college

I really think that on some level our students don’t understand plagiarism the way we do/did.  But you can’t have this conversation with most faculty who view plagiarism as if it were a capital crime.  It is a grave offense that undermines the work of the academy, but saying it’s really bad doesn’t change the culture our 18 year olds bring to the university.   Trip Gabriel has an interesting piece in the New York Times on the rise in plagiarism.  This passage, really stood out to me:

Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.

Do you think this argument excuses plagiarism among our students?  How do you address it at your institutions?

via Matt Yglesias.

As I try to get out from under the mass of “green books” (the blue book is a casualty of campus greening efforts), I thought I’d give a shout to my Race, Multiculturalism and Politics students at California Lutheran University. I’m a pretty mild mannered person in general, but for some reason, I often perform “high wire acts” with untested assignments.

This semester, I asked my Race classes (mostly first-semester freshmen) to create Wikipedia entries for books from the suggested readings section of my syllabus. I was a bit nervous about this assignment. Particularly as students began coming to me reporting that the “the crowd” on Wikipedia had decided to delete their blog entries.

Today, some of my students presented their Wikipedia pages, and I was blown away. Other than the occasional typo here or akward sentence structure there, they exceeded my wildest expectations. Here are two examples:

Wikipedia page for Multiculturalism Without Culture, by Anne Phillips
Wikipedia page for Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau

I was impressed with my students ability to synthesize pretty heady stuff. I wonder how presenting material in such a public forum changed the work product. Has anyone given a similar assignment? How did it work out? I was stunned by the zeal with which many of the students approached this project. I’d love to hear your thoughts.