Re: [Air-L] Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age
Gerry, Of that entire article, I thought the most provocative and interesting statement (which opens up completely different questions than the majority of anecdotal evidence brought to bear) was this one: "And at the University of Maryland<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_maryland/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia <http://www.wikipedia.org/>in a paper on the Great Depression<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/great_depression_1930s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as *common knowledge*." [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html?_r=1&src=tptwempahs... mine] Granted, the outright copying and pasting of texts is problematic. That said, the argument that posts on Wikipedia constitute "common" knowledge is an claim worth seriously considering. What is the relationship of crowd-sourced information to "common" knowledge? What if the situations was changed a bit and the student was reproducing dates and facts, not whole text passages, out of wikipedia and supported their lack of sourcing with this claim. - Matt ps. I write this as someone who hasn't had a problem with students sourcing facts from Wikipedia. ----------------------------- Matthew Bernius PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University | http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/ Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl mBernius@gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius
On Monday, August 02, 2010, Matthew Bernius wrote:
Of that entire article, I thought the most provocative and interesting statement (which opens up completely different questions than the majority of anecdotal evidence brought to bear) was this one:
When I read it, I thought to myself either the students are disingenuous, or their education is not serving them well. One of the things one should learn in college is what is appropriate and why. I include the following in all my syllabi [1], but think the issue should also be part of the first year of every student: not necessarily as a task or rule, but understanding how knowledge work is "done." [1]:http://reagle.org/joseph/2007/teaching/bp-bibliography.html
At both RIT and Cornell, the issue of sourcing and plagerism have always been presented near the front of Syllabi. And when I've taught writing to freshmen, it's been an issue discussed within the first few classes. Anecdotally, in my experience, and those of my colleagues, the students that have had the most problem with this have traditionally been foreign students (who had poor composition skills to begin with). So yes, I had the exact same reaction as to most of those accounts. Still the idea of Wikipedia as common knowledge just interested me and I was wondering how it struck others on the list. ----------------------------- Matthew Bernius PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University | http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/ Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl mBernius@gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008@reagle.org>wrote:
On Monday, August 02, 2010, Matthew Bernius wrote:
Of that entire article, I thought the most provocative and interesting statement (which opens up completely different questions than the majority of anecdotal evidence brought to bear) was this one:
When I read it, I thought to myself either the students are disingenuous, or their education is not serving them well. One of the things one should learn in college is what is appropriate and why. I include the following in all my syllabi [1], but think the issue should also be part of the first year of every student: not necessarily as a task or rule, but understanding how knowledge work is "done."
[1]:http://reagle.org/joseph/2007/teaching/bp-bibliography.html
My reaction is a little different. I find that the focus on citation as a recognition of other's ownership and giving credit, while important, doesn't tell all the story. For me, citation is also an acknowledgement that something has an author, which ought to kick in a critical appraisal of the author-text relationship. Everything from bias to type of discourse (e.g. polemic and so on) to the author's credibility is opened up. Seems to me that the second function of citation is what is being lost when one invokes "common knowledge" as reason not to cite. And an overemphasis on "citation as a function of copyright" might be crowding out "citation as an acknowledgement of discourse". Cheers, James Howison Post-doctoral Associate CMU School of Computer Science http://james.howison.name On Aug 2, 2010, at 23:18, Matthew Bernius wrote:
At both RIT and Cornell, the issue of sourcing and plagerism have always been presented near the front of Syllabi. And when I've taught writing to freshmen, it's been an issue discussed within the first few classes. Anecdotally, in my experience, and those of my colleagues, the students that have had the most problem with this have traditionally been foreign students (who had poor composition skills to begin with).
So yes, I had the exact same reaction as to most of those accounts. Still the idea of Wikipedia as common knowledge just interested me and I was wondering how it struck others on the list.
----------------------------- Matthew Bernius PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University | http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/ Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl mBernius@gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius
On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008@reagle.org>wrote:
On Monday, August 02, 2010, Matthew Bernius wrote:
Of that entire article, I thought the most provocative and interesting statement (which opens up completely different questions than the majority of anecdotal evidence brought to bear) was this one:
When I read it, I thought to myself either the students are disingenuous, or their education is not serving them well. One of the things one should learn in college is what is appropriate and why. I include the following in all my syllabi [1], but think the issue should also be part of the first year of every student: not necessarily as a task or rule, but understanding how knowledge work is "done."
[1]:http://reagle.org/joseph/2007/teaching/bp-bibliography.html
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ps. I write this as someone who hasn't had a problem with students sourcing facts from Wikipedia.
This turn of phrase could be interpreted in at least two ways: 1. Your students regularly use Wikipedia to discover facts, and cite Wikipedia in the process, and you don't consider this a bad thing. 2. Your students have not cited Wikipedia. (Though I would be shocked if they were not *using* it.) Generally, none of us are expected to cite "common knowledge" as it is represented in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Of course, if this were truly knowledge held in common, we would have need of neither. The question is whether text that you re-use verbatim should always be attributed. I have always considered this to be the case, but was in a discussion with colleagues about IRB applications and some of the proforma text that frequently goes into creating them. Those who would never find cutting-and-pasting acceptable in an article are fine with cutting and pasting "boilerplate" in the form of consent forms or other materials that are common across similar protocols, and would never think to cite it. At first I was surprised by this, but at some level, we consider that kind of writing to be "technology." Much in the same way as we might copy computer code from a cookbook without attributing it, we take something that "works" for a human subjects protocol. Often, the boilerplate language is provided to us by our IRBs so that we can do just that. My partner indicates that this kind of copy-and-pasting from boilerplate is not at all unusual in the legal profession, and I suspect it happens in other places where the sort of "ultimate wording" already has been reached. I am far from an apologist for plagiarism (despite what I may have suggested elsewhere: http://alex.halavais.net/how-to-cheat-good) but it seems that given the common undergraduate experience, finding the words that work within a formal--almost legalistic--structure is not exactly an unexpected response. I'm not saying we should blame ourselves, as faculty, for student plagiarism--and I have little patience for those who claim that their questions are so original that they never have to worry about plagiarism--but I can at least see a corner there of why students think this is acceptable. For too many of them, school is not about communicating unique ideas, but rather crossing off a very clearly defined objective in order to achieve an acceptable grade. Best, Alex -- // // This email is // [x] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //
participants (4)
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Alex Halavais -
James Howison -
Joseph Reagle -
Matthew Bernius