February 16
Week 4: CyberPlagiarism

Today we'll be addressing aspects of these course objectives:

  • Describe the moral, ethical, legal and societal implications of specific learning technologies.
  • Identify problem situations that occur within the domains of online training, virtual schools, peer-to-peer file sharing, and pervasive computing.
  • Use software tools and online resources to practice creative problem-solving and communicate your solutions and reflections.
  • Use a variety of problem-solving techniques to address ill-defined problems within the domains of this course and beyond.

In an information-rich environment, it is technologically easy to access the ideas of others. The dark side of that is that it's also easy to claim the ideas of others without their permission or without giving attribution to the source. In terms of learning, it's far too easy now for students to turn in papers which reflect no real growth in their knowledge and which only exercised the fingers used for control-c and control-v. What are the problems and solutions that arise in a situation like this?

Carol Tohsaku will set the scene with a presentation on cyberplagiarism and Turnitin.com

Think about Carol's presentation. Check out this memo sent by the provost this week, and the SDSU Academic Senate policy entitled Handling Cases of Suspected Plagiarism. And, if you like, make use of any of the other following resources:

Distance Education Report: Modeling Ethics for Distance Learners
Faculty Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty (a challenging read ... but manageable!)
Kansas State/Grading Policies
Comparative Evaluation of Plagiarism Programs
Columbia to Pull Book

And there are some interesting SDSU policies to review as well:

Instructional Technology Services/Turnitin website at SDSU
Plagiarism Policies at SDSU (including links to the Office of Judicial Procedures and the Academic Senate policy linked above)

In a small group construct a decision/event tree (Jones pp. 127-128) for one of the following scenarios:

  • A student considering whether (and in what way) to plagiarize
  • A professor considering whether (and in what way) to use turnitin.com

Place your tree into the Moodle cyberplagiarism forum (#5).

Then we'll review what groups came up with, and create a causal flow diagram (Jones p. 95) to repesent the complexities associated with plagiarism on a college campus. (It might be interesting to check out a causal flow diagram last year's 296 class came up with regarding email privacy and monitoring.)

Here's the diagram we came up with. Comment on it in Moodle (#8) if you like.

 

Before Next Week's Class

  • Read Jones Chapter 11
  • Read JSB Ch 5 (ch 3-4 optional)
  • Read JSB's Learning in the Digital Age
  • Read the pages under Content (Louder Echo, etc) on the Growing Up Digital site.
  • Do a blog entry. If you haven't done one yet following last week's guidelines, be sure to do so this week. Otherwise, feel free to use your blog to reflect on problem-solving, cyberplagiarism, or anything else related to this class OR NOT...