20100718.1721

I more or less took today to myself. I've been doing a lot of running around recently, and I figured that I could stand to take a day to rest; I feel like I'll be very well able to get back to work in earnest tomorrow.

One of the things that I do when I rest is read. I'll not restate my love of text (again at the moment), but I do generally find reading to be a pleasant activity. And even when I do run across things that prompt strong responses from me, such as this article, I enjoy the sensation.

As I read Staples's article earlier this afternoon, I found myself more or less in agreement with what he discusses. I have already had several cut-and-paste plagiarists in my writing classes this semester. In most of the cases, the offending students simply did not know that 1) they were supposed cite information that they get from the Internet, and 2) that their assignments needed to be their writing, rather than a collage of source materials formatted neatly (not that most format their papers according to the standards I enforce, but that is a different issue).

Regarding the former, I find that a lot of students simply do not realize that information taken from the Internet requires citation. The typical reaction from a student upon being confronted with the zero that plagiarism receives from me is something like "But it's on the Internet. Doesn't that mean the everybody owns it?" While I do acknowledge that ownership of information is a thorny issue--something that this article, among many others, speaks to--I do not see citation so much as confirming or denying ownership as a mark of respect for the person or people who went to the trouble of assembling the material being employed. This is particularly true in the cases of older works that have passed into the public domain and are "common property"; all of us really do own the work, at least in a legal sense, but we ought to at least pay lip service to the effort that went into constructing that material.

Some of the reasoning behind the latter type of behavior, the cut-and-paste-and-from-sources-only approach to writing for school, is in the academic socialization enforced upon the students in the past. There are in my experience a number of instructors at several academic levels who oblige their students to do nothing in their "research papers" except compile and summarize information. While it is very much true that being able to find and condense information is a valuable skill in the academy and outside it, the development of knowledge depends on more than simply grabbing data and putting it together. At the very least, it requires looking at the data and extrapolating from it; unless at least that minimal step is taken, all that is being accomplished is rote recitation--a task at which almost any contemporary computer vastly exceeds almost any human.

That I say so does not mean that I am against the computer or its use in scholastic research--indeed, I am very much for both. But I do not believe that the machine or its employment ought to stand in the place of identifying an idea and explicating both the information that gives rise to it and the process by which said information does so. I am not at all certain that it can.

I am also not at all certain that Staples's final call for the preservation of "the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally" can be adequately answered. Rather, I think that new methods for doing so need to be developed. And there is already quite a bit of work--some of it quite good--being done in classrooms throughout the United States and outside it. There is also, unfortunately but unavoidably, quite a bit of shitty work being done in that regard.

The task before us, then, is to identify and expand upon those methods which are successful and valid, looking into why they are successful and why the others are not.

Addenda
July 22, 2010
I caught a flagrant plagiarist yesterday; the student's entire paper, down to the line-breaks, had been cut-and-pasted from one of four websites. One of those websites, evidently, is Cheathouse.com. Pretty obvious, really...

July 23,2010
I just spent a couple of hours grading papers, though for a different class. Three more students plagiarized. I understand that the end of the term is at hand, but I have spoken with their class at great length about the need for citation--as well as for doing one's own work, since cut-and-paste or copy-over jobs like those I caught today are not exactly the same as missing a citation.