Archive for the 'Plagiarism' Category

Agents of the Information Age? Perhaps Not.

Published
by
Melissa Dennihy
on March 22, 2010
in Art, Internet, Online Learning and Plagiarism
. 3 Comments

Last month, Lauren blogged about Helene Hegemann, a 17-year old author from Germany whose novel Axolotl Roadkill has become a best-seller and a finalist for a major prize in fiction—despite the fact that entire passages of the book were lifted from a novel by another author.  After reading Lauren’s post, I decided to assign the New York Times article on Hegemann to the students in my Writing II course here at Baruch.  We read the article last week, and while discussing it in class, I was quite surprised by a lot of what my students had to say; their comments really got me thinking about how they view both the web and the act of writing.

For one thing, though I tend to (mostly) agree with them, I was shocked to find that all 26 of my students thought this was a case of shameless and unacceptable plagiarism—not a single one of them bought the idea of Hegemann as “the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new.”  Furthermore, despite being members of this generation themselves, many of the students said, to my surprise, that they find that “whirring flood of information” intimidating at times, particularly when it comes to the web.  As one student spoke about how she’s leery of using online sources for academic assignments both because they might not be as “good” as print sources and because she doesn’t want to be accused of plagiarism, I noticed a number of other students nodding in agreement.  Yet, though students certainly need to use more caution and discretion with online sources than with print ones, they shouldn’t be afraid to use the web for academic assignments.  As teachers, it’s our job to help them learn how to use the web cautiously and properly (for what I think is a particularly useful resource for students regarding this, see UC Berkeley’s Guide to Evaluating Web Pages), but perhaps we also need to place more emphasis on teaching students how to harness the web’s endless possibilities.  Personally, I’ve always assumed that because my students are the so-called representatives of the “information age” that this automatically means they make constant use of the web, not just for socializing, but also for academic purposes.  Our conversation in class forced me to re-think this assumption, and has also left me wondering how many of my students really understand how to make the most of what the web has to offer them as students (and beyond the worlds of Facebook, twitter, and youtube).

I was also surprised to find that my students might not have come down as hard on Hegemann had she been a musician rather than a writer.   We discussed in class how mixing and sampling are prominent in the music industry today, with artists like Girl Talk making enormously successful careers this way:

Yet, while most of the students didn’t think that what Girl Talk does is either “wrong” or unoriginal, they all argued that Hegemann’s version of mixing is unacceptable and that the praise her work has received is undeserved.  For some reason, it seemed to them that there is something almost holy about the written word on the page—that to lift that and put it into your own work—even if you give credit where credit is due (which Hegemann didn’t)—is somehow both more unethical and less original than to, say, re-use an old MJ song in a new remix.  In general, they were willing to allow authors far less room for “artistic play” than they were willing to allow musicians and other artists (photographers, filmmakers, etc), which I found curious, fascinating, and perhaps a little troubling.  As we begin the seventh annual Ethics Week at Baruch today, I can’t help but wonder if academia’s constant emphasis on stamping out plagiarism hasn’t made some students a little fearful of the writing process—or, at the very least, caused them to view writing as more “restrictive” and less creative than other forms of art.

Vanilla Ice All Over Again

Published
by
Lauren
on February 17, 2010
in Acacademic Integrity, Copyright and Plagiarism
. 1 Comment

Yesterday I spoke with a faculty member about her frustration with plagiarism by students. One “innovative” technique that she noticed some students employing was the pastiche: whole paragraphs comprised of phrases and sentences culled from websites, press releases, newspapers, and textbooks, mashed together without any attribution or acknowledgment that the words were not entirely their own. While some students probably knew that they were plagiarizing but thought they could get away with it, others apparently have more benign intent: they haven’t yet internalized academic norms about appropriate use of sources and citation. Perhaps we can call these two types of plagiarism “bad faith plagiarism” and “good faith plagiarism.” Both types deserve penalty, but it is the former, I believe, that deserves more scorn. Students who plagiarize because they don’t know any better are students who are capable of learning proper citation techniques.

With this conversation fresh in my mind, I’ve been thinking about the recent case of plagiarism in Germany by a 17-year-old novelist. Apparently, author Helene Hegemann lifted passages, including an entire page, from someone else’s novel. Unlike the 2006 scandal involving teenage author Kaavya Viswanathan, who claimed that she had plagiarized in good faith, Hegemann readily admits to using another author’s words in her novel without any attribution–what I would call “bad faith plagiarism.” She claims, however, that her novel is akin to a musician who remixes or samples.

Some of Hegemann’s defenders claim a generational defense. The Guardian UK’s Robert McCrum argues that Hegemann’s novel is actually an example of “good faith plagiarism”:

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Laura Miller isn’t having it:

Kids these days, this Cassandra-ish line of reasoning goes, have unfathomably different values, and their elders had better come to terms with this because children are, after all, the future. You can’t tell them anything! It’s as if people under 25 have become the equivalent of an isolated Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve grown up in our very midst.

The New York Times article hints that in addition to a generational defense, culture plays into it too. That is, remixing is just part of Berlin youth culture:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

My issue with the “Oh, she was just remixing” argument, however, is that Hegemann did not merely incorporate someone else’s words into her novel. By not acknowledging her sources, she was, in effect, passing off the entire novel as her own, and this, from my perspective, is what some of us stodgy old folks used to call “stealing.” Remixing and sampling can be great, innovative art forms. I’m a fan of Creative Commons. I think copyright rules are too strict. However, if you are going to riff on another person’s words, music, or ideas, you should at least give them credit for it.

If Vanilla Ice couldn’t get away with it, why should Hegemann?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE[/youtube]

Give or Take a Few Hundred Billion

Published
by
Hillary
on May 18, 2009
in Acacademic Integrity, Blogs and Blogging, Higher Education, Internet and Plagiarism
. 2 Comments

I recently came across a particularly glaring plagiarism that highlighted the goofy (and troubling) game of telephone that can happen to information as it circulates through the web. I’ll call the student Cac. It didn’t take me long to diagnose Cac’s speech outline as an out-and-out plagiarism. It was a shoddy piece of work all around—supposedly an outline for a Persuasive Speech about Plastic Bag Recycling, Cac had left out the requisite Topic, Central Idea, and Specific Purpose Statement that belongs at the top of each outline. Cac also neglected to shove his stolen text into a speech outline format—it was laid out in bullet points, obviously ripped from an advocacy website’s FAQ.

Suspicious, I pulled out a short phrase and googled it: “about 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.” The first hit did the trick. Cac had copy-pasted the entire script, complete with headings—“Facts about Plastic Bags,” “What We Can Do,” “Benefits of Using Reusable Bags.” But did Cac realize, I immediately wondered, that he was plagiarizing from the National Environmental Agency of Singapore?

But I soon wondered which website Cac had ripped this info from; my search for this “about 2.5 billion plastic bags” factoid revealed the same info on many, many sites. Some were repeating it in the context of Singapore (which it no doubt belongs in, given that one of the facts relates to landfills in that country), but many weren’t. The first example I found drew conclusions about Malaysia’s plastic bag usage based on Singapore’s. No biggie. But then I saw a website for RV-lovers based in Canada that used the very same stat for Canada’s plastic shopping bag usage. And Todaysparent.com claimed that “Ontarians alone” used 2.5 billion shopping bags yearly. Even the city of Alexandria, Virginia employed the same stat for justification of their Environmental Action Plan, although in their usage it was unclear who used that many, just that they were used. An online Pakistani daily newspaper listed almost all of the very same “facts about plastic bags,” and they made the 2.5 billion stat sound as though it was global, not national. Even an American company peddling reusable bags used this fact, suggesting that it was the U.S. that used 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags.

I could go on.

Doing some quick Internet research of my own pulled up figures for U.S. yearly plastic bag usage between 100 billion and 380 billion—even more stunning numbers than the 2.5 billion Cac was so impressed by. (And the global annual figure seems to be closer to 1 trillion. If my sources are to be believed.) False information on the web isn’t much of a newsflash, but this incident quickly became less about plagiarism for me (a separate issue) and more about the minefield of Google when used by students for (legit, non-plagiarized) research. Sure, 2.5 billion is a persuasive number any way you slice it, and it’s being employed to make the same argument each time: plastic bags are bad, and we use an awful lot of them.

Somewhere In The World

Somewhere In The World

But each of these filchers was too careless to put the stats in context, or to read closely enough to figure out exactly what the stat was referring to. It calls to mind Jeff Jarvis’s question (referencing Nicholas Carr) at the recent Symposium: does Google make us stupid? (And another of one of his questions: how do we structure the information that we have?) The breaking down of media orthodoxies through Jarvis’s “conversation as content” model perhaps works best when it relates to an individual journalist/blogger taking corrections and comments from a diverse and vibrant peanut gallery, but there’s easily 2.5 billion cases of downright incorrect information streaking across the web, posted on sites without external or internal fact-checkers.

Lessig on Remix

Published
by
Wendy
on March 19, 2009
in Copyright, Internet, Media, Plagiarism and Technology
. 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Lawrence Lessig, the intellectual property rights expert, speak at the main public library with Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the famous red-white-and-blue poster of Obama.  Lessig was promoting his new book, Remix, which again tackles the impact of increasingly stringent copyright laws on creativity.  The panel was moderated by Steven Johnson, who also has a new book, which looks at the history of ‘sampling’ by artists in all media, and they had some interesting examples, including work by Thomas Jefferson.  Lessig said he’s pulling away from the Free Culture movement in the next phase of his career, and will be focusing instead on Corruption (yes, capital C).  I think by that he means big business’s unseemly influence on our legislative process.

One surprise for me was how articulate Shepard Fairey was, considering that he’s a visual artist, not a lawyer/professor like Lessig, who’s used to harnessing the power of words.  Maybe Fairey has gotten some practice, defending himself against the legal battle he’s in with the Associated Press over his use of the photo he tweaked to create his ‘Hope’ poster.  After the talk, I created a similar image of myself at the site Obamicon.me.  Try it, it’s fun, although I found it hard to come up with a single word I embody, promote, or aspire to, like ‘hope.’

Here’s a short clip drawn from the much longer talk they gave:

Lessig at NYPL

How and when do we begin learning about plagiarism? Why don’t we always learn?

Published
by
Olga
on April 4, 2008
in Literacy and Plagiarism
. 2 Comments

In the past several months I’ve been a volunteer tutor for an eighth grader whose homework assignments often involve looking up terms and concepts on Wikipedia or Dictionary.com.  For her most recent project she needs to provide visual images to illustrate her points; these images are also found online.  While working on her project, my student often has an IM window open on her screen; she clicks on it every time I turn away.  The computer screen thus becomes a single entity containing the private chat and information resources. 

Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?  

Plagiarism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Published
by
Jenny
on February 26, 2007
in Acacademic Integrity, Pedagogy and Plagiarism
. 5 Comments

I used to take plagiarism seriously; even worse, I used to take it personally. If you are the type of instructor who makes it a business to track down the source of a plagiarized text in order to prove that a student is a plagiarist, then you’re probably finding, in the age of Google and Turn It In, that catching a plagiarist can be a pretty easy job.

The same tools that make it easy to locate sources of plagiarized texts, however, are the same tools that are making it easier for students to plagiarize. Some papers are even constructed by cutting and pasting information from internet sites, and in extreme cases, the student will keep the original html formatting in their papers, not bothering to change the font, color, or line spacing of the lifted material. The internet is also a host to companies that will offer to write or sell papers to students.

In my discussions with faculty members, I try not to spend too much time discussing plagiarism for two reasons. First, plagiarism is not going to go away, and I would rather that faculty walk away from my sessions with ideas of how to make their classroom and teaching more innovative. Second, I think that how we deal with plagiarism is oftentimes touchy and personal–there’s a taboo surrounding the measures that one could take and the measures that one actually takes when confronting or not confronting a student who is inadequate in the area of attribution.

I feel strongly, however, that not confronting a plagiarist will ultimately thwart the student’s ability to develop crucial communication and critical thinking skills.

My method of dealing with plagiarism isn’t the best, I’m sure, and it’s certainly not fool-proof; however, I’ve so often been asked how I go about confronting inadequate attribution that I feel compelled to list my steps here.

1.) Don’t take it personally. The student is not throwing your teaching back in your face, as it were. The student might be suffering from feelings of inadequacy, fear of writing, fear of English, or other feelings that we, in our capacity of instructors, aren’t able to relate to. Of course, the student might also just be trying to get an easy way out of an assignment or just waited until the last minute, only to discover that the work involved in the assignment was too much for one all-nighter.

2.) Don’t spend your time commenting or marking up a paper that you suspect is plagiarized. It’s a good idea to hand back the plagiarized paper with the rest of the class’s papers with a little note. What you want to say is up to you, but I find it best not to use the “P” word.

3.) Always give the student the benefit of the doubt. I always tell myself to assume that the student just didn’t know better, even if the paper is an article on the internet. I ask the student to talk to me after class or during office hours, and I go over citation and attribution with them personally. Some of us might feel that we don’t want to deal with the situation, that sending the student to the Writing Center for a lesson in attribution would be less awkward, but having this lesson straight from the instructor is really the best way to let to student know about the seriousness of the issue. Besides, the student has already been caught, as it were, and probably doesn’t want to face someone else–it’s embarrassing and shameful.

4.) In some cases, when I am able to find the source of the plagiarism on-line, and depending on the case, I will staple the print-outs to the student’s paper with a note that says, “Sally, could you please go through your paper and properly attribute what you’ve written here and then resubmit it? I’ve printed out the sources to make it easier for you to cite the websites in your paper and the web addresses in your Works Cited page. I think you’ve chosen a good topic, but I’m interesting in seeing what YOU think here.”

5.) If a student does it twice, well, then I might consider the measures that I could take, but students, I find, generally don’t do it again.