I am citing an interesting article, especially when considering how traditional education has dealt with plagiarism (driven by the copyright concerns of various media industries…). You can see a new push forward with curation tools (Storify, Bundlr, etc.), you can see tools for, and many users who: amass, collate, and curate information. You can similarly see a growing number of iPad magazines such as Zite, Flipboard, Taptu, and others which do this sort of aggregation and curation automatically for you…
I always thought that plagiarism was primarily related to someone attempting to pas of someone else’s ideas as his own…this is not necessarily the same thing as creating a report, a news article, or to aggregate and present the work of others…In essence, I see plagiarism as a protection for creators, not necessarily for publishers…
I suppose that this could be subsumed into an argument showcasing that the growing amount of this curation activity is closer to a discursive versus contextual reality…
With regard to this idea, I wonder about the chicken–egg dichotomy in that this can only take place within the bounds of the tools which have been spouting up in about as soon as someone coined the term: Web 2.0.
Are these tools a natural outgrowth of the nature of increasing connectedness in computers? And does this imply that whatever the Gutenberg Parenthesis may be is solely an emergent aspect of computing?
Plagiarism or Paraphrasing: Does it Matter Anymore?
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/05/plagiarism-or-paraphrasing-does-it-matter-anymore
Last week’s post about how the Internet affects plagiarism brought up some interesting points of discussion.
Readers are parsing the difference between copying information verbatim without citing the source, and paraphrasing information gleaned from sources like Wikipedia.
One reader writes:
As a graduate student and researcher, 80% of what I do is not expressing original thoughts, but accurately understanding, coherently organizing, and properly attributing other people’s thoughts. I realize TurnItIn focuses on essays and term papers, not research, but perhaps what we really need is better education on how to attribute and use sources.
Another reader takes a step back and frames the conversation in terms of information ownership:
We are entering an age where ownership of information is becoming increasingly shared or indeterminate. Therefore, it’s time to re-think the concept of plagiarism.
This young generation of thinkers sees intellectual property very differently than my older generation does. I believe we are not far from an era where most information is considered public property and one’s intellectual value is measured by what one can do with information rather than by how much one knows. In this new world, plagiarism will become irrelevant. Of course, those who reject my hypothesis can always use technological solutions to address this fundamentally technological problem. Personally, I’d rather cultivate a paradigm shift in my own thinking about what I truly value in student writing. Changing my old attitudes is preferable to wrestling with out-dated notions of plagiarism that are doomed to become irrelevant by the middle of the 21st century. Like it or not, this new generation is going to re-define much of what us old timers take for granted.
Another reader believes that using another source’s idea without reference is also plagiarism, whether or not the same words are used.
The whole point of plagiarism (which many confuse with copyright which punishes copying exact words) is that you’re copying someone else’s *idea* without attribution, not just their exact words.
