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

Julian Hopkins j at julianhopkins.net
Tue Aug 3 21:39:08 PDT 2010


I have experienced the issues mentioned by everyone here, and it may be
compounded in countries (such as Malaysia) where rote learning is heavily
emphasised. For Muslim cultures, I believe that drawing a parallel with the
very stringent requirements for tracing and documenting sources in the
hadith (the isnad - 'chain of transmission') would be a good way of
validating citation practices.

I also think that incoming students should be given practical classes as
soon as possible in their university life, and in particular they should
include:

1. A pledge not to plagiarise - some research showed that this has a
positive effect (McCabe, Donald L., and Linda Klebe Trevino, 1993. "Academic
dishonesty: honor codes and other contextual influences." Journal of Higher
Education. 64.5.)

2. Training in the use of a citation management software such as Zotero
(which is free). Proper use of such software takes most of the drudgery out
of citations, and I continue to be amazed by how many students, and
certified academics, do not use it. From experience, a little demonstration
of the integrated word processing feature has an immediate Wow! factor that
convinces some students to use it. 

Unfortunately, too many seem to think it's too much work. I think that one
reason is that the moment when one needs such software the most is also a
moment of high pressure to meet deadlines, thus people put it off because of
the need to learn to use the software. If all students were required to set
up an online Zotero account (for example), at the beginning of their
studies, then they would be a lot more likely to use it. 

I wrote something about cyberplagiarism in Malaysia once, in case anyone's
interested:
http://julianhopkins.net/distribution/JulianHopkins_Cyberplagiarism.pdf 

Regards,
Julian

++++++++++
Blog: www.julianhopkins.net
Twitter: @julianhopkins
Skype: julhop

-----Original Message-----

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 18:20:46 -0400
From: Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008 at reagle.org>
To: Matthew Bernius <mbernius at gmail.com>
Cc: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age
Message-ID: <201008021820.47122.joseph.2008 at reagle.org>
Content-Type: Text/Plain;  charset="windows-1252"

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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