Writing Ethics and Technology
I'm on the panel titled Writing Ethics and Technology at the 9th Annual NJWA Conference at Georgian Court University on April 4. I have been doing some online collaboration on the topic with the other K20 panelists.
I gave my part of the panel's opening presentation the title "Technology Ethics: An Oxymoron?" I'm playing the oxymoron card because the question the panel is being asked is whether using technology to combat plagiarism can outweigh the use of technology to plagiarize. Is technology the problem or the solution?
There are plenty of opinion pieces out there on this. They have titles like "Educating the Cut-and-Paste Generation" and "Download your Workload, Offload your Integrity." Here are a few sites I've been reading that you may to consider.
"As much as I don't care for Turnitin's practice of hoarding student work in their database, their marketing copy that emphasizes detection over teaching, and their overstated promise to solve plagiarism, it cheers me that people are finding ways to make Turnitin.com useful if they're stuck with it. I'm not a fan of the program, and when I teach, I have students use CopyChecker,a small client side program that can be downloaded to their computer(When last I taught, it was free to students and may still be.).
With this, students can paste in one window their draft and in another window text from a source they are using. The program highlights matching and then students have a list of heuristics I give them: Is the match in your draft in need of quotations? Has it been cited? Should it be blockquoted?"
Abstract of a keynote address by David Booth
"Academic Integrity in the Context of New Technologies"
New technologies present unprecedented opportunities for sophisticated undergraduate learning, and also unprecedented threats to the values of academia. The context of liberal learning is thus decisively changed by the advent of new technologies: students have access to vastly more information, but that information is less mediated by intervening experts and interpreters. Students can learn more, encounter more, synthesize more, and interpret more; yet by the same token they face a confusing jumble of competing claims and constant temptation to misappropriate others' work. On the other hand, although this new context renders the challenges for learning communities more intense, the challenges remain in many ways what they always have been: students must cultivate critical judgment, manage ambiguity, locate their own ideas in the context of others', etc. Thus new technologies should not distract us from certain cardinal virtues that remain central to liberal arts colleges and universities; instead we should develop pedagogy that employs new technologies to renew our focus on those virtues.
Google announced back in May 2007 a ban on advertisements for "academic paper-writing services" and the sale of archived essays, theses, and dissertations." What that means is that essay websites join their blacklist of "unacceptable content." (That list includes ads for weapons, prostitution, drugs, tobacco, fake documents and "miracle cures".)
Educators have to be thankful for that small helping hand. Buying an "original" essay or research paper has always been a very difficult form of plagiarism to detect, and programs like Turnitin are no real help with truly original content that was produced by someone other than the student who submits the work.
Ryerson University in Canada has online some faculty strategies. It's sad how few colleges actually offer any information online for students and faculty or have clear policies about integrity issues. Here's a Ryerson sample:
Plagiarism Detection Software: If you will be using Turnitin.com, your course outlines must inform students that it is a course requirement. The Course Management Policy (#145(a), Section 4.3 ai. requires that: “Students who do not want their work submitted to this plagiarism detection service must, by the end of the second week of class, consult with the instructor to make alternate arrangements.
One of the Penn State iStudy for Success! modules deal with integrity. You can look at some of their student and instructor materials.
There's a lot that I still want to examine and I look forward to the information from the other panelists who will look at some tools that I have no experience with, such as SafeAssignment from MyDropBox which is works within Blackboard.
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