Name: Suhaili binti Hanafi Matrix No : GB130070 Title: An Ethical Dilemma: Talking about Plagiarism and Academic Integrity in the Digital Age Writer : Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Kelly Sassi Conclusion : How we handle academic integrity with our students has implications beyond our individual classrooms. As educators, we make important distinctions when we evaluate student assignments for different purposes. The distinctions between smaller assignments that build student understanding, help stimulate ideas for prewriting, or develop collaborative skills, and essays, projects, and exams intended for final, independent evaluation of student capabilities, are clear. Our aim as teachers of writing is to develop students’ ability to put “ideas, questions, and problems into words, mulling them over so they can see them from different angles and reason their way to where they want to stand” (Rex, Thomas, and Engel 56). We might shift our writing pedagogy from merely policing plagiarism toward engaging in rich conversations with students about academic integrity: 1. Socialize students into discourse communities of academic writing by providing invitations for students to “question and discuss plagiarism” (Price 105). 2. Acknowledge that what constitutes plagiarism is context dependent. Indicate in written policies that citation is a convention, and “conventions shift across time and locations” (Price 106). 3. Provide clarity about the historical origins of and contemporary rationales for citations in academic writing (Howard 789). 4. Acknowledge alternate ideas about authorship, including oral traditions and voice merging, and other perceptions about originality that come from non western cultures, which many of our students and their families come from (Howard 792) 5. Invite students to practice different kinds of ways of attributing outside sources and their own work (Price 108–09). The ways that we talk about plagiarism and academic integrity in the digital age pose new challenges never seen before in the profession. High school teachers are grappling with the same issues that college composition instructors are taking up; see, for example, the CCCC statement on “Transforming Our Understanding of Copy right and Fair Use”. It is difficult to anticipate what new ethical dilemmas will arise. For example, while multimodal composing has brought with it an acknowledgment of patch writing as a strategy that digital natives often use, there are still situations —writing on demand is one of them—when students will have to write convincingly without the aid of the Internet and access to the ideas of others (Gere, Christenbury, and Sassi). Just as we have always had an obligation to teach students the positive traits that help them avoid plagiarism, such as citing sources correctly, we now need to learn what kinds of materials are free for the remixing that is a hallmark of students’ digital literacy.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:25:32 +0000
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