[Air-l] turnitin issue

[Sarita Yardi]

from the perspective of a grad student -

This thread is challenging because it is conflates a number of different
issues:
1. Does my professor trust me, the student, and should they?
2. Why is my professor using Turnitin in this particular class or with this
particular group of students? (ie do they not trust us, do they want to
check 'just in case'?)
3. What copyright rules should be applied to my work?

I subscribe to online environments with fairly reckless abandon (can I say
it's all in the name of research?) and I'm sure there is way more
information out there about me than I care to know. Even if I didn't study
online environments, my papers are on my website and any robot or person
could scrape them and copy them if they chose to. For that reason, the
technology behind Turnitin doesn't particularly bother me AS LONG AS I know
beforehand if a professor is going to submit it to the site and also know if
my name will be associated with the paper. (In fact my standards for writing
might be raised... the awareness that there may be an audience for my work
is a motivating factor!)

The idea of copying chunks of text off the web into a paper without citing
is foreign to me, but I learned to write papers before the online remix
culture took off. I think the real problem is the junior high and high
school kids who have grown up in this copy and paste culture. When we visit
a page on Wikipedia and edit it, yes, we can see who wrote each section of
the page before us if we care to dig through the history, but it is
possible, even likely, that we will just insert our change into someone
else's paragraph and be done with it - and this is how it this environment
is designed to work.

A more compelling example is MySpace - the millions of sites out there have
been created from cutting and pasting from other people's sites. Kids in
schools right now are getting *a lot* of lectures about privacy issues on
MySpace but I haven't heard of many (any?) about the perils of plagiarising
their friends' MySpace design.

My point: Without teaching kids/teens/college students about why you, the
professor, are using Turnitin, it could be considered unfair to them to use
it against them. In other words, if they aren't taught, very explicitly and
repeatedly, the difference between writing academic papers versus using
MySpace, Wikipedia, and other remixing environments, because they have been
raised in these cultures it may be unnatural for them to automatically make
the distinction between right and wrong (yes, this this is an arguable
claim, but it is worded as such to make the point).

One idea: A fun assignment might be to have students pick one arbitrary
topic and 1. Write an academic paper, 2. Edit a Wikipedia page, and 3.
Create a MySpace page about this topic - and run all three through a
'Turnitin test', then explain why failing the Turnitin test in the latter
two is not necessarily a problem whereas failing the first is. I think would
make a pretty lasting impression on me, as far as homework assignments go.

I ran this post by my labmates and Andrea Forte also suggested that in
addition to thinking about educating kids we may also need to think about
how we, the educators, actually define plagiarism.


PS
The latest print issue of IEEE has two articles, one with a reference to
Turnitin along the same lines of this discussion and the other which says
that the number of instances of plagiarism reported in IEEE publications has
been rising steadily with 14 in 2004, 26 in 2005, and 47 in 2006.
http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org
("Copy-and-Paste Papers Put Profs on the Offensive" and "The Plagiarism
Problem: Now You Can Help").

Also, Dan Perkel at Berkeley wrote a paper called "Copy and Paste Literacy"
that may be worth a read:
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel/media/dperkel_literacymyspace.pdf
<http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/%7Edperkel/media/dperkel_literacymyspace.pdf>




-- 
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/%7Eyardi>