Category: Academia

I went to a spiel/mini-symposium/keynote speech deal over at the University of Michigan on Friday that was kind of a recap of a conference they had there about plagiarism last year, and also a celebration for the book Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age. An interesting afternoon, and as an aside, it is one of those things that makes me think about living in the long shadow cast by the University of Michigan. Most people (including some of the out-of-towners who were at this thing) are surprised to learn that EMU is only about 10 miles away from U of M, though, as my visit to the pristine and beautiful Angell Hall reminded me for the millionth time, U of M and EMU are worlds apart. But the upside of living right next to U of M is events like this come up every once in a while, not to mention all the other cool stuff in Ann Arbor and on campus, the libraries, etc., etc.

Anyway, the speeches were from Linda “on the home team” Adler-Kassner, Rebecca Moore Howard, and Chris Anson. The three of them have a chapter is in this book, too. Linda AK’s talk was about Turnitin.com and she pointed out something that I guess is kind of obvious once you start looking but something I had not thought of before: just about everything you see about plagiarism in the popular press seems to come from these people at Turnitin.com. That’s kind of like everything about the overblown dangers of drinking and driving coming out from Budweiser or something. It’s a nasty business to be sure, but you’ve got to hand it to John Barrie and these other people: they’ve been incredibly able to convince folks that a) plagiarism is this horrific plague on the educational process, and b)Turnitin.com is the solution. And they’ve done all this with essentially no expertise on the matter.

Rebecca Howard’s talk was mostly about a research project she’s working on called “The Engaged Reading Project,” which is a fairly complicated and detailed analysis of how students are using/misusing sources. One of the things she pointed out as part of her talk was some of the ways in which Turnitin.com doesn’t work when it comes to “catching” things less than 40-some-odd characters, and what Turnitin really is is a “copy detection” system, which is not the same thing as plagiarism. I appreciated this because while all of the ethical and other problems with plagiarism detection schemes are of course important, it frankly annoys me to no end that these people are making millions of dollars off of a product that fosters bad teaching and, just to top it off, it doesn’t really work that well.

Anyway, most of what Howard did was talk about how her research is trying to approach the problem from the opposite direction, to find out what it is that students are doing with their sources, etc. I think a lot of what she was talking about is that students who are misusing sources and doing a sort of “patch writing” are just not that engaged in the reading and the assignment. So in that sense, plagiarism (but not really plagiarism, more like not using sources well and/or not according to the rules) really is a learning problem and not a policing problem.

Chris Anson talked about a couple of examples of plagiarism– or not really plagiarism so much as “borrowed writing”– that occur all the time in the “real world.” One was in the Army, where it is (apparently) common for officers to copy each others’ memos without attribution in order to relay a message to the troops. Mike at vitia had a series of posts which start here about this in November that sort of address this kind of thing. But for me the more interesting example was when he was talking about how there’s all this language on the web that people “borrow” from each other all the time. The example Anson had that stuck with me was the kind of language that a number of different web sites use about how to drive in the snow and ice. For example, if you do a Google search for these two sentences–

Use your brakes cautiously. Abrupt braking can cause brake lock-up and cause you to lose steering control.

— (as I did if you follow the link), you’ll see lots of web sites use either the exact language or something pretty close to it in describing icy driving. Now, is this plagiarism? Hell if I know. I mean, it seems to me there are only so many ways you can uniquely word something like “use your brakes cautiously,” which maybe gets into some territory about what counts as “common knowledge” of something that doesn’t need to be cited, or some kind of language that cannot be copyrighted or owned per se, like most recipes.

At the end of the day, and I think this was Linda’s main point, “plagiarism” is a problem that really is a stand-in for lots of other problems and fears we have about the (mis)education of youth. Plagiarism is a hot topic again as a result of technology, but is it actually a “problem” because students can so easily just “copy and paste” stuff from the web, or is it really a problem because this technology throws such an enormous wrench into concepts of ownership, knowledge, access, collaboration, connections, etc. It’d be interesting to find out if there were previous plagiarism scares with the development of previous technologies, like the dangers of the typewriter making writing so much easier to copy.

Anyway, great and thoughtful stuff. I bought the book and I hope to use it a bit next year when I teach about plagiarism again in 516.

From the blog Framed comes this entry, “Don’t Turnitin: Annotated Bibliography:”

Late last year, the company (Turnitin) attempted to induce high school students–minors, mostly–to assent to a new and draconian user agreement by clicking through a document that appeared when one logged in to Turnitin. Turnitin attempted to induce students to agree to its terms without even notifying the school district or the parents of children in the school. This step caused the school to temporarily suspend the service.

Now, however, the school has sent home a form for parents to sign authorizing their children to click through and assent to the Turnitin contract. Unfortunately, the school did not tell parents anything about the content of the agreement they were supposed to authorize their children to assent to.

The blogger in question, James Trumm, also includes a handy bibliography that sums up the problems of Turnitin. But these tactics are pretty dang low if you ask me.

I’ve got to get a move-on here because I’ve got to clean up after our faux Mardi Gras party we had last night (pictures and a post about that later). But I wanted to post something about the last couple weeks of wiki-centric stuff around here, culminating in a couple lectures featuring Larry Sanger and Marshall Poe.

Just to back up a bit:

Marshall Poe is the McAndless visiting scholar at EMU this year. This is an endowment that was set up many years ago to bring in various visiting professors for a term; a couple years ago, this is how we got Scott McCloud to be on campus and do so much stuff with our classes. Poe’s approach has been to bring in others, presumably the people that he worked with/interviewed for his forthcoming book on Wikipedia, to come in and give talks and such. There are a couple more scheduled through the term.

This week, it was Sanger, who spoke along with Poe Thursday night and Friday morning at this little symposium thing we had here. Basically, Sanger spoke mostly about his new project, Citizendium, which he sees as a sort of anecdote to the anarchy and chaos of Wikipedia, a place where articles are written by people who use their real names and are then vetted by real experts, and a place where everyone has discussions in professional and polite tones.

I have to say there are few things that Sanger said that I agree with.

One of the things that framed my own preconceived notions about Sanger was Poe’s Atlantic Monthly article, “The Hive,” which is a history of Wikipedia. In the story, Sanger is depicted as a guy who came up with much of what was Wikipedia (at least in the early days), who was victimized by/a participant in some ugly flame-wars, and who was more or less tossed out of the Wikipedia universe just as it started taking off. So I knew that he had reasons to be bitter and defensive. But the extent to which this came across in his two speeches was rather striking. Sanger seems like a pretty angry guy.

I don’t think Wikipedia (or YouTube or Digg, both of which Sanger and Poe mentioned frequently) are as chaotic and lawless as they suggest, and it seems to me that model of many eyeballs has served Wikipedia surprisingly well in terms of it accuracy. Citizendium (and btw, an unsolicited piece of advice: change the name to something that folks can easily pronounce) aims to be a better online encyclopedia, but even if that were possible, why? What’s the goal? All encyclopedias– Britannica, Wikipedia, Citizendium– are, by definition, summaries which are inevitably “watered down,” which frequently gloss over controversial details, and which are often enough wrong. I encourage my students to use Wikipedia as a place to get started, though I don’t allow them to reference it as a source in an academic research project. But I wouldn’t allow them to reference Britannica or Citizendium either. So even if Sanger is making a better mousetrap/encyclopedia (and that’s an “if,” of course), it’s difficult for me to understand the point.

In the end, I think what was most interesting about Sanger’s speeches and point of view is that it is so very very different from mine and, as far as I can tell, most of my colleagues. Sanger is a Philosopher with a capital P and out of the same mold as Plato. He’s an academic (of a sort) who, based on his training and world view, has no problem at all with an epistemology that assumes Neutrality is possible, that Knowledge is “out there” and, that the goal of philosophy is to objectively approach and understand that Knowledge. The best way to get to that Knowledge is to ask a Philosopher, which is someone who has Wisdom (and, in these days, Credentials) and can thus provide the answer.

Rhetoric has traditionally been described as the opposite of Philosophy, and given that Sanger and I (and probably most of my colleagues in the English department) begin with completely different world views about what (K)knowledge is and how we get there, I just don’t get where he’s coming from at all. Sanger would probably feel the same way about me.

At some point on Thursday night, Sanger made one of those “off-the-cuff” comments that really has stuck with me: he said he imagined Citizendium as being kind of like those old county fairs, where article writers would be like the farmers presenting their wares and the academic experts would be like the judges picking the winners. Well, this– and the call for politeness and decorum and order that came up again and again– just struck me as nostalgia. And like most things that are based on nostalgia– the genre of the western, for example– it is a longing for a more perfect past that never actually existed in the first place. In that sense, I think that Citizendium is a beautiful and futile dream.