Cinnabar and Alabaster

MLA definition (775) "plagiarism is 'a form of cheating that has been defined as the false assumption of authorship: the wrongful act of taking the product of another person's mind, and presenting it as one's own.'"
777. repeated references to confusion over "what constitutes plagiarism in the digital age"--as if the digital-ness of the age changed the above definitions. it doesn't. it might change the textual practices we engage in & the assumptions we make about those practices, but that's an entirely different source of confusion.
778. there's really not so wide a crisis as people seem to believe.
780. a separate issues(?) "'a lot of students would agree that plagiarism and downloading music are theft, but they see them as victimless crimes'" & wild alarmism "if plagiarism were allowed to go unchecked, the impact on society wcould be catastrophic, according to Lawrence M. Hinman....trust is fundamental to the social, political and economic fabric of any successful society. 'without trust in public and business institutions outside the family, an economy stops developing after a certain point,' he says"
782. back in the day "for most of recorded history, drawing from other writers' works was encouraged. this view was grounded in the belief that knowledge of the human condition should be shared by everyone, not owned or hoarded."
788. very different school definition from Erdenheim PA: plagiarism includes "'lack of in-text or in-project documentation; documentation that does not check out or does not match works cited/works consulted;' and 'work that suddenly appears on final due date without a clear provenance'" the latter of which is clearly policing-in-action & has nothing to do with teaching academic practice.

he said she said
789. john barrie, turnitin.com pres: (the good) "we draw from the past to create the present. academic endeavors work in a similar manner. students from elementary school to postgraduate are constantly learning from and building upon the corpus of prior work from their peers, authors, of books or journal articles, lectures from faculty or from information found on the internet. on eof hte best methods for learning involves collaboration or peer review among groups of students in order to share ideas and criticism regarding course material." (the bad, & totally inconsistent with the above) "our society's future leaders are rapidly building a foundation of shaky ethics while cheating their way to a degree....while some administrators...are in complete dereliction of their duty as educators by not demanding original work from all students, ethical, hard working students are being out-competed by their cheeting peers--and it's an outrage"; becky's response: (a) we are not "in the throes of widespread moral decay" but "in the midst of a revolution in literacy", & "buying software instead of revitalizing one's teaching means that teachers, like students, have allowed the electronic environment to encourage a reductive, automated vision of the educational experience"; in simplest form, the "cure" isn't a shiny new toy, "it's careful pedagogy."