Serendipity35

There's a NJWA Conference in April. The New Jersey Writing Alliance examines pedagogical and institutional innovations in teaching reading and writing both in high schools and at the two and four-year colleges.

I'm prepping for a panel that will address issues around the success and failure in using technology to prevent and detect plagiarism. It seems that the objective is to address specifically some of the software like Turnitin.com and SafeAssign that are being used, and also some of the institutional questions that need to be considered such as intellectual property and broader academic integrity issues.

I have been looking at my archived materials on all this from the past 7 years. During that time I have been a Turnitin administrator and faculty user at both the higher ed and secondary levels. I have also served on NJIT's Honor Commission and so have seen the larger institutional concerns.

In researching some topics online, it's clear that this is another educational issue that makes our world flat.

For example, from ZDNet News, I found the very unshocking headline "U.K. teachers: Web plagiarism a serious problem." Here are a few bits from there with a few of [my comments].

• More than half the respondents in a survey of U.K. teachers said they thought plagiarism from the Internet is a problem. [only more than half?]
• Some students who steal essays wholesale from the Web, they said, are so lazy they don't even bother to delete advertisements from the cut-and-pasted text. [Does this mean they are lazy or that they don't see anything wrong in what they are doing?]
• The 58 percent of teachers who said plagiarism was a problem estimated that more than a quarter of the work returned by their pupils included plagiarism.
• "I have found once students clearly understand what plagiarism is, its consequences, and how to reference correctly so they can draw on published works, plagiarism becomes less of a problem," said Diana Baker from Emmanuel College, Durham. "I think the majority of students who engage in plagiarism do it more out of ignorance than the desire to cheat. They really want to succeed on their own merit." [I agree that educating students about these topics will help, but i believe less and less that students are unaware that what they are doing is considered wrong.]

Do you have any success or failure stories about using any type of technology to prevent or detect plagiarism? Post a comment or drop me an email at kronkowitz[at]pccc.edu. I would love to share your information with the panelists and the conference attendees in April.