[Air-l] turnitin issue

[burkx006 at umn.edu]

On Mar 11 2007, Sarita Yardi wrote:

> 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.

Well, as long as you mention it, in addition to the papers uploaded by 
instructors, it appears that Turnitin also scrapes a lot of web content 
into their database (on the theory, pretty much plausible, that web content 
is a substantial source of plagiarized material).

So your papers may well be in the database without your knowing that an 
instructor has submitted it to the site, as there is an alternate route by 
which they may have gotten there.

DLB


-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
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