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

[Matthew Bernius]

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
>