--- Bonnie Nardi <nardi@ics.uci.edu> wrote:
It seems likely that plagiarism will continue to increase. We are moving toward a culture of reusable information: mashups, anamutations, machinima, and the like. The ethos is one of reworking existing materials.
These developments feel to me like a variation on the media producer-consumer relationship we have been locked into for a long time. The difference is that people reshape materials to a degree instead of consuming perfectly passively. But someone still has to produce the original materials. There are thus the creative producers (a small number of people) and the larger group of scavenging consumers if you think of this negatively, or bricoleurs if you think of it positively.
The main form of plagiarism I have encountered is students reusing their own work for more than one class. It's almost impossible to guard against this. Sometimes they even ask if they can do this -- the culture of reusability.
Now if someone can please write a paper on the evolution of departments of Informatics that I can reuse I would be most grateful.
<snip> I've seen much recycled material - in academic conference papers then in journals, and gosh even major books :-) In this world of increasing publication and self publication, I would have expected that more and more student (undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate) papers would be appearing online one way or another - and yes it makes it more and more difficult to perhaps distinguish from 'original' thinking and 'creativity', and reuse. Mind, didn't Newton say something like 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.' And that was apparently scarcely original, being a version of a phrase in common usage by authors and thinkers in the Middle Ages and Rennaissance. Taken from http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0162b.shtml "We are like dwarfs standing [or sitting] upon the shoulders of giants, and so able to see more and see farther than the ancients." - Bernard of Chartres, circa 1130 "Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness on sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size." - John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 1159 "A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself." - Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621 "Dwarfs on the shoulders of giants see further than the giants themselves." - Stella Didacus, Eximii verbi divini CONCIONATORIS ORDINNIS MINORUM Regularis Observantiae, 1622 "A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two." - George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651 "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, 1676 "Newton won the race in part because, as he put it, he had stood on the shoulders of giants and in part because he just happened to be the biggest giant of them all." - Alan Cromer, Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science, 1993 "In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand." - Gerald Holton "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." - Hal Abelson Dominic Pinto BA MIEEE MCMI MRi FRSA http://www.ecademy.com/user/dominicpinto e-m: dominic.pinto@ieee.org M: +44 780 302-8268 Ph: +44 207 379-8341 In the U.S. M/Cell: +1 215 667-3001