Changing your mind
From PLN
Changing your mind
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PLN Challenge, March 2008
edited by Walt Crawford, published March 10, 2008
The March 2008 PLN Challenge is fairly open-ended:
- What have you changed your mind about? Why?
Two panelists responded with challenging commentaries.
The nature of the PLN Challenge is changing. We're still sending out a question to a group of panelists--but this is also an open challenge to all of PLN. You're invited to add your own response on this page or the Talk page--or, if you'd rather, send me your response and I'll add it to the page. You're also invited to add your responses to earlier PLN Challenges (for the first one, you'll have to use the Talk page or send me your response).
- Thanks to Roy Tennant for suggesting the question with "What I've changed my mind about," his February 12, 2008 post at the Tennant: Digital libraries blog.
Debbie Malone: To Turnitin or not to Turnitin.com
- Debbie Malone is Library Director at DeSales University
In the last few years, faculty members on my campus have brought a steadily increasing number of papers over to the librarians to check for possible plagiarism. We do often document cheating, and we have shown individual faculty members techniques for searching possibly plagiarized phrases. I became interested in a wider solution to this problem, and began talking with faculty members about the benefits of Turnitin.com (a popular online plagiarism detection service) as an aid in checking student papers. We had a free trial of the software and even had a small workshop on the subject. Some faculty members were very interested, but no one seemed too eager to actually use departmental funds to purchase the software. I did not want to use library funds unless there was wide spread agreement that we needed to more aggressively tackle the plagiarism issue and that this product would be used on a regular basis. We never bought the product, but I was still interested and got occasional questions about it.
I’ve recently changed my mind about the benefits of turnitin.com, mostly due to an online seminar I’m taking from the University of Maryland, Center for Intellectual Property, titled “Building a Community that Values Academic Integrity.” One of the presenters is Robert Vanderhye who is the lead attorney in the copyright suit against turnitin.com. He is representing a number of high school students in Virginia who argue that they were coerced into submitting their original papers into turnitin.com and that the company archived their unpublished manuscripts, which included personal and confidential information, without their permission. Besides the copyright violation this represents, Vanderhye has an expert witness who will testify that the Turnitin.com website has serious security issues that mean the company is not adequately protecting the intellectual property that they store, mainly student papers. Since the company routinely provides full copies of student papers to clients who request them anywhere in the world, this privacy issue is extremely important.
The attorney has another expert witness from the academic world who will testify that plagiarism detection services in general, and turnitin.com in particular, compromise academic integrity by breaching the trust between instructor and student. Using these services implies that all students are cheaters who must submit their work for clearance. They are deemed guilty until they can prove their innocence. Instructors or institutions that require students to submit their papers to the service violate the students’ copyrights on texts they have written by their own efforts.
Another problem that I see with these online services is that they address only a small part of the plagiarism problem. The systems do not detect the failure to cite sources that have been paraphrased or the fabrication of sources. Students need to learn about academic integrity from instructors in every course they take. The Council of Writing Program Administrators has published a statement on best practices in defining and avoiding plagiarism, which notes that “plagiarism detection services should never be used to justify the avoidance of good teaching.”
One of the documents I especially like in the seminar I’m taking at U of Md. is the “Letter to My Students” written by Bill Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. He wrote the letter he used in his classes to show “students that academic integrity isn't something that we as faculty do to them, but it's a set of principles that bind all of us equally for the good of inquiry and learning." The letter goes on to clearly state what he as a professor will promise to do for his students and what they should do in return. It is written simply but makes great sense. He says: “If we don't have integrity in the small things, if we find it possible to justify plagiarism or cheating or shoddy work in things that don't seem important, how will we resist doing the same in areas that really do matter, in areas where money might be at stake, or the possibility of advancement, or our esteem in the eyes of others?”
I am convinced more intense discussion of academic integrity on my campus can go a long way toward decreasing instances of plagiarism and other forms of cheating. I think educating our students on ethical academic behavior will serve them better than using online detection services to catch them cheating.
Sara Weissman: Web 2.0
- Sara Weissman is at Morris County Library
That Web 2.0 is the next big thing that will connect libraries with their patrons. Why? Because we've done/do it at our place...and the response is silence, or a big yawn.
No one comments back to the blog, the invitation to submit to a community online photo album (Flickr) got 28 submissions from only 5 people. The teen forum just got posts from pornographers and required so much late night patrolling that I finally just tore it down. (Ditto, MySpace.)
LibraryThing is fun for us, but doesn't seem to have done anything for the patrons. Chat reference goes unused while good old e-mail ref chugs along.
The big hit here is the [email list]. Signups have even accelerated lately for this. Bring it to me seems to be what patrons want. Put it in my mailbox...which I read anyhow. Don't make me go fishing elsewhere, for more library info.
I suspect we who dabble in tech massively overestimate most folks comfort with RSS, Twitter and the like. Just because we think something is fun, doesn't mean our patrons do. At the end of a hard day of work, all I want is a notice in my mail that my book is in, there is a puppet show for my kids or a concert for my family--that seems to be the public mood of the moment.
I'm so glad we haven't spent a lot of money on all of the 2.0 initiatives. Do love those free or low cost mashups ....
Related articles
- Five books that will increase your ability to lead - Good leaders need to be able to change their own minds--but they also need to be able to change other people's minds. This piece discusses five books that will help hone your ability to lead through persuasion.
Your turn: Talk about it
What aspect of library leadership have you changed your mind about? Add your comment here, use the Talk page, or send me your comment.
