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. Bonnie A. Nardi School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3440 (949) 824-6534 www.artifex.org/~bonnie/ On Mar 9, 2007, at 9:25 AM, T. Kennedy wrote:

I've been (trying) to follow this discussion concerning turnitin with interest. I use turnitin in ALL the courses I teach - as Marj concisely put it - as a tool to detect replicated text.

Turnitin is not full proof - already pointed out; it picks up any replicated text, which may include direct quotes from websites, journal articles etc - but also if they put in their reference page and so forth - the percentage of matching text can be misleading. It is up to the faculty and TA (etc) to go through the report - check the original site of the text see what's going on.

There have also been times when students have recycled papers from other courses and when I've requested the original source, I am not able to get it without permission of the instructor of that first course (sent via email). This tells me that w/s/t intellectual property - not everyone can easily access student papers even if they wanted to.

I think we are missing one of the larger issues here - WHY are so many students plagiarising in their written submissions? (in fact, I also ask them to post their written text of seminar presentations - and it continually surprises me how many students just lift material from other sources without acknowledgment in their presentations). And why do students still feel it's ok to copy and paste copious amounts of text in their papers?

The argument: "However, the assumption that students need to prove innocent (rather than innocence unless otherwise proven) bothers me a great deal." No one is assuming anything, as submitting a paper to turnitin is not a finger-wagging session with accusations of guilt. If nothing else, I've used this tool to show students how to cite properly and how to reword arguments (and then cite) affectively. But let me say this - if we didn't have so many students plagiarizing daily - then we certainly wouldn't need this program would we? We certainly wouldn't have extensive notations in university calendars and we certainly wouldn't have uni depts attaching notes to course syllabi or noting plagiarism in them.

(as an aside - does the existence of radar cameras to detect excessive speeds by drivers on highways also presume that everyone is speeding and should be ticketed, or is it a tool to catch those who do speed? Do I contact the ministry of transportation and tell them to not use these cameras because it's an infringement of my personal freedoms and assert that not everyone speeds so why track me? I don't think so.)

We've moved beyond the core issue here and overlooked the key issue; the amount of plagiarised student submissions is increasing steadily. In EVERY one of my classes in the last six years I have had at least one student (probably an average of 3 per class) plagiarise in their papers. To be honest, I can only stomach so much of the "I didn't know I had to reference that" story - despite the numerous handouts, links to writing centres and in-class discussions I've had with students about how to cite properly, what's considered plagiarism and so forth. Long before turnitin arrived, I spent endless hours searching suspicious student text in search engines like google (with results I might add). Would this be a considered unethical as well?

As others have pointed out - universities are full of rules, regulations and policies - and this is another one. If people are hesitant, then again - there are other options that can be made available to the student - and I think this is part of a larger pedagogical issue and how we feel we should measure student performance and learning. But again, I am more interested in why the prevalence of plagiarism in our classrooms.

Tracy

-----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Marj Kibby Sent: March 9, 2007 2:46 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue

Turnitin is a tool. It can be used for good or for evil. :-)

Turnitin doesn't detect plagiarism. It locates text that matches text in its database.

How we use that facility is up to us.

Marj

Dr Marjorie Kibby, Senior Lecturer in Communication & Culture Faculty of Education and Arts The University of Newcastle, Callaghan NSW 2308 Australia Marj.Kibby@newcastle.edu.au +61 2 49216604 _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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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.

It makes good economic sense to recycle existing information rather than to reinvent the wheel -- so in many ways our students' behaviors make better economic sense than the traditional writing pedagogies that focus on original authorship. However, in this culture of reusability (aka filesharing, aka single sourcing), the writer needs to learn two important skills: 1. When and how to credit labor/effort and to acknowledge copyright -- and those are two different things. Though copyright maximalists like to blur that distinction, I think it is important to maintain it. In most business contexts, it is not a copyright violation to recycle boilerplate from an existing report (the company owns the copyright, after all, under the work-for-hire doctrine). However, it can pose ethical problems if an employee tries to "steal labor credit" from another employee. 2. When and how to adapt existing information for next contexts, audiences, circumstances. "Mere copying" or redistribution is seldom rhetorically effective. The writer has to learn how to reshape, adapt, redesign information for suitability elsewhere. Recycling one's own work done in a previous academic context is neither plagiarism nor a copyright violation (unless the copyright was assigned to someone else). However, it might be an act of "academic dishonesty" (yet another category) nonetheless, depending on how that is defined by a given institution and by a given instructor. Jim Porter ------------------------------- James E. Porter Co-Director, WIDE Research Center Writing in Digital Environments Olds Hall 7 Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 porterj8@msu.edu office: 517.353.7258 fax: 517.353.9162 http://wide.msu.edu/ -----------------------------------------

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>