Back in Jr. High School I was considered one of the better writers in school. But I worked really hard at it. We had a book that was published every year called “Red Feather Writings” and the best stories, poems etc were selected for publication. The best of these recieved some kind of award.

I was dumbfounded when a couple of incredible poems knocked me out of first place. One of them was written by a very studious and focused girl whom I had a lot of respect for and pegged as having a lot of integrity (even though she would have nothing to do with me). Her writing acumen seemed to come out of the blue and for the longest time I assumed that because I worked so hard at this and this girl could just pull something like this out of thin air when she needed it I must not be very talented. This kind of haunted me for a long time.

Fast forward to a few months ago. I’m cleaning out the attic and run across a box of school stuff my mom saved and returned to me not long ago. In it was a copy of “Red Feather Writings”. And reading it was fascinating. And then I ran across that “incredible” piece of work. And realized it was plagerized! I can’t say for sure but it seems likely a few of the other pieces probably ended up there the same way. Fortunately my self doubt about my writing skills had evaporated by the time I left high school (thank you Mr. Phillips!). But plagerism does have implications for school kids.

Setting aside the later cases which you don’t mention, the impact technology can have on traditional endeavors is profound. I would be willing to wager that students are moving from paper notes to SMS notes (if we can believe your Mr. Larkin) for practical reasons: the offer advantages that make it superior to paper notes.

Technology tends to increase productivity even if the activity is unwanted like your example.

Regarding your thoughts about edu-tech Pollyanna’s. New gadgets tend to release an internet avalanche of fluff pieces lauding the expected impact of the gadget, of how it will Change Everything, etc. You mention frustration with writers who write fluff pieces about new technology for the classroom. Your piece would benefit from a few examples of these. Are any of these folks producing thoughtful pieces, except for tech related topics? I’m curious to know what you’re referring to.

The web certainly provides students with huge volumes of relevant work and provides it in a copy-and-paste-able format. This convenient copyable format and the ease of finding what must appear to be obscure references or textbooks would seem to favor the clever plagiarist.

But the internet provides advantages to the teacher wishing to detect plagiarism as well. With students submitting their work in digital format teachers may easily utilize powerful search engines able to search through text from a large portion of the written works in print, or out of print. Google makes the task of searching for a given sentence easy. What may appear to be an obscure reference has probably been scanned by Google and its full text is search able. This convenient, fast and powerful new tool should make any plagiarist more than a little wary.

It’s not obvious to me whom the internet gives the advantage to in this kind of predator prey relationship. Consider how this worked in the pre-internet age. Back then, even lazy students had ready access to books or encyclopedias that were very likely to be outside the reach of the instructor. The job of copying was more laborious and provided the plagiarist with a convenient opportunity to introduce small modifications to the copied text making detection almost impossible.

So what’s all the fuss? Has their been in increase in incidence of plagiarism? I haven’t bothered to look, but I will assume that there are reports supporting this statement. Measuring such things as this is a tricky business. I suspect relatively few guilty parties are ever caught so it makes me wonder – in the midst of a revolution in detection capability – if any reported increases simply reflect the increase in detection rates.

I suppose you could request every teacher and parent in the country to shed their bad habits, but realistically this is not going to happen anytime soon, is it? Until that time when we’re all angels can you suggest better advice than ‘do as I say, not as I do’?