Doug Johnson

Most of my Head for the Edge columns, updated and edited, can be found in my latest book. Buy it and I might be able to afford a nicer nursing home one day. Thank you.

Copy, Paste, Plagiarize
Head for the Edge, Technology Connection, January 1996

CD-ROM encyclopedias, full-text magazine indexes, and other digital information sources have developed a bad reputation among certain teachers and media specialists.

It’s not that the information contained in these electronic tools is inferior to that found in their print cousins, but that students - who are often more computer literate than their teachers - have little difficulty copying big chunks of text from these resources and pasting them directly into their word processed reports. And some, of course, submit the work to the teacher as original.

The old educational specter of plagiarism comes at the speed of light to the digital age!

In the good-old purely-print-pencil-and-paper days, the teacher or media specialist often had the luxury of monitoring students as they took notes by hand from books and magazines. Notes were often a required part of the research assignment.

Nowadays, it’s rather heartless to ask the student researcher to sit at a computer and convert those digits already dancing on the screen to graphite and paper, and then laboriously keystroke, letter by letter, the paper-bound information back into word processing digits. I certainly can’t imagine any professional researcher using such a kludegy method of gathering and processing data. In fact, anyone who deals with lots of information and has a computer knows that once text or graphics or sound or video is in its wonderfully malleable digital form, you’ll do just about anything to keep it that way. (It’s why I hate the fax machine, but love e-mail attachments.)

So how can we discourage electronic plagiarism?

Carol Tilley <ctilley.dahs@incolsa.palni.edu> from down in Danville, Indiana asked that question on LM_Net last year. She categorized the solutions media specialists from around the country suggested like this:

1. Instruct teachers and students on ethics in information
2. Require students to hand in copies of printouts, etc. use in a research assignment
3. Change the nature of the research assignment to utilize a higher level of thinking skills

Instruction on copyright and intellectual ethics need to be on-going for both students and teachers. Unfortunately knowing what is right is too often not enough.

Handing in printouts, as Carol suggests, is a temporary fix, and “encourages students’ perceptions that they are not to be trusted.”

The most effective means of preventing plagiarism involves educating teachers that an effective research assignment requires original reasoning by the student. Research which is simply “about” a topic leads to copying. But activities and tasks which ask for conclusions, ask for answers to interesting questions, ask for comparisons, ask for solutions to problems, ask for points of view all lead to original writing. These kinds of assignments help kids narrow a topic, focus effort, and call for higher level thinking. They might, heaven help us, even be interesting and meaningful to the student!

If a teacher asks me to just write “about” bats, heck, I’ll copy that report right out of Groliers, electronic or print. (In fact, I’d encourage my fourth-grade son to take the encyclopedia page that is “about” a topic back to the teacher, and innocently suggest that someone else has already done the assignment.)

But if instead that teacher asks me to

• find out if people could use the same techniques bats use to fly at night,
• show how bats are like or unlike other mammals,
• build a bat house and explain its design
• create an appeal to prevent people from killing bats,
•  write a story from a bat’s point of view, or
•  speculate about why are people afraid of bats

you’ll see work from me which almost has to be original!

Don’t blame kids for using plagiarism to keep from having to reinvent a boring wheel. You want some originality and creativity, you gotta ask for it.