based on this premise.

Just the opposite. My aim was to suggest that research into different forms of reading reluctance and its amelioration, including the learning of coping strategies and helping poor and reluctant readers develop the skills of good, critical readers, could be used to help us handle information overload.  I was suggesting that in many ways we already had the tools – and they were as applicable in the digital world as in the world of print.

It is, I think, well-known that AI is prone to hallucinate, at times providing poor information, sometimes inventing information.  Current advice, at least in the educational world, is to use AI as an assistive tool but to verify everything it tells you. Many do check and verify – and many more do not, and sometimes come a cropper. Is this another echo with the past, again nothing new?

I am thinking of the arrival of Google and the opening of the floodgates of search results. Go below the fold, we advised our students, the results you seek may well be on page 2 or 3 of the hit lists.  And again, while everyone knew the mantra and what they should be doing, most searchers still went straight to Google hit #1 and went no further.

Is it the same today, with AI, do students hear the advice, know what they ought to do – and then not do it?

Which is why I find this podcast, the misuse and misinterpretation of my 18-year old article, worrisome. If any listeners to this podcast accept it without checking against the actual paper, how will they know that the AI tool has got it so badly wrong? Could the wrong information become, in time, accepted wisdom, quote in later papers and articles?

Nor does it matter if the podcast itself is genuine, if AI was used to voice an essay written by Richard Price. Or if AI was not used at all, if this is a human writing the piece and a human speaking it. The AI is irrelevant. The podcast-article is completely wrong.

But without checking against the original article, how will anyone know? Not just my article, any LLM output, any AI generated summary, perhaps anything generated by AI – without checking and verifying, how will you know?

Added: 10 July 2025 : the podcast / a transcript of the podcast

Tarnish… it spreads

Tarnish … it spreads

An article published on the BBC website yesterday, Derby teacher banned over coursework plagiarism, reports an unusual situation, one which raises many questions.

Gavin Bevis reports on a teacher who has been banned from teaching for at least 7 years. It seems that in 2019 the teacher had inserted passages into two students’ coursework after they had submitted their work to the teacher and before she submitted it for assessment.   The passages had been taken from a student’s work submitted the year before, 2018, with just a few changes made.   The work was flagged as suspicious and investigation confirmed plagiarism.

Bevis’s report does not say what triggered the flagging, whether it was flagged by text-matching software such as Turnitin or similar tool or simply that the examiner/s reading the work felt that something in the writing did not ring true; perhaps it just rang bells (or perhaps it was a different cause of concern altogether). Whatever the trigger, Continue reading

Author, author! Author…?

My last article, To be verified…, centred on an item in The Times which claimed that the International Baccalaureate (IB) was or would be allowing students to use ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) in essays and other work, as long as the use of such tools was acknowledged and attributed appropriately.

The news turned out to be true; an article by Matt Glanville, Head of Assessment Principles and Practice at the IB, was published on the same day, and may well have been the source of The Times’ reporter’s story.  Titled Artificial intelligence in IB assessment and education: a crisis or an opportunity?, it provides deeper and more thoughtful detail and consideration than the story in The Times, including Continue reading

To be verified…

Half-listening to the news on BBC Radio 4 this morning, I was jerked to full attention during the regular quick look at the front pages of today’s UK newspapers. The Times has a front-page report declaring that the International Baccalaureate (IB) allowing students to use artificial intelligence to help them write their essays as long as they credit the AI used.

News to me!

Quick checks: the BBC News website includes front-page views of today’s newspapers (for a limited time only, possibly for copyright reasons). I took a screengrab.

The headline reads: Exams body lets pupils use AI chatbot to write essays.

The Times website carries the story as well – unfortunately behind a paywall, and The Times is not a newspaper to which I subscribe.

A quick Google check for [artificial intelligence international baccalaureate] – using the News feature and limiting the search to the last week found just one mention of the story –

Google search [artificial intelligence international baccalaureate]

the story in today’s The Times. There are several stories of students being punished for using artificial intelligence, even in IB schools.

Checks on the open IB website and in the closed-access My IB find no mention of this. It looks as if The Times has a world exclusive! (The thought that the newspaper had fallen victim to a hoax crossed my mind.)

Having bought a print copy of the newspaper, I wonder about the accuracy of the headline Exams body lets pupils use AI chatbot to write essays – that “lets” may be a trifle misleading. It implies that the IB already allows students to use AI in their work for assessment. The second paragraph states

Continue reading

Credit where it’s due

I cannot give credit to whoever coined the phrase “credit where it’s due”; I fear that is lost in the mists of time.

It is a common term in education and academia, but it was – and probably still is – more everyday than that, used to divert (often) praise away from oneself and on to someone more deserving, the person who wrote, made, did whatever

We often use the term in education, one of the reasons for citing one’s sources (at point of use in text), but I am not sure that students are always aware enough of what academic writing is all about to fully appreciate how helpful it can be.

This notion was brought home to me in a recent online workshop. Asked to design a poster or a slide sequence, several participants produced “citations” on the slides which were simply the URLs of the web pages (and occasionally the sites, but not the exact page) of the source of image or text they had used; references listed on the last slide or two also comprised URLs only.

Continue reading

Back to basics, again

News that CHATGPT had “sprinted” to one million users in just five days, exponentially faster than any other online service, has itself spread fast. The chart produced by Statista has been reproduced many many times, it is big news.

Articles about ChatGPT and AI generally seem to be increasing almost as fast, and my last post here, Here we are again!, just added to the number.  News that Google is about to launch its own chatbot, Bard, keeps the story much alive. Those commenting on developments in the AI field must feel that it is sometimes hard to keep up. 

Meanwhile, many in education and other fields fear that ChatGPT will make plagiarism and other forms of non-authentic work easier.  On the other hand, there are many, even in education, who see great potential in ChatGPT, see ways it can make their work easier. Some hold that it could lead to improved work and enhance critical thinking and student creativity.  At the same time, Courtney Cullen, in a post on the International Centre for Academic Integrity (ICAI) site, Artificial Intelligence: Friend, Foe, or Neither?, strikes a balance; shewelcomes “the increased focus on academic integrity” in educational circles.  We want our students to learn and show that they are learning, not simply to parrot, possibly unread, something generated by a machine.

Continue reading

Here we are again!

Since ChatGPT was first launched towards the end of 2022, there has been much alarm expressed in schools and colleges, in discussion forums, blogs and other social media platforms, in the educational press and in the general press too. There has also been calmer discussion; we shall come to that.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) text-generator, developed by OpenAI.  Its appearance marks a huge step forward in the evolution of AI.  To now, text-based AI has been uninspiring and flawed: think of the chatbots used by many support centres Continue reading

Who’s your friend?

One of the consequences of the death of Queen Elizabeth II last month is that over 800 individuals and companies who at the time of her death held a Royal Warrant for providing goods or services to senior members of the Royal Household need to re-apply for the warrant.  Many may lose their warrant if King Charles III (and any other member of the royal family whom he appoints as a grantor) does not share the Queen’s tastes or needs. In addition, the warrant is not granted for the lifetime of the royal who grants the honour, every warrant holder needs to re-apply every five years to ensure that the Royal Household still uses the product or service.

When a royal warrant is cancelled or expires, the ex-warrant holder must remove the royal insignia from their labels, letter-heads and anywhere else they display the arms and the message “By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen” or “By appointment to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales” – declarations which must now be updated.  (For more information on this, see the Royal Warrants page of the Royal Family website or the FAQs page on the Royal Warrant Holders Association website.)

The Royal Warrant is, of course, highly prized and not easily obtained. Continue reading

Vanity, but not in vain

It has been a little while (okay, a long while) since I last posted here.  I am far from the only person who has had a difficult last few years, of course, but still.  I hope my personal situation is easing now and that I can fully get back into the swing of things.

I did start several blog posts during my long “sabbatical” and I may get round to completing them if they still seem relevant. What has sparked my interest now is, in a way, very personal, and conceited fool that I am, I can not resist sharing.

Many readers of this blog have accounts with platforms for sharing academic research and articles such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, to access academic papers, contribute informally to the body of knowledge Continue reading

Another brick in the wall

I have come across an interesting twist in the contract cheating industry, Ghost Grading: Part 1 – A New Twist on Contract Cheating.  I hope I do not steal any of Dr Sarah Elaine Eaton’s thunder, especially as she still has Part 2 of her investigations to come, but the story is of interest.

It seems that teaching assistants and other instructors in North America (maybe elsewhere too?) are being targeted to outsource their grading duties.  The contract grading company gets paid by the TA at a rate lower than the TA receives from their institution, so the TA has money-in-hand without doing the work and also, as Eaton puts it, Continue reading

Takes your breath away…

News reports two days ago indicated that cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris’s takeover bid for Vectura, a UK manufacturer of lung health products, looks set to go through.  This  is not a matter of academic integrity and I am not sure about the integrity issues pure and simple either – but there are surely ethical considerations to ponder, and ponder I do.

Last month, discussing What’s not there, I wrote about e-smoking manufacturer Juul’s purchase of the May-June edition of the American Journal of Health Behavior (AJHB); the Special Open Access Issue on JUUL comprised eleven research studies and two editorial articles on JUUL, all attempting to provide Continue reading

What’s not there

In How to make the world add up: Ten rules for thinking differently about numbers,* economist Tim Harford’s Rule Six reads

Ask who is missing.

It is sound advice.  Too often, we are so busy thinking about what IS there that we forget to look for what IS NOT there.  Looking at studies and surveys and pondering their conclusions and implications, it is important to know who and what were surveyed and studied, where and when and how the investigations were carried out.  With surveys, we need to know the demographics of the sample investigated, since factors such as age, gender, place, ethnicity, religion, class or wealth, job or employment and many other factors including the size of the sample and how participants were chosen could affect conclusions about whatever is being studied, including considerations of whether those conclusions might – or might not – apply to those who were not studied, did not take part in the study.  Unless the sample includes everyone in the population, we cannot (at least, we should not) generalise and claim that whatever we have concluded applies universally.

Caroline Criado Perez makes this point over and over in her book, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.  I think this paragraph Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized

Spinning it out

A few weeks ago, my eye was caught by an article in The Guardian, Overconfident of spotting fake news? If so, you may be more likely to fall victim.  Natalie Grover reported on a recent survey of 8285 Americans which suggests that 90% of participants thought that their ability to distinguish between fake and accurate headlines was above average, that those who had over-high perception of their abilities were more likely to visit websites which tended to publish false or inaccurate news items, and they were also more likely to share fake news; on the other hand, those who took a more thoughtful approach to their news reading were less likely to be misled by or to share inaccurate and false news reports.

There have been many studies of over-confidence in recent years.   It may be this misplaced self-confidence which leads students (and people generally) to go for and to use without question whatever comes up as Google hit number 1, this regardless of anything they have been told and taught about website evaluation.  It may be a form of cognitive dissonance – knowing that they have to slow down and think about what they find online while at the same time accepting what they find online without thinking about it.

Who needs those CRAAP and WISER and CARRDS or other evaluation tools?  Why bother to laterally read and think, or use Four Moves?   We do not need to think, we cannot be taken in, we know best.

Think again.

I am not sure about my own general news-reading habits, but I do know I tend to be Continue reading

Feeling the draft

News reporters who plagiarize their stories occasionally make the news themselves – when they are found out.  I was alerted to just such a story a few days ago. My alert service pointed to two short online reports and I had a look.  There were a couple of statements in those reports which puzzled me, they were so intriguing they got me looking for more details and for clarification.

I am not sure that I found clarification.  I did find more reports on the same story, some published a day or two later but quite a few published much earlier. The core of the story remained the same but each succeeding report I looked at seemed to add a different detail.  Unhelpfully, some of those extra details did not quite match the details of other reports.

And while I do not want to comment on the case itself, not least because there is an active legal case going on (the reporter is suing for unfair dismissal), I think there are general points which can be made and general questions to ask which are of interest with regard to honesty and integrity in education and academia.

Let’s dive in!

There is agreement on the basic situation Continue reading

Reader beware – different views of point

Do you use Reader View?  Do you recommend it to your students?  I often use Reader View when available, especially if I want to print out or save a PDF version of the page I am looking at and there is no ready-made PDF version already linked on the page.

Reader and Reader View are extensions or apps which enable “clean” views of the page you are looking at, keeping the textual matter but avoiding the advertisements, embedded videos, navigation and sidebar matter and other distractions.

Here, for instance, is a page on MacWorld, How to enable Reader View automatically for websites in mobile and desktop Safari:

The advertisements flicker and change, the video clip plays automatically and floats so that it is always on the screen, there are several more distractions as you scroll through the article.

These distractions disappear Continue reading

Nothing but …

Last week, I received an email message from Chegg, telling me they had recently changed their Terms of Service.  It was very much an in-your-face message, in Helvetica 21.  That is big.

The body of the message reads:

 

 

We have updated our Terms of Use.

The updates are effective as of March 17, 2021. They apply to all accountholders, so we encourage you to read the Terms of Use fully. Some of the updates include changes to the Dispute Resolution section, the Arbitration Agreement, and to the procedures for filing a dispute against Chegg. The Terms of Use can be found here.

If you do not wish to have these Dispute Resolution updates apply to you, you must notify us as described in the Terms of Use within 30 days of their effective date.

 

 

 

 

It is a very carefully worded message. We are urged to “read the Terms of Use fully” and are told that “some of the updates include changes to” three specific areas of the Terms of Use, all three dealing with problems arising from using Chegg services and procedures in case of  dispute.   Note that use of “some of the updates include changes to…” – note that “some.”  The implication is that there may be other updates, other changes, but they are not mentioned in the email.

Nor are they listed on the Terms of Use page. There is no summary of changes made, no indication of what the previous terms were for comparison purposes.  Nor is there any indication of what, outside the dispute procedures, has also changed – just that note in the email suggesting that there have been changes elsewhere in the Terms of Use.  It is for the user to find them, “we encourage you to read the Terms of Use fully.”

There are 47 topics in the Terms of Use, more than 14,000 words on the page – Continue reading

Tempting snakes

It is some time since I last wrote about Viper, a free service which called itself a “plagiarism checker,”  housed on a site called ScanMyEssay.  It is worth writing again, because there are a number of changes in Viper’s  services and in the Viper business model.

In those earlier posts, Authentic Authenticity (published September 2013)  and Snake (in the grass) (March 2016), I advised against Viper because among other things: Continue reading

MLA9 already – and already mixed feelings

it does not seem long since the Modern Language Association published its 8th edition (MLA8) – but I see that it was released as much as 5 years ago, April 2016. Now, next month sees publication of MLA9, the 9th edition of the MLA Handbook – and yesterday MLA hosted a webinar preview of the new edition.

I well remember my excitement and delight, as that edition seemed revolutionary (as I wrote in MLA8 – new edition of MLA Handbook and Back to basics – MLA8 revisited).  Instead of presenting lots of rules and variations from and exceptions to the rules in an attempt to include all types of known (and unknown) source, format, medium, platform and more, we were given a template to follow with which we could build the references which informed our lists of Works Cited, while still being faithful to the rationale and the principles of academic referencing and supporting our readers.  This was empowering, it was liberating.

The principles of MLA8 citation and referencing are Continue reading

The integrity of integrity

One of my neighbours was livid earlier this week. The council recycling collection team had not emptied his recycling box. We leave our recycling boxes at the roadside for collection; everyone else’s recycling had been collected, our boxes emptied, but not his.  A large tag tied to the handle explained why:  the recycling was contaminated.

Someone, presumably a passer-by, had deposited a polystyrene carton and the remains of a take-away meal in the recycling box. The whole box was deemed contaminated and could not be taken for processing.

Contamination of recycling is a problem. If not caught Continue reading

Cheap Shots

It is easy to take pot-shots at EasyBib. They make it too easy, as I have suggested many times over the years.  They have an imperfect citation generator which frequently churns out incorrectly-formatted citations (especially in auto-citation mode). They give wrong advice in their guides to citation styles. They have produced many flawed add-ons which attempt to enable “Smarter Research. Powered by You,” such as their Research and Essaycheck services (both of which were abandoned some years ago; the links here go to the Internet Archive records).  Their grammar and spelling checkers need to be used with great care – but that goes for many, probably most, possibly all grammar and spelling checkers.

[Among my various blog posts whch mention EasyBib, Getting it wrong…, Not so easy does it, APA mythtakes  and Not such a wise OWL are particularly pertinent here.)

As I say, EasyBib makes it easy to shoot ’em down.  I probably would not have bothered this time, except that, clearing my inboxes (long overdue), I came across an EasyBib blog post which Continue reading

Stylistically speaking

A pedant myself, I was naturally attracted to an article by Elizabeth Ribbans in the Guardian this week: the headline read COVID or Covid? The comfort of pedantry at a time of national crisis.

Ribbans is the newspaper’s readers’ editor; her team is responsible for fact-checking, correcting copy and dealing with readers’ questions, comments and complaints. The question which inspired the headline was from a medical specialist who asked why the Guardian insisted on using Covid-19 when the medical profession uses COVID-19.

Ribbans explains that it is the Guardian‘s practice, along with many if not most British newspapers,

to use uppercase for abbreviations that are written and spoken as a collection of letters, such as BBC, IMF and NHS, whereas acronyms pronounced as words go upper and lower, eg Nasa, Unicef and, now, Covid-19.

(This is, incidentally, a practice I abhor. “Nasa” and “Unicef” are not words even if their abbreviations/ acronyms can be pronounced; when I see them spelled as “NASA” and “UNICEF” I am aware of the full title of the body and its responsibilities, just as I am aware of who the BBC, IMF and NHS are and what they do. Continue reading

Avoid like the plague…

It’s an ill wind, they say, an ill wind which blows nobody any good.

Covid-19 / coronavirus is spreading, more people are affected, the global death toll keeps rising, and at exponetial rates.  Businesses are closing, in some cases for good.  Parents are having to stay at home to look after children whose schools are closed. Stay indoors, do not go out unnecessarily, keep your distance, wash your hands.  The times are grim, the news is grim, we are all indirectly and directly affected (and if we aren’t affected yet, we will be).

The times are bringing out the worst in us, the times are bringing out the best in us.  While many selfishly rush to stockpile and the shops empty and more are happy to flout emergency regulations, we also see much that makes us proud : the selfless dedication of medical personnel and others in key services, new community awareness, measures of environmental recovery too.  These may be bad times but there is much that is good too, generosity and compassion..

Even cheat sites are playing their part. Well, one at least is. A special offer in the face of global catastrophe, Continue reading

None too advanced

In my last post, Guest what?, I described how I got intrigued by an article extolling the virtues of online essay writing services. It was posted on a website devoted to trashing the Royal Dutch Shell oil company. The article seemed so very out-of-place that I started investigating, both the gripe site itself as well as article.

Although the article, 10 Interesting Facts about Online Essay Writing Services, reads as if talking about essay writing services in general, it gives no names, no  examples. There is, however, a single hyperlink to one of these services.  It links to a site well worth looking at more closely. It might even be worth sharing and discussing with students, the better to put them off any temptation to use such sites themselves.

The underlined text links to a site called Continue reading

Guest what?

Now here’s an oddity. My plagiarism news alert alerted me to 10 Interesting Facts about Online Essay Writing Services the other day. What I found interesting, even before I clicked on the link, was that the article was posted on the Royal Dutch Shell plc .com website. What interest did Shell, the multinational/ global oil company, have in online essay writing services?

I just had to find out.

It turns out that Royal Dutch Shell plc .com is a gripe site, someone with a grudge against Royal Dutch Shell. The Shell website is simply www.shell.com, not royaldutchshellplc.com.

The site was founded by and is maintained by John Donovan.  On his disclaimer page, he openly proclaims the nature of his grudge against Shell.

Donovan might have good cause for his grievance; he certainly seems to have grievance, be it justified or not.  His site is full of whistle-blowing articles pinpointing practices which may be of a dubious nature. The origins of his grievance are highlighted on his eponymous site, johndonovan.website (one of several he maintains):

And the puzzle: in among the many many articles accusing Shell of misdemeanours of many kinds is the article,  10 Interesting Facts about Online Essay Writing Services. It seems out of place. What’s more, the “10 interesting facts” article extols the supposed virtues of a good essay writing service. Donovan appears to be very much in favour of them.  The article claims that “trustworthy and effective” services provide Continue reading