On Mar 11 2007, Sarita Yardi wrote:
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.
Well, as long as you mention it, in addition to the papers uploaded by instructors, it appears that Turnitin also scrapes a lot of web content into their database (on the theory, pretty much plausible, that web content is a substantial source of plagiarized material). So your papers may well be in the database without your knowing that an instructor has submitted it to the site, as there is an alternate route by which they may have gotten there. 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@umn.edu