Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue [and privacy+security of students]
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
Bram Dov Abramson wrote:
It's hard not to wonder whether alternatives to Turnitin are in the offing.
mydropbox.com, an alternative to turnitin.com that does basically the same thing, restricts the database to the institution -- that is, student texts are compared to all the publicly available texts and to student texts generated at their own institution; the databases (as I understand the system) are housed institutionally as well, so the privacy and IP issues seem a little better thought out for their system. Unfortunately, it's not as well marketed or supported as turnitin.com. I think the kinds of locally-instituted open source tools for doing this kind of work that you suggest below could be designed to be primarily teaching applications (rather than detection software). Now that would be a big leap forward. Doug
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 _______________________________________________ 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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participants (2)
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Bram Dov Abramson -
Douglas Eyman