Plagiarism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
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...
View ArticleHow and when do we begin learning about plagiarism? Why don’t we always learn?
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...
View ArticleLessig on Remix
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...
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Give or Take a Few Hundred Billion
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...
View ArticleVanilla Ice All Over Again
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...
View ArticleAgents of the Information Age? Perhaps Not.
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...
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Cheating for Adults
Earlier this week, at the first Great Works faculty roundtable of the semester, faculty and fellows discussed the overlapping worlds of plagiarism and assignment design. Toward the end of the session,...
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Starting at the top: Notes on cliché and seduction in academic titles
As a writing fellow, I’ve had a few glimpses into the importance, faculty tell their students, of doing research. Part of this activity inevitably involves going to the library, or at least the library...
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Tales From a Ghostwriter
photo credit: striatic This is the point during the semester when my Facebook feed starts to fill up with laments from my teaching friends about the scourge of rampant plagiarism by their students.*...
View ArticleSeeing double
Several of us have been preparing and sharing ideas ahead of our faculty roundtable discussion today. For you Baruchians, it will take place Tuesday, April 12, 2:3o-4pm, in the SOC/ANT department...
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An Audience for Shenzhen: part three, an unexpected turn
In the third installment of this piece, I originally had intended to look at how Mike Daisey’s audience for his stage monologue shifted as the location of his performance changed over time. However,...
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Post-Plagiarism?
We tell our students “don’t plagiarize,” “cite your sources,” “attribute.” Often it is easier just to scare them. “You will fail the assignment” or “You will fail the class.” If we are feeling...
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Teaching in the “Post-Plagiarism” Era
“How do we instill the ethics of citation and attribution, when the real world doesn’t seem to care about such paltry details?” Image from Wikimedia Commons Christopher’s excellent post on...
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