[Air-l] turnitin issue

[Dominic Pinto]

--- Bonnie Nardi <nardi at ics.uci.edu> wrote:

> 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.
> 
<snip>

I've seen much recycled material - in academic
conference papers then in journals, and gosh even
major books :-)

In this world of increasing publication and self
publication, I would have expected that more and more
student (undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate) papers
would be appearing online one way or another - and yes
it makes it more and more difficult to perhaps
distinguish from 'original' thinking and 'creativity',
and reuse.

Mind, didn't Newton say something like 'If I have seen
further, it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants.' And that was apparently scarcely original,
being a version of a phrase in common usage by authors
and thinkers in the Middle Ages and Rennaissance.

Taken from
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0162b.shtml

"We are like dwarfs standing [or sitting] upon the
shoulders of giants, and so able to see more and see
farther than the ancients."
- Bernard of Chartres, circa 1130 
"Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like
dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see
more than they, and things at a greater distance, not
by virtue of any sharpness on sight on our part, or
any physical distinction, but because we are carried
high and raised up by their giant size."
- John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 1159 
"A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see
farther than a giant himself."
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621 
"Dwarfs on the shoulders of giants see further than
the giants themselves."
- Stella Didacus, Eximii verbi divini CONCIONATORIS
ORDINNIS MINORUM Regularis Observantiae, 1622 
"A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the
two."
- George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651 
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants."
- Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, 1676 
"Newton won the race in part because, as he put it, he
had stood on the shoulders of giants and in part
because he just happened to be the biggest giant of
them all."
- Alan Cromer, Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of
Science, 1993 
"In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to
sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we
stand."
- Gerald Holton 
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because
giants were standing on my shoulders."
- Hal Abelson 


Dominic Pinto BA MIEEE MCMI MRi FRSA
http://www.ecademy.com/user/dominicpinto

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