[Air-l] turnitin issue [and privacy+security of students]

[Douglas Eyman]

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
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