Monthly Archives: March 2009

Right now, the major conference in my field, the Conference for College Composition and Communication, is going on in San Francisco. Alas, my proposals weren’t accepted, so I’m not there. But I am reading about it, including this very interesting article from today’s Inside Higher Ed, “False Positives on Plagiarism.”

Anyone who thinks that Turnitin is the best thing since sliced bread to prevent plagiarism ought to read the whole article; let me quote from it at some length:

On Thursday, at this year’s meeting, a team from Texas Tech University presented data that challenged the plagiarism detection services in a new way. The team found that services that theoretically detect the same sorts of problems actually find (or don’t find) very different examples of possible plagiarism.

Generally, the study found that Turnitin was much more likely than competitor SafeAssign (which is part of Blackboard) to identify material as being potentially not original. But that finding shouldn’t necessarily cheer Turnitin. The researchers reported that many of the instances of “non-originality” that Turnitin finds aren’t plagiarism, but are just the use of jargon, course terms or the sort of lack of originality one might expect in a freshman paper. In other cases, the study found that Turnitin didn’t necessarily identify the correct source of plagiarized materials.

This year’s meeting also comes at a time that Turnitin is trying to encourage different kinds of presentations to the composition meeting. Turnitin is paying the travel costs of some of those who are speaking here. The Texas Tech professors are not among those in San Francisco on Turnitin’s dime and the company won’t reveal those who are receiving support.

But some of those in the program giving papers that suggest a more positive view of Turnitin confirmed that they have been promised money by the company. The board of the composition association has adopted new rules, prompted by Turnitin’s grants to selected speakers, to encourage speakers to disclose their financial support, but some speakers said they didn’t know about the rule.

Now, as the comments on this article demonstrates, just because someone “proves” something with evidence doesn’t mean that it will change anyone’s mind. In other words, I am sure there are still a lot of teachers who will read this and say “Yeah, well, I think Turnitin works great for me so I’m going to keep using it.” I can’t remember who said this, but that point of view strikes me as yet another example of how you can’t change ideologies with the facts.

Second, by paying off people giving presentations in favor of Turnitin, it seems like that company and those scholars are taking a page from the tobacco industry way back when. Kind of amusing and sad at the same time, if you ask me.

This from Inside Higher Ed: “Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing?” I post this in part because the writer, Robert E. Cummings, has an edited collection out about teaching with wikis I have used for my own teaching, and just because Wikipedia is one of those things to get academic-types all fired up.

Here’s a long passage that kind of sums up my take on Wikipedia; “Jim” is an academic who had commented a previously published article about the extreme weaknesses of Wikipedia, how he fails students who cite from it, etc.:

No matter how counter-intuitive it might seem that an open source which anyone can edit would provide, on the whole, useful information, it is simply the case. And accepting the fact that a completely open source could render useful information is the price of admission for the ideas which will follow in this article. Useful information for a heart surgeon about to operate on you? Certainly not. Useful information for a general introduction to a topic? Certainly so.

Jim’s reaction is fruitful to us as teachers in higher education because it provides a clearer picture of what the college classroom looks like for a contemporary student, who must use the wide range of information tools available to us all in a networked society. A few simple notions of information literacy could handle this teaching moment – such as explaining the role and nature of an encyclopedic source in a student research paper – but Jim’s reaction is akin to decrying the advent of the telephone. Clearly, students shouldn’t use telephones, since inaccurate information could be passed on them. We’ll just ban the use of telephones in gathering information for our courses, penalize our students for using them, and later wonder why they seem under-prepared to succeed in a world dependent on the use of telephones. One can scarcely imagine the cognitive dissonance Internet native students still suffer in higher education, but comments like Jim’s help us understand just how bad the problem might be.