from the perspective of a grad student - This thread is challenging because it is conflates a number of different issues: 1. Does my professor trust me, the student, and should they? 2. Why is my professor using Turnitin in this particular class or with this particular group of students? (ie do they not trust us, do they want to check 'just in case'?) 3. What copyright rules should be applied to my work? I subscribe to online environments with fairly reckless abandon (can I say it's all in the name of research?) and I'm sure there is way more information out there about me than I care to know. Even if I didn't study online environments, my papers are on my website and any robot or person could scrape them and copy them if they chose to. For that reason, the technology behind Turnitin doesn't particularly bother me AS LONG AS I know beforehand if a professor is going to submit it to the site and also know if my name will be associated with the paper. (In fact my standards for writing might be raised... the awareness that there may be an audience for my work is a motivating factor!) The idea of copying chunks of text off the web into a paper without citing is foreign to me, but I learned to write papers before the online remix culture took off. I think the real problem is the junior high and high school kids who have grown up in this copy and paste culture. When we visit a page on Wikipedia and edit it, yes, we can see who wrote each section of the page before us if we care to dig through the history, but it is possible, even likely, that we will just insert our change into someone else's paragraph and be done with it - and this is how it this environment is designed to work. A more compelling example is MySpace - the millions of sites out there have been created from cutting and pasting from other people's sites. Kids in schools right now are getting *a lot* of lectures about privacy issues on MySpace but I haven't heard of many (any?) about the perils of plagiarising their friends' MySpace design. My point: Without teaching kids/teens/college students about why you, the professor, are using Turnitin, it could be considered unfair to them to use it against them. In other words, if they aren't taught, very explicitly and repeatedly, the difference between writing academic papers versus using MySpace, Wikipedia, and other remixing environments, because they have been raised in these cultures it may be unnatural for them to automatically make the distinction between right and wrong (yes, this this is an arguable claim, but it is worded as such to make the point). One idea: A fun assignment might be to have students pick one arbitrary topic and 1. Write an academic paper, 2. Edit a Wikipedia page, and 3. Create a MySpace page about this topic - and run all three through a 'Turnitin test', then explain why failing the Turnitin test in the latter two is not necessarily a problem whereas failing the first is. I think would make a pretty lasting impression on me, as far as homework assignments go. I ran this post by my labmates and Andrea Forte also suggested that in addition to thinking about educating kids we may also need to think about how we, the educators, actually define plagiarism. PS The latest print issue of IEEE has two articles, one with a reference to Turnitin along the same lines of this discussion and the other which says that the number of instances of plagiarism reported in IEEE publications has been rising steadily with 14 in 2004, 26 in 2005, and 47 in 2006. http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org ("Copy-and-Paste Papers Put Profs on the Offensive" and "The Plagiarism Problem: Now You Can Help"). Also, Dan Perkel at Berkeley wrote a paper called "Copy and Paste Literacy" that may be worth a read: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel/media/dperkel_literacymyspace.pdf <http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/%7Edperkel/media/dperkel_literacymyspace.pdf> -- College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/%7Eyardi>