Harris, Robert A. The Plagiarism Handbook: Strategies for Preventing, Dectecting, and Dealing with Plagiarism. Los Angeles: Pyrczak Publishing, 2001.

Harris, whose book focuses on undergraduate plagiarism, argues that plagiarism is on the rise due to Internet resources and a lack of attention to the proper use and attribution of sources. He believes that plagiarism should be attacked at many angles, including writing plagiarism-resistant research assignments, using Internet tools to detect plagiarism, following plagiarism cases through the system to make it a serious offense for students, and giving students quizzes about source use and plagiarism and handouts to teach them how to cite sources. Harris argues that prevention is key to preventing both intentional and unintentional plagiarism. His book contains cartoons (that the teacher is allowed to copy and use in class) to start discussions with students about plagiarism.

Quotable Quotes

“each kind of theft” (1)

“how committed you are to fighting it” (1)

“simple rule” – charts, decision charts students use to decide to cite or quote, trying to simplify the citation decision

Notable Notes

gives 16 reasons for plagiarism – none to do with the difficulty of understanding sources: students are lazy, indifferent, careless, have no motivation, poor choices, procrastination, liars

teaching students about plagiarism:

• give explicit definition
• keep it positive – don’t assume all are potential cheats
• show examples of proper use and plagiarism
• discuss note-taking
• dispel attribution myths
• discuss why plagiarism is wrong
• discuss benefits for students for citations
• show them paper mill sites
• tell them the consequences
• signed integrity statement

Logie, John. Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2006.

Logie addresses through rhetorical historicism five terms used to describe sharing in the peer-to-peer debates (hacking, theft, piracy, sharing, and war), arguing that in order to understand the basis of the arguments on both sides of the debate, we must throughly investigate the language through which those arguments are being made. He believes that current copyright restrictions, including DMCA and the TEACH Act, are limiting the potential of people to create new culture and ideas. Logie argues that the composition classroom, where students are taught about the social nature of composition, plagiarism, individual authorship, and intellectual property, is an important place to talk with students about the rhetoric, language, and arguments behind these debates and to teach them how they might argue for a copyright law that allows for the creative potential the Internet promises.

Quotable Quotes

“And while the stakes of intellectual property debates ultimately devolve to who gets paid how much and when, the mechanism for assuring fair compensation—a limited monopoly right—has profound consequences for the circulation and availability of cultural artifacts.”(8)

“Digital media offer opportunities to efficiently archive and access the bulk of artistic and intellectual work created since the dawn of humanity.

This is not an overstatement. The potential intellectual and social utility of these now-hypothetical archives is staggering. Our challenge is to engage in a principled argument about how best to achieve this goal. ” (21)

“[RIAA and other big media corporations] had persuaded most Americans that the act of downloading copyrighted material from the Internet—whatever the context and purpose—was illegal. This victory was achieved in large part because of the successful rhetorical strategies of the content industries. And once these industries had persuaded Americans that downloading was criminal, the logical next step was to ensure that it was perceived as

violent crime.” (66)

“The past decade’s major legislative amendments to copyright—in particular the Copyright Term Extension Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the No Electronic Theft Act, and the TEACH Act—collectively constitute a disastrous appropriation of rights, privileges, and opportunities formerly understood to belong to the public at large. At the very moment that the most powerful cultural tool in human history—the networked personal computer—has become both widely available and largely affordable, the U.S. is busily drafting laws that reinforce a copyright model optimized long ago for the circulation of print-based media.” (141)

Notable Notes

how ethos and pathos play into both sides of the debate, Burkean identification

no statistical significance on the economic effect of P2P sharing on record companies…Napster failed to show how most of its activity was not the theft of protected commercial property, but rather sharing of free culture for the public good

piracy = theft by force, kidnapping, murdering, violence

Napster, P2P file sharers aren’t targetted for downloading but for uploading – for distribution

sound quality of MP3 and CD – two different purposes

limits ability of cut and pasting with purchased Adobe e-books

Apostel, Shawn and Moe Folk. First Phase Information Literacy on a Fourth Generation Website: An Argument for a New Approach to Website Evaluation Criteria. Computers and Composition (Spring 2005).

Writing instructors need to change how they teach students to evaluate online sources both to account for students’ own “insider” knowledge of online sources and to account for the shift from alphabetic, text-centered criteria to integrated, multimodal digital design. Their article explains the current shift to incorporate visual literacies into the teaching of composition and gives an overview (with examples) of the four generations of web site design. Old standards for online site evalutions favored objectivity and centralization, ignoring a multitude of rich, subjective sources in blogs, forums, and multimedia. The digital world is rapidly evolving – we have to keep up, change our standards, and teach our students to use it well.

Quotable Quotes

“as websites evolve from their text-only beginnings, the book-derived criteria for evaluating credible sources are becoming increasingly archaic.”

“Here we see that teaching students to evaluate websites based on alphabetic skills may no longer be a sufficient way to equip students to critique and create rhetoric. As websites move into future generations of development, they will—if the current trends continue—incorporate more digital images, video and audio files, and animated images into their designs. If these communication devices are going to be used to orient our way of seeing the relation and display of information, then we need to empower our students with the ability to negotiate these sources so they can critique the information being presented.”

“Before dismissing our students’ current habits, then, we might look at how they are “making do” and how their strategies can be utilized and/or improved to impact our current ideas of website value in the classroom.”

Notable Notes

4 generations: 1. heavy text dump, no formatting 2. introduce tiled backgrounds, tables, frames, animated GIFs 3. thoughtful multimedia design (CDROM technology) 4. all of #3 plus non-CDROM technology like online shopping, IM, broadcasting live

student ways to evaluate sites: who links to this site? where did the original content come from? what does this site feel like? (“technological ethos”) where else is this information found?

opening up subjective possibilities in blogs gives students a whole new range of potential sources to enrich their research.

lots of Kress, Selfe

language isn’t the only semiotic system

DeSana, Laura Hennessey. Preventing Plagiarism: Tips and Techniques. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2007.

DeSana, a high school English teacher and part-time writing instructor at NYU, argues that students need to learn how to do original, subjective, interested research, not just retell what their sources say. She relies on an literature-based writing assignment sequence that begins with freewriting responses to a primary source, then analyzing and adding secondary sources. Her goal is for students to be the dominant voice in their thesis-driven researched arguments, controlling their source use with effective quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. She believes that this kind of assignment sequence, coupled with a range of plagiarism-proof topics that dissuade students from relying on online cheat sources and recycled papers, will teach students to respect the research process and not plagiarize. She has a two-part definition of plagiarism: source of language plagiarism and source of information plagiarism, both equally important to address and curtail through the proper use of citation systems and explicit instruction in paraphrase. She gives teachers seven tools and steps for identifying plagiarism in their students’ papers, often positioning the students as savvy, lethargic, potential cheats who try to pull one over on the teacher because of their Internet expertise.

Quotable Quotes

“For those of us who are vigilant, we will enter the library as dectectives on the trail of a more intelligent theif” (97), on the importance of checking print-based sources in libraries (like secondary sources, CliffsNotes) for student plagiarism attempts

“Individuality self-destructs in endless mirroring” (111), doesn’t see much good in imitation

“We must begin to teach them how to exert control over the chaos – how to shape and academic argument” (7).

“We have to require the higher level of thinking that is achieved through the simultaneous processes of analysis and synthesis” (6).

The retelling that happens in a book report “is useless for several reasons – foremost among them is that it is a shabby mimicking of the original. No one can write Poe’s ‘The Fall of the Usher’ as well as Poe, nor should another writer attempt to” (4).

“Reporting is a retelling of ideas found; it is not an analysis of ideas found” (1)

“As educators, we must teach students to realize that they are required to have their own insights into source materials. They must engage in a dialogue with the sources they consult. Without this dialogue their research is meaningless and becomes a mere exercise of collecting and organizing” (1)

Notable Notes

absolute binary between research and retelling

works cited only includes one thing from rhet/comp, a article from Written Communication about text/source use and ESL students

one of her plagiarism prevention techniques she dubs “non sequitor approach” – having students turn in copies of online study guides to provide them for comparison with their essays

prescriptive writing process and sequence = freewriting, notetaking, outlining, writing

retelling (summaries) are not, in DeSana’s opinion, objective pieces of writing, not subjective researched positions

focus is on how to teach students to write thesis-driven, argumentative, taking-a-stand research essays

Erikson, et al. “A Web We Can Weave: Considering Open Source Technologies in Our Classrooms.” Comupters and Composition. (Spring 2009)

This collaborative article, written by Erikson and his graduate studetns, investigates different Web 2.o interfaces and technologies the authors (who took a grad seminar class with Erikson) used in the seminar and also in their teaching. Erikson argues that it’s important for those in composition and rhetoric to become familiar with and be able to use the many Web 2.0 technologies students are using, the technologies that are part of their everyday litearcy activities. Drawing on Selber’s three-part literacy framework, Erikson advocates for more productive, rhetorically literate assignments and classroom teaching practices to make composition more relevant and answerable to the multiliteracy needs of today’s students. The graduate students each wrote a section about a different technology – YackPack, Facebook, GoogleDocs & GoogleGroups, podcasting, and wikis.

Quotable Quotes

“the use of Google and many other tools of the digital age are an integral part of the history of literacy in Western culture; to ignore this fact and to bridge the gap between students as digital natives and faculty as digital immigrants certainly calls the question about which group is truly more ignorant and less literate”

Questions teachers need to ask before adopting a Web 2.0 technology: 

What are my course goals for using this technology?
What goals can this technology help me accomplish?
What do I want my students to do with technology?
What are the ethical questions to consider when implementing any new media technology into the writing classroom?
How can I expect my student population to respond to new media?
Are there issues of access, funding, literacy, time, or space that I need to examine beforehand?

“the constant reminder that these tools were the ones in use by our students, and lest we consider those irrelevant to the concerns of English studies in general and Rhetoric and Composition in particular, we can only turn to the current national election process to see the role of tools like YouTube in the candidate debates, blogs in disseminating political views by pundits and citizens alike, and how can one forget Barack Obama’s early morning text message to his supporters about his Vice Presidential choice. Because these tools are ones in the hands of today’s students, defined as digital natives (Prensky, 2001), they should be ones worthy of functional, critical, and particularly rhetorical literacy education within graduate programs in Rhetoric and Composition, not only to transform the undergraduate writing curriculum but also to change the presumption that all academic discourse is print in nature, particularly in light of concerns by the Modern Language Association (2006) about the crisis in scholarly publishing and the impact on print production processes as well as on the academic reward system for faculty caught within the paradigm shift between the print and the digital.”

Notable Notes

see what the students are using and use that – don’t just rely on Blackboard because it’s safe and easy

great YouTube video by Michael Wesch at Kansas State University

Klausman, Jeffrey. “Teaching about Plagiarism in the Age of the Internet.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 27.2 (1999): 209-212.

Klausman explains how he uses internet search engines to combat student plagiarism off the internet, describing what he understands as patchwork plagiarism and paraphrase plagiarism. He claims there is a rise in plagiarism due to the Internet and illustrates to his students how fast and simple it is for him to check up on their use of internet sources by using the “find” feature on the websites and web addresses included in their bibliographies. He claims he now spends much more time teaching students how to appropriately work with texts.

Notable Notes

dated – 1999, pre-Turnitin

only checks the sources students put in their works cited page

Walden, Kim and Alan Peacock. “Economies of Plagiarism: The i-Map and Issues of Ownership in Information Gathering.” In Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism. Eds. Eisner and Vicinus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. 133-144.

Walden and Peacock give an overview of the issues in students using Web-based sources for their papers, specifically the contradiction between the Web seeming like a free, publicly-owned space (like a park) and the reality of the privately-owned information in it, which must be cited and used properly. They developed the i-map, a heuristic students can use to keep track of their research processes to make sure they properly document what they have found. They argue that there has been an additional onus placed on students to evaluate sources in a way they did not need to when they relied on library books and articles.

Whiteman, Sherri A. and Jay L. Gordon. “The Price of an ‘A’: An Educator’s Responsibility to Academic Honesty.” The English Journal. 91.2 (November 2001), 25-30.

This article begins with a short piece by Whiteman, a high school English teacher, where she laments students as unethical, plagiarizing cheaters and calls on teachers to rally against them and those who allow rampant Internet cheating to happen and profit. She is countered by Gordon, a college professor who argues that if students were given more specific assignments that were difficult to plagiarize, a lot of the cheating would, by necessity, disappear. Whiteman answers Gordon by saying the kinds of assignments teachers give are to prepare them for future work in the academy and, good assignment or not, students should behave ethically and not plagiarize.

Quotable Quotes

“The invaluable benefits of abundant access to the information superhighway have been outweighed by its ability to create non-thinking, non-reading patrons of plagiarism” (26).

“How do we as educators reconcile our ability to teach effectively with our students’ ability to cheat and steal without our knowledge?” (26)

“Students do not plagiarize in a vacuum” (27)

Notable Notes

Whiteman gives up, says she should only focus on the “potential of my more ambitious and honest students” (26)

high school v. college perceptions on the issue

still demonizing, infantilizing students

investigate the problem – what can teachers do to prevent plagiarism? Is changing the assignment enough? What about schools’ overreliance on papers, essays, to evaluate students? Are their too many grades? (mine) connection to what plagiarism is – is it all about students being unethical?

it’s not about baffling, bewildering, upsetting, disheartening teachers. it’s bigger than that (me)

Atkins, Thomas and Gene Nelson. “Plagiarism and the Internet: Turning the Tables.” The English Journal. 90.4 (March 2001), 101-104.

Atkins and Nelson, two high school teachers, teach at the high school that test piloted Turnitin.com (the creator of the program was an alma mater.) They claim that the software has cut student plagiarism to nearly zero and advocate its use to both prevent plagiarism and to make sure students are getting as good as an education as they could possibly get, one that is in jeopardy if Internet plagiarism goes uncontrolled. They argue that teachers and schools, by using a program like Turnitin, insist on high academic integrity, an expectation that is beneficial to students. Their article gives a sample paper that shows how Turnitin is able to identify passages that were lifted from internet sites and other papers.

Quotable Quotes

“The teacher is the final determiner of whether or not the paper was plagiarized. The program is a tool, albiet a powerful tool, but it is not the final determiner. The teacher, with his or her knowledge, skill, and experience, will make the final decision” (104).

“If students are allowed to use others’ words and ideas as their own, they deny themselves the opportunity to develop writing fluency and critical thinking skills” (104).

The goal of education = “The development of comprehesive skills, powerful understanding, and excellent ethics” (104).

Notable Notes

Turnitin is supposed to be preventative, not punitive

students are in awe of the power of the program, witness its capabilities and then, I suppose, cut out the plagiarism

all of plagiarism – stealing and buying papers, patchwritten text, is treated the same

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. “Designs for Social Futures.” In Multiliteracies. Eds. Cope and Kalantzis. London: Routledge, 2000. 203-234.

Cope and Kalantzis foreground three important concepts or ideas in literacy pedagogy: 1. that literacy is a matter of design that depends on the exercise of human agency 2. that all literacy is multimodal and increasingly nonlinear due to digital 21st century technology and 3. that no one literacy is better than another; the many discourses and identities of cultures and subcultures  necessitate dialogues in literacy learning instead of dogma. Inherent in any act of designing are both the concepts of a unique individual voice and hybridity (synthesizing of many identities, discourses, and experiences), both concepts that are grounded in agency. They use an example of translating the Bible into an Austrailian Aboriginal language to showcase that naive multiculturalism, a multiculturalism that believes in simple translation without cultural or political ramifications, cannot take into account the effects of globalization on local cultural and subcultural diversity. Globalization and digital technology have simultaneously created spaces for countless small subcutlures but in that fragmentation, there is no common culture and in the “common” global culture left, there is no regional cultural distinctions.

Quotable Quotes

“There is just so much to draw from in the breadth and subltety of Available Designs that every Designing re-creates the world afresh” (205).

“Design is a process in which the individual and culture are inseparable.” (203).

“Culture is no more and no less than the accumulated and continuing expression of agency; of Designing” (203).

Notable Notes

the paradox of digital media – it is cheap and universal and gives space to small subcultures and groups, but it has created dromospheric pollution (no sense of distance between places – Virilio 1997), a sense of transitory and immediate culture, no distinction between virtual and real, fragmentation and loss of common culture, and does not take into account issues of access/bandwidths/disabilities

communication has always been interactive – not just a digital phenomenon

culture, meaning-making must always be shifting and changing – dynamic – because literacies and cultures are never static

three levels of designs – lifeworld (everyday lives, function); transcendental (analysis, reflection, depth, larger scope); universals (human nature, breadth, cross-cultural)

good chart 212-216 about five dimensions and modes of meaning