[Air-l] turnitin issue

[Jim Porter]

> 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




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James E. Porter
Co-Director, WIDE Research Center
Writing in Digital Environments
Olds Hall 7
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI  48824
porterj8 at msu.edu
office: 517.353.7258
fax: 517.353.9162
http://wide.msu.edu/
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