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

Margaret Borschke Margaret.Borschke at unsw.edu.au
Tue Aug 3 17:33:37 PDT 2010


What if we question the premise: that is that students plagiarise more than they once did.  Is it really true?

These charges have a distinct whiff of anxiety about "kids today" and the effects of digital and network technologies about them.

Copy and paste capacities might make it easier to lift entire passages but the same technologies also made it easier to find them. Students know this. For one, most know they will be are assumed guilty before being proven innocent by commercial services that universities subscribe to such as Turn it in.

Whenever I read these "corrupting influence of the internet" stories, I like to counter them with this beautiful confession by Kevin Kopelson about his own old school adventures in plagiarism and his more recent experiences teaching:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n10/kevin-kopelson/diary



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