In a BBC news article today, there’s a discussion of cheating, plagiarism and its changing nature in digital culture:
Technological solutions alone will not be enough to prevent children using the internet to cheat in their coursework, a government adviser has said. Professor Jean Underwood of Nottingham Trent University says it is up to teachers and parents to show that plagiarism is inappropriate. [...] Professor Underwood said technology could help ameliorate the problem but was “no quick fix”. She said software already existed to help schools ascertain whether work was the pupil’s own. “It can even be as simple as typing a phrase into Google.” “If a phrase has been plagiarised, sites will bring it up.” [...] Professor Underwood said some software could check as well as mark work. But she said some clever students would find ways round such programmes. [...] “We need to think smart on an academic and technological level,” she said “The internet is a wonderful thing with the power to change lives - but there will always be a downside.”
While I gather the article and the survey is describes are aimed at primary and secondary education more so than tertiary level, I do think the general philosophy of teachers, educators, parents and anyone else who is part of the learning process(es) taking some responsibility to teach students and learners that plagiarism is wrong is extremely important in ensuring the upcoming generations don’t have a far less developed ethical approach to plagiarism, (mis)appropriation and cheating.
In the last couple of years I’ve taught several courses which have looked a digital culture and had a sizable online presence. From those I’ve found these three strategies can be useful in increasing student awareness of the ethical (and practical) dimensions of citation and the problems of plagiarism:
[1] Talk About It In Every Course - Sometimes I’ve found that students simply don’t have enough conversations about plagiarism. Many academics presume that students already know what’s ethical and what’s not, especially in the second, third and later years of a university degree. For various reasons, some students will not understand what plagiarism is and why it’s wrong (especially when the rhetoric around the tertiary system is often phrased in economic terms - “in purely financial terms, doesn’t using existing work mean I can finish my degree faster and get a job” might be the thoughts of some students!). Having a conversation about the expectations of the course in the first tutorial/seminar/class session which includes flagging the unacceptable nature of cheating/plagiarism is important. If possible, it’s worth setting aside enough time to make this a real conversation - put the right questions/starting points on the table and students will almost always come to the conclusions that cheat/plagiarise are wrong themselves!
[2] If Get Students to Post Their Material Online and Discuss The Copyright Status of Their Work - In the cases where a course has a public and visible online presence, I’ve found it important to discuss what should and shouldn’t be in a university course blog in some detail with them before students start posting (especially since many of them are familiar with different experiences of blogging from personal and social blogs). An especially useful part of the conversation can be when students consider how they would like their online posts and their online writing to be protected. Starting from a student-centric perspective can make issues of ownership, ethics and plagiarism much closer to home, and increase an awareness of why these issues matter. While I’m not a huge fan of speaking the tongues of legality, I’ve found the practicality of using some sort of official copyright license on university blogs quite important. Moreover, working out which license in conjunction with students can be an extremely fruitful process. For example, the Self.Net tutorial blogs all used a Creative Commons which works on the ‘Some Rights Reserved’ principle (letting you work somewhere in the spectrum between the absolutes of the public domain and full copyright). The specific license used was Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 which has these stipulations:
Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.
In a nutshell, this license was the legal equivalent of the ethical guidelines students agreed upon when discussing plagiarism and responsibility in the first tutorials and thus makes their decision far more clear when it has a legal form as well. These licenses also explicitly flag two more important things: (a) that students actually own their work, something often not made clear and (b) that other students, courses, universities, individuals, self-learners, etc. are explicitly welcome to build upon and re-use the work of students in this course and that agreement is presented with a legal mechanism which basically enshrines the anti-plagiarism practices academia has cherished for centuries (ie it’s about ensuring creditation as they key thing!). Thus students also start to consider their work in the spectrum of learning materials online, too (and self-awareness of their sometimes rushed efforts can help them bring a more critical perspective when examining other online sources!).
[3] Write Assessment That Illustrates the Continuity Between Online and Offline Sources - For example, in my Self.Net course last year, as the first minor assignment (worth 20% of the course mark), my colleague Jane Long and I came up with the notion of a Critical Annotated Webliography. That is, an annotated bibliography of exclusively online sources. In order to focus the webliographies, I wrote four hypothetical questions, and then asked student to write an annotated bibliography of online source that they would use if they were to answer the essay question (but they were not actually required to answer the hypothetical question, just describe how they would’ve gone about it). This assessment piece ensured that the critical skills students bring to offline/ print sources in books and so forth was also brought along when addressing online sources. One of the bigger issues still seems to be that students (and some educators) treat online sources as if they need different critical skills (and, more often than not, less critical skills) to analyse. While new media such as Flash animations certainly need media-specific analyses, when an item online is text or just a PDF or html page, then the same critical skills can be brought to bear as would be regarding offline sources. This is an extremely obvious point, but one many students need a helping hand to make. In Self.Net I found the Webliographies were never successful in discussing and understanding these issues, and student feedback suggests it was a successful method to engage with the ethical and practical issues surrounding online sources. (For a few good examples, feel free to take a look at Hourann’s Webliography, Carley’s Webliography or Dani’s Webliography which were written in the second half of 2004).
Incidentally, while I do understand that in time-constrained teaching environments, there’s something useful about plagiarism-detection being automated, I nevertheless have huge issues with institution level plagiarism detection systems like TurnItIn.com. In my view this is (a) treating the symptom, not the cause and (b) treating students as if we expect them to cheat. While I might be living in a utopian bubble, I still believe that it’s the educator’s job to ensure a philosophy and ethics in students which will see them choose not to plagiarised and if plagiarism is occurring I would also like to think the educators are clued in enough to be able to spot it in their areas of expertise.
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