[etni] Re: Wikipedia and Plagiarism
- From: Mitzi Geffen <mitzi1002001@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, drjamesbacker@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 08:42:38 -0800 (PST)
Funny, I didn't think we came to a catch 22. Even if you insist on the kids
doing all of the work on the computer, there is no reason not to insist that
they provide a print-out of each article they use and somehow indicate the
paragraphs from which they took their information. My students also want to use
Wikipedia, and I say fine, but you won't get credit for having done the
project! They have learned that it is not in their interest to break that rule!
A man has been sent to the moon. That was probably much harder to figure out
than this!
All the best,
Mitzi
--- On Thu, 2/5/09, James Backer <drjamesbacker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: James Backer <drjamesbacker@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [etni] Wikipedia and Plagiarism
To: etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thursday, February 5, 2009, 4:32 PM
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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