From Judith McDaniel

Last semester I had more plagiarism on the final projects in my General Education class than I’d had in the previous three years.  One student copied an entire plot description of a novel from Wikipedia.  Another used materials directly from an author’s official biography website.  And so it went.  When confronted, each of them knew exactly what they had done, expressed some level of contrition (or depression) and accepted their lowered course grade.  The one exception was an Asian student who had no idea she had to use a citation when she was quoting from a text or using ideas from a text.  A friend of hers, who had been in an earlier class of mine, came to see me and reminded me about her questions about citation.  “In my country [China],” she told me, “we don’t use citation the way Europeans do.”  I checked around, and she was correct.  The occasions on which one uses a citation in China are in fact quite different.  I insist that foreign students learn citation the “western” way, but I don’t penalize them for that first mistake.  And I am much more proactive in making sure that culture doesn’t become an excuse for cheating.
          Recently the New York Times published an article about plagiarism suggesting that students “simply do not grasp” that stealing someone else’s words is wrong.  And of course, it is the fault of the internet.  First, “it is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age.”  Copying is easy, of course.  But second, perhaps it is that “we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author.” Or, third, it just could be that “our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” according to another quoted source. 
          More interesting to me than the article itself were the comments.  There were 482 comments posted in less than at day!  Many were from high school teachers who “begged to differ” with those who supposed students did not know better.  They HAVE been taught, insisted these teachers.  Taught year after year in class after class.  The problem is, they get away with it, and the lazy shortcuts get rewarded.
          But the Sloan Consortium published its own analysis of the relationship among copyright, open access, and plagiarism last month.  Yes, copying is easy these days, “infinitely easier.”  But it is also important to distinguish between an idea and the words that express it.  The expression is protected, the idea is not. Ideas are what we are sharing through open source networks, courseware, and blogs.  If I like an idea, I am challenged to express it in my own words, develop it, tweak it, expand or clarify it.  We gain nothing when exact words are copied.  We gain everything when ideas are shared.
         That is what I want to teach my students.
         And next week I will discuss the value and necessity of disclosing the source of the ideas we are using.