March 2007 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Re: [Air-l] what is the turnitin copyright claim?
by William Bain 10 Mar '07

10 Mar '07

I was recently advised by an online publication that copyright is immediately generated on production of a work. According to my informant, doing the legal paperwork, etc. to secure a copyright is simply to prevent misunderstandings (to say the least) at some later date when someone else might use your work. I don't know how this applies to talks or presentations given at conferences, but it seems like an interesting though maybe complicated point. But this is my lay understanding and there seems to be pretty good evidence for its being true, since many physical publications at least note whether they or their authors keep copyright on publication. Best regards, Will William Bain PhD Student Comparative Literature Department of Spanish Philology Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona --------------------------------- The fish are biting. Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing.

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Call for Participation for WiAOC 2007: CONNECT, a free global online conference for teachers and education professionals, May 18-20
by Jeremy Hunsinger 10 Mar '07

10 Mar '07

from ifets Begin forwarded message: > Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 07:07:45 -0800 > From: Dafne <dygonza(a)YAHOO.COM> > Subject: Call for Participation for WiAOC 2007: CONNECT, a free > global online conference for teachers and education professionals, > May 18-20 > > Call for Participation for WiaOC 2007 > CONNECT: a free synchronous and asynchronous online > conference for teachers and education professionals > May 18–20, 2007 > > Webheads in Action, a world-wide cross-cultural online > community of > several hundred ESL/EFL educators and other > professionals, invites > your participation in CONNECT: Conversations on > Networking, > Education, Communities, and Technology, a unique > conference to be > held entirely online May 18–20, 2007. > > The conference is called a convergence because it is > intended to be a fair or festival in which many > communities of colleagues converge to celebrate with > us by presenting their work in a wide variety of > formats (See: http://wiaoc2007.pbwiki.com/about_CfP) > > Participation is free and open to all who are > interested. > > Keynote speakers include Stephen Downes, George > Siemens, Etienne > Wenger, Barbara Ganley, Teemu Leinonen, and Leigh > Blackall. > > More information is available at > http://wiaoc2007.pbwiki.com > > Proposals for presentations at WiAOC 2007 will be > accepted through April 7, 2007. > > Looking forward to your participation, > > Dafne Gonzalez > On behalf of the WiAOC organizing team Jeremy Hunsinger () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series

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turnitin musings
by Dr.Cameron Adams 10 Mar '07

10 Mar '07

To begin, I have never used turnitin, but have been tempted to. Why is that the case? The problem is not that more students are plagiarising (though it seems like it to me), but instead what the nature of the student body is. My recent experience is in the UK so it may vary for you, but I suspect not as much as one might think. Two things are going on that will suffice as setting to my argument: the government wants something like 50% of the population to go to university and, higher education is being degraded to a disappointing level. Let me contextualise the latter. In my university I have had to take a "teaching" course to satisfy a requirement. In this we are told of the (apparently) government policy of teaching our students "transferable skills" (basic reading, writing, etc.) at the expense of our subjects. The idea is that physics students and anthropology students leave the university with the same stuff. The degree is to differentiate between job candidates in service type work (bank management and the like). The effect of these two things is that I have a rather large number of students who do not know why they are here. Only two of my students have any interest in the topic of their course of study (their major is anthropology, but they hope to get some unknown "job" in the future--this is half way through their degree). One of my students claims to have literally pulled the topic out of a hat! Basically we have a lot of unmotivated students. Far more than traditional methods of cheater detection can handle. I have to mark so much that I do not have the time to carefully assess changes in style, etc. The apparent lack of drive makes it seem less critical to do original work. After all, as my students put it, they are not planning to be anthropologists. (actually, when I assess work a common whinge is "you act like you think we will become anthropologists"). The high numbers and low ownership of their education coupled with easy ways to cheat, again, trumps our now outmoded means of cheater detection. In this context we have lost the arms race. Thinking about it, its not so much a question of using technology to keep up. Given fewer essays with more time to mark them, I could still catch all but the most sophisticated of plagiarism. It takes more time to assess some of these essays than it took the student to write them. All of us are overworked and I think that this is the main problem. Besides, I think if we rely too much on tech, we could begin to lose our critical faculties that allow us to notice clues to plagiarised material. That said I have a couple of thoughts that may or may not be legit: Couldn't student privacy could be protected by using a one time code at submission instead of their name? Another small note is that creatively recreating assignments is easier earlier in one's career than later. If it were not we'd be artists instead ;0). Cheers, Cameron Adams

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Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue [and privacy+security of students]
by Bram Dov Abramson 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

It's hard not to wonder whether alternatives to Turnitin are in the offing. First, you'd think that comparing a given text to all the publicly-available Web content, journal articles, books, and other things they're already indexing would be exactly the sort of thing Google, say, would be good at. Second, it sounds like some of the opposition to Turnitin has to do with perceived risks arising from the jurisdiction in which it is based and operates. When that happened with cryptographic work, some of the U.S. efforts migrated north to Canada and elsewhere. A competitor based outside the U.S. might have a real Third, surely delaminated open-source tools which separated the querying and comparing to the hashing, would provide more options. If universities which submit papers to Turnitin also had access to good tools with strong respect for privacy, for instance, it would not be too difficult for them to automate the hashing or whatever of the materials they were also submitting to Turnitin. By gradually building up their own archives, they'd be building a resource which would decrease their dependence on single efforts like Turnitin -- and could create interfaces to enable privacy-compliant plagiarism queries without giving up control of the contents or of the ethical standards by which those archives were governed. cheers Bram

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Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue
by Marj Kibby 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

In my first year cultural studies course I give students a turnitin report of a paper I wrote for the purpose that has a range of citation errors and a number of correctly cited quotes. In small groups they go through the report, decide which 'matches' are ok, and which are citation errors that need to be fixed. They add references, quotation marks, paraphrase, etc as required. We discuss what the various groups have done, and they are encouraged to go through their own reports before final submission of the papers. Turnitin is set up to allow submission for a week or two before the due date, and for students to see their own reports immediately. I think where Turnitin is solely used as a detection tool, there is a tendency to look just at the percentage of matching text - but I haven't found that particularly useful. I think you need to examine every instance of matching text to see just why and how it matches. Marj Dr Marjorie Kibby, Senior Lecturer in Communication & Culture Faculty of Education and Arts The University of Newcastle, Callaghan NSW 2308 Australia Marj.Kibby(a)newcastle.edu.au +61 2 49216604 >>> James Whyte <whyte.james(a)yahoo.com> 03/10/07 3:34 AM >>> In that vein, I am not sure that I understand Marjorie's claim that Turnitin is useful for teaching referencing, since no one outside the company knows the matching algorithm -- the criteria for text comparison are unknown, so it is hard for me to see what the students would learn. Perhaps she could say more about that.

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Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue [and privacy+security of students]
by Miraj Khaled 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

well, are we sure it is only 'hash' of the papers? have turnitin made that clear? any way, Dan, the Feds may not even need to reconstruct the full papers. they can just execute search strings on arbitray terms and then just put the author names into the "No Fly List". but even if we leave this aside there's another issue of concern. let's say a young muslim student [in Canada] is given an assignment to write a paper on Contemporary US policy in the Middle East. so if s/he knows that his/her paper would be required to be sumbitted to the turnitin database and can be searched at will by US authorities. would s/he be freely expressing his/her opinion against the US government and their policy if s/he knows that s/he may be travelling to US in near future? This may seem far-fetched, but can any of you [or turnitin] assure us [the students] that the rights of the authors of submitted papers are NOT being trampled?? I thank Richard Stevens for bringing forward some of the scenarios that may happen and probably IS already happening. I remember reading some times ago of a student in US who wrote a graduate thesis on the location/vulnerability of network/power grids and other critical infrastructures and mapping them on topographic maps. all the data were gleaned from publicly available sources. yet the feds heard of this thesis and basically restricted it's publication and even denied the author access to his own thesis paper. I know this is not related to turnitin, but this is one example that is of concern to me at least. miraj khaled ============ Graduate Student Simon Fraser University --- air-l-request(a)listserv.aoir.org wrote: Message: 15 Date: 09 Mar 2007 12:09:47 -0600 From: burkx006(a)umn.edu Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue [and privacy+security of students] To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org On Mar 9 2007, Richard Stevens wrote: >Why would the gov't be interested in electronic forms of student >papers? Well, considering that Homeland Security has in the past >stated a focus on incoming exchange student programs (thereby >granting student visas) as a high-level security threat for allowing >potential terrorists to enter the country, I'd say this desired >access is not beyond the realm of interest to our government. Although I think this is a good point, everything we know about Turnitin indicates that they are storing a hash of the paper, rather than the full paper itself. I can see that the feds might well be interested in the topics of certain student papers, but I am not at all certain that the content can be reconstructed from what could be subpeoned or NSL'd. DLB -- Dan L. Burk Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor University of Minnesota Law School 229 19th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455 ********************************** voice: 612-626-8726 fax: 612-625-2011 bits: burkx006(a)umn.edu > ------------------------------ > > Message: 8 > Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 11:08:31 -0600 > From: Richard Stevens <stevensr(a)smu.edu> > Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue [and > privacy+security of students] > To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > > Why would the gov't be interested in electronic > forms of student > papers? Well, considering that Homeland Security has > in the past > stated a focus on incoming exchange student programs > (thereby > granting student visas) as a high-level security > threat for allowing > potential terrorists to enter the country, I'd say > this desired > access is not beyond the realm of interest to our > government. > > The relative ease of student visas granted to young > men and women > from abroad has been one fo the chief arguments for > increasing the > surveillance of library use, allowing government > access to school > records, etc. > > What a student writes in a university classroom > should (in my humble > opinion) be seen as a product of an experimental > period in one's > life. Probably never before are afterwards will a > student be exposed > to the opportunity for intellectual exchange and > informational > resources. > > And I'd hate to think that one of my middle east > students would be > impugned by our government because a paper on > nontraditional > approaches to the problem of terrorism (for example) > violated the > contemporary political sensitivities of whomever > happened to in power. > > Not taking up this branch of the argument, just > acknowledging that it > does exist. > > -Rick > > >I am as concerned about electronic privacy as > anyone -- and far more > >concerned than most -- but I am having a difficult > time seeing why the > >government would want to access a hash of a student > paper, or what might be > >the privacy interests that would be violated if > they did. > > > >There is plenty of other stored student data > (health records, library > >usage, brower logs) to spend time worrying about. > > > >DLB > > ____________________________________________________________________________________ TV dinner still cooling? Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/

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Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue [and privacy+security of students]
by Miraj Khaled 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

--- air-l-request(a)listserv.aoir.org wrote: even if we keep aside the ethical and moral implications, there are other serious issues to consider. namely privacy of the students' and surveillance of their works. as turnitin.com is a US company, the FBI and other federal agencies can access the database under the Patriot act. if that ever happens, how can you assure your students that their rights aren't being trampled by an orwellian big brother agency. shouldn't the students' security be of the utmost importance to any faculty member and the university? I am a grad student myself and I fully agree with rosanna. fortunately in our university i haven't faced to submit anything to turitin, otherwise i might have considered suing myself! anyway, there's an insightful article in the recent issue of University Affairs magazine that looks into similar issue: http://www.universityaffairs.ca/issues/2007/january/academic_libraries_01.h… miraj khaled ============ Graduate Student Simon Fraser University > Message: 6 > Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 00:57:30 +0100 > From: "Rosanna Tarsiero" <rosanna(a)gionnethics.com> > Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue > To: <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org> > > As a student myself (and online instructor), I never > plagiarized a paper, > and I do know that there are persons that do. > > However, the assumption that students need to prove > innocent (rather than > innocence unless otherwise proven) bothers me a > great deal. > > I would refuse both submitting a paper to turnitin > AND doing supplemental > work. In all honesty, I do hope that some student > sooner or later ends up > suing colleges. Assuming people to be guilty unless > otherwise proven > violates quite a number of human rights. > > Rosanna Tarsiero > > "Circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him." > > --James Allen > > -----Original Message----- > From: air-l-bounces(a)listserv.aoir.org > [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf > Of Mark Warschauer > Sent: venerd? 9 marzo 2007 0.50 > To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue > > I know of no precedent or case law, but this is an > issue that is > taken seriously here at UC Irvine. Students are > usually given the > permission to opt out of submitting their papers > through > Turnitin.com, but professors then require any > students who opt out to > complete one or more alternate assignments to > demonstrate their > papers were not plagiarized (and those alternatives > can be quite > onerous). See examples at > http://eee.uci.edu/faculty/ccopenha/39b-student/turnitin.students.htm > > Mark Warschauer > > >Dear AOIRers, > > > >A colleague teaching another course has come across > an issue with an > >undergrad who refuses to hand in her term paper > because the faculty > >member's course requires that all papers also be > submitted to > >Turnitin.com. > > > >The student claims that this violates her own > intellectual property > >because Turnitin reportedly keeps copies for future > plagiarism searches. > > > >As a supposed ICT & society "expert," my colleague > came to me for advice. > >My first thought was horsefeathers. > > > >However, I am wondering if there is any precedent > or case law on this in > >Canada or the US. (EU would be too different, I > think.) > > > >I am not interested in the ethics or the morality > of Turnitin, but in how > >other situations have been resolved. > > > >Thanks, > > Barry Wellman > > > _____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________ Get your own web address. Have a HUGE year through Yahoo! Small Business. http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains/?p=BESTDEAL

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my experience with plagiarism and turnitin
by Barry Wellman 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

I asked my question in good faith. I'm kinda amazed at how many people did NOT answer my question (about precedent re Turnitin), but treated it as a projective test. I am also amazed at some of the responses which basically say: "The way I teach, no one ever plagiarizes." Perhaps they are teaching in an alternative universe to mine. I have been teaching for 42 years, and I do most of the things I know of to avoid plagiarism: conferences, outlines, ask for raw work to be available. Yet, cases still crop up. Schmucks happen. In situations where I sense plagarism, I would welcome turnitin: not as a mass produced test, but as a way of acquiring more data. (Note that I did not say "information", much less "knowledge"). And then I would ask the student to come in and chat, bringing raw material, etc. And always with someone else in the room. Now, I have direct personal experience that Turnitin can be horribly misleading, so please folks never treat as definitive. A young colleague of mine sent a book chapter off to an inexperienced editor, the editor ran it through Turnitin, and without checking futher, accused the colleague of plagiarism. The colleague came to me in tears. What had really happened is that the colleague had included a bunch of quotations from prior publications, properly cited and indented, but all Turnitin does is show that the same quotation had been originally published before. (Of course.) When this was pointed out to the editor, she retracted her accusation, altho she never had the courtesy to apologize. This is a totally true story (as all of mine are), but the colleague has asked me not to use her name. Frankly, I think the editor should have been run out of her university for malevolent incompetence. (But if malevolent competence grounds, we'd lose 50% of university administrators). Anyway, thanks for your advice, which I have passed on to the folks actively involved in this particular situation. Next year, I will insist, as per Toronto policy, that Turnitin be used. I will also do a new one, insisting that I not be videoed, cameraphoned or audio-ed, unless there is a disability situation. I don't want to be YouTubed without my permission. And so it goes... Barry Wellman _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _____________________________________________________________________

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Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue
by Judy Rice 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

Have lurked for quite some time--but this issue is one too close to my heart to remain silent. I have taught adjudicated youth in alternative high schools and pre-service teachers at the university. Have spent a great deal of time in self evaluation. What do I really want from my students? Why do they need to learn what I teach? What do they need to do to convince me they have indeed learned? The issue is that in this new age of technology and distributed information, we, as educators, need new ways for students to demonstrate proficiency and subject mastery. We will never solve the plagiarism problem as long as we keep the rewards for plagiarizing so high. Tama's suggestions are good ones, but we need to go further in re-thinking how a student demonstrates understanding and scholarship, not in thinking up more complex ways of detecting lack of it. Research papers are good, but even better is the ability to retrieve needed information on a given subject that would support one's thesis in a paper. Maybe a good assignment would be to find 5 papers that you would like to plagiarize and defend your choices...? Judy Cossel Rice >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Message: 11 Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 10:06:15 +0900 From: "Tama Leaver" <tamaleaver(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <580c038d0703081706j6eeb707et3bc6ae2d2e1d518d(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Since we've moved onto talking about how to try and guide students away from plagiarism, I recently developed a one-page primer for course design at UWA which suggests some strategies for designing better courses and assessment, encouraging original work. It's up on the web if anyone's interested: http://www.teachingandlearning.uwa.edu.au/__data/page/72852/NotesOnPreventi… (And apologies to Barry as this thread has clearly strayed substantially from his original question!) Cheers, Tama -- Dr Tama Leaver Associate Lecturer (Higher Education Development) Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (M400) University of Western Australia 35 Stirling Highway Crawley WA 6009 Australia Ph: (+61 8) 6488 1502 Fax: (+61 8) 6488 1156 www: http://www.catl.uwa.edu.au www: http://www.tamaleaver.net edublog: http://tama.edublogs.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

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Re: [Air-l] turnitin
by James W Craine 09 Mar '07

09 Mar '07

---- Original message ---- >Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 21:01:19 -0800 >From: air-l-request(a)listserv.aoir.org >Subject: air-l Digest, Vol 32, Issue 9 >To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org > >Send air-l mailing list submissions to > air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org air-l-owner(a)listserv.aoir.org > > >Message: 9 >Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 19:37:16 -0500 >From: Douglas Eyman <eymand(a)earthlink.net> >Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue >To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org >Message-ID: <45F0AC3C.9090406(a)earthlink.net> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed > >I don't believe there are any legal cases that have been decided about >turnitin.com, but there have been successful student challenges to its >implementation --primarily in Canada, see for example: > >http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060309/plagiarism_too… >http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2004/01/16/mcgill_turnitin030116.html > >As Alexis notes, there are pretty strong claims on both sides. For a good >example of both, see Charlie Lowe's argument against its use > >http://cyberdash.com/plagiarism-detection-software-issues-gvsu > >and Turnitin.com's response > >http://kairosnews.org/turnitins-response-to-recent-posts-discu > >I've done several workshops for writing teachers that address the issue of >plagiarism, and even though there isn't a clear legal finding that turnitin.com >violates students' intellectual property rights, I think that making the case on >that basis is a bit of a red herring -- turnitin.com (and other plagiarism >detection services) can be a good tool for teaching about plagiarism, but it's >not a good tool for stopping it. What *is* a good tool for stopping plagiarism >is designing better assignments, getting students invested in their work, and >treating plagiarism as a pedagogical problem rather than a moral one. > >And one further note (which prompted my reply): > >Alexis Turner wrote: >> A few other notes to consider: >> Turnitin does not store the actual paper. They store a hash of the paper, >> weakening the argument that IP is being violated. > >If you put in a substantive amount of the "plagiarized text," the hash that is >stored is output as identical to the original work that has been collected by >the company. In other words, if you took all of a book that someone else has >written and put it into a database, if when you get the output it reads the >same, then the IP issues are still the same (that is, the IP violation argument >is certainly not weakened unless the output of the comparison itself is never >displayed). I tend to think that students who object to a guilty-until-proven >innocent use of systems like turnitin.com should certainly be allowed to >question the ethics of instituting such a system. > >I believe there is also an option to check the paper but prevent it from being >added to the database (I know this is true of mydropbox.com and fairly sure that >is also in turnitin.com) -- this allows students to check their own work in an >ethically responsible way; if the instructor can establish a pedagogically >responsible use of the tool (by utilizing this feature and by using it as a >learning tool rather than a detection service), then both students and teachers >would be well served by it. > >Douglas Eyman >Sr. Editor >Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy >http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/ > I have to agree with Doug on this - I tried Turnitin for one semester and was quickly bombarded with refusals to complete the assignment if Turnitin was required - since I was teaching a class in critical geography my own arguments were used against me so in that respect my students did indeed learn something - and it made me rethink not just the legalities of the program but the ethical issues as well - the next semester (and all the ones since then) plagiarism in my classes has come to a complete halt when I worked hard to create assignments that were unique to the class and to the individual doing the writing - this approach has worked quite well for me at the undergraduate level - for graduate students I simply require the paper be submitted to a professional journal - this gives another level of review and since graduate students have in a sense indicated their desire to pursue a professional career in the field by enrolling in a graduate program, any hint of plagiarism ! ! would be ruinous to their academic future James Craine Department of Geography California State University, Northridge APCG Yearbook Editor

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