Revisiting Plagarism
Lots of talk about education, or rather, the lack thereof.
International education sucks.
There’s a lot of problems with the culture and process of education, and there will have to be many solutions, both of the very focused and very grandiose variety.
But I’m pretty bothered that in this era of edupunk, we’re still ignoring a blatantly obvious problem:
We’re not revising our plagiarism policy.
From a website engineer’s perspective, it’s pretty obvious that copying and pasting existing material is not only not bad, but copying and pasting can be really useful for a variety of uses related to knowledge and learning. For instance, copied material can signify “I read this”, or “I’m interested in this topic”.
Copy and pasting itself isn’t what educators take issue with, of course.
Rather, it’s that we still think plagiarism is bad because it provides the plagiarist with the opportunity to lie about authorship of material.
Both proprietary products and search engines can tell the real author from the fake. And by all means, plagiarism should be discouraged, as young plagiarists may eventually turn into adult spammers. And nobody wants that.
But really, what’s better: a tumblelog with 10 entries per day of unoriginal academic material, or one three paragraph entry per day of original critical thinking?
Neither. They can and should co-exist.
But first, we need to revise our plagiarism policy.
