[Air-L] Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

[James Howison]

My reaction is a little different.  I find that the focus on citation as a recognition of other's ownership and giving credit, while important, doesn't tell all the story.

For me, citation is also an acknowledgement that something has an author, which ought to kick in a critical appraisal of the author-text relationship.  Everything from bias to type of discourse (e.g. polemic and so on) to the author's credibility is opened up.

Seems to me that the second function of citation is what is being lost when one invokes "common knowledge" as reason not to cite.  And an overemphasis on "citation as a function of copyright" might be crowding out "citation as an acknowledgement of discourse".

Cheers,

James Howison
Post-doctoral Associate
CMU School of Computer Science
http://james.howison.name

On Aug 2, 2010, at 23:18, Matthew Bernius wrote:

> At both RIT and Cornell, the issue of sourcing and plagerism have always
> been presented near the front of Syllabi. And when I've taught writing to
> freshmen, it's been an issue discussed within the first few classes.
> Anecdotally, in my experience, and those of my colleagues, the students that
> have had the most problem with this have traditionally been foreign students
> (who had poor composition skills to begin with).
> 
> So yes, I had the exact same reaction as to most of those accounts. Still
> the idea of Wikipedia as common knowledge just interested me and I was
> wondering how it struck others on the list.
> 
> -----------------------------
> Matthew Bernius
> PhD Student | Cultural Anthropology | Cornell University |
> http://www.arts.cornell.edu/anthro/
> Researcher At Large | Open Publishing Lab @ the Rochester Institute of
> Technology | http://opl.cias.rit.edu | @ritopl
> mBernius at gMail.com | http://www.waking-dream.com | @mattBernius
> 
> 
> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008 at reagle.org>wrote:
> 
>> On Monday, August 02, 2010, Matthew Bernius wrote:
>>> Of that entire article, I thought the most provocative and interesting
>>> statement (which opens up completely different questions than the
>> majority
>>> of anecdotal evidence brought to bear) was this one:
>> 
>> When I read it, I thought to myself either the students are disingenuous,
>> or their education is not serving them well. One of the things one should
>> learn in college is what is appropriate and why. I include the following in
>> all my syllabi [1], but think the issue should also be part of the first
>> year of every student: not necessarily as a task or rule, but understanding
>> how knowledge work is "done."
>> 
>> [1]:http://reagle.org/joseph/2007/teaching/bp-bibliography.html
>> 
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