[etni] Wikipedia and Plagiarism

  • From: James Backer <drjamesbacker@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 06:32:58 -0800 (PST)

Greetings, all!

Please let me clarify my position about Wikipedia. It is a great place to start 
thinking about a topic and it has some great links to serious sources. It 
cannot/should not be cited in papers because it is a wiki: something whose 
content can change in the next five minutes. 

I tell my high school students this over and over, but they seem not to believe 
me, or accept the "rule." I also teach my graduate students, who are in-service 
teachers, the same thing: Don't accept Wikipedia as an entry in a reference 
list.

Because I get ETNI as a digest, I didn't know that Mitzi had posted her 
response on the list. We had a very interesting off-list discussion coming to a 
real Catch 22. 

If you want to avoid copy-and-paste plagiarism, you can have your kids do all 
the drafts with paper and pen. Then the final draft can be word-processed at 
home. (Unfortunately, there are always a few kids without computers at home, 
leading to all sorts of problems with the administrators and parents. I had one 
mirakezet machzor attack me for suggesting that the kids could do computer 
work - or anything else - during breaks.) 

On the other hand, do we want our student stuck back in the 20th Century? Don't 
we want them to know how to be digital, online and off? (Please note: I am 
*not* saying neglect handwriting.) Isn't the project a perfect way to teach 
them 21st Century skills? They could search, evaluate their findings, 
summarize, synthesize, compose, correct, and present their work digitally. But 
sadly, some of the kids just copy-and-paste, creating even more work for 
teachers who have to find the plagiarism and confront the students with it. 

There seems to be no easy solution for this Catch 22 situation because a few 
kids, and their parents, will always be ready to abuse the system - whatever 
that system is. One way or another, the teacher ends up spending many hours 
working on these problems, which often only have tangential importance to 
teaching/learning English.

Jimmy


      
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