I’ve had an LA Times article on how teachers are adapting their lessons in the face of technology-enabled plagiarism in the queue for a few days.
However, there’s no need for me to comment when Doug Johnson does a much better job of getting right to the brutally honest point.
Don’t blame kids for using plagiarism to keep from having to reinvent a boring wheel. You want some originality and creativity, you gotta ask for it.
And then asks some questions every teacher needs to honestly confront.
Are “term papers” archaic? Will anyone mourn their passing? What can be substituted to show a student has engaged in a meaningful way with a large body of information?
Wow, what a rabbit hole I just went down into and then came back out of, following one blog to another to another to another, reading about knuckleheads who plagiarize entire blog entries, steal hmtl code from website, people who treat out-ing plagiarists as high sport, and to top it off, a product that prevents browsers from displaying the html behind a website.