Jason, Andi Garing and I were having a brief discussion about the concept of plagiarism, and what it means in the digital age of Google, mashups, retweeting, copy+paste. In talking to students and looking at what they do, I get the impression that many instances of plagiarism are just not conceptualised by students in the same way as by staff. So for example, a student that copies text verbatim from a paper, but cites the reference, is clearly not intending to cheat but has not understood the basics of academic referencing. Their understanding of referencing is not helped by the amount of material presented in teaching situations that is directly “plagiarised” from texts and textbook resources without formal acknowledge.
I have long held the view that a great skills exercise for first year students would be to provide a database of plausible psychology sentences and get students to select appropriate ones to put in the correct order to generate an argument.
The resultant product would be entirely plagiarised words (and presumably detected as such by a software agent), but actually not real plagiarism because the argument/structure of writing would be generated from the way that the sentences were put together not from the words themselves, especially if the words could be put together to form multiple different arguments.
It is also possible to take someone else’s idea and slightly reword it without acknowledgement, which to my mind is plagiarism, but of the sort that will not be picked up by a software agent such as TurnItIn. Anyhow, just as Louise, Jason and I are exploring the concept of what is understood by students with respect to the social media and how they fit in to the world, Andi, Jason and I are interested in exploring the way that current students understand plagiarism.
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