Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
202. the student who'd memorized the bio of abe lincoln, reporting it back on paper--is he plagiarising? "because all language learning is, to some extent, a practice of memorization of the words of others, on what grounds do we see certain acts of textual borrowing as acceptable and others as unacceptable? how have the boundaries been drawn between the acceptable memorizing and use of word lists, phrases, sentences...paragraphs, poems, quotations, and so on and the unacceptable reuse of others' words?"
203. group grading/norming sessions "often produce...quite extraordinarily divergent views on what is and what is not a good piece of writing" and "there is nothing like the hint of something borrowed to radically split the meeting down the middle"; "ironically, once the spectre of doubtful ownership is raised, teachers start to look for grammatical errors as a sign of good writing and to become suspicious when such errors are crucially absent. our criteria are turned on their head: suddenly we are looking either for language that is 'too good' in order to incriminate the student, or we are looking for evidence of errors in order to exonerate the student."
211. big picture issue: "looking more carefully at traditions of ascribing meaning and creativity to god, the individual, or discourse raises a number of concerns about how meaning, texts, and textual borrowing are understood and thus challenges any easy ascription of a notion of plagiarism"
212. the "western tradition....faces very real challenges if we start to take seriously different textual and learning practices in other cultures. but...it also faces challenges from its own inconsistencies": "the western cult of originality has existed alongside wholescale borrowing" but/and also "textual practices are changing: even if there once were clearly defined lines between the borrowed and the original, they are starting to fade in a new era of electronic intertextuality."
213. as wordsworth & dorothy exemplify, "much of what gets claimed as the result of original academic work actually draws heavily on the work of silent others--women, graduate students, research assistants and so on"
216. a tale of murky academic attribution (he said she said): "and so, as these words and ideas circulate around the academic community, it becomes unclear quite what their origins are. and does it matter? the ideas attributed to giroux are interesting, but do we need to know who really said them originally?" (apparently it was faigley, misquoted after attributing his next sentence to giroux)
218. "i want to avoid simplistic arguments such as 'it's OK to plagiarise in chinese'....rather, what i am trying to get at is the ways in which relationships to text, memory, and learning may differ."
222. we might do well to consider "the possibility that the memorization of texts is not a pointless practice from [the chinese] point of view, because the issue is not one of understanding the world and then mapping language onto it but rather of acquiring language as texts as a precursor to mapping out textual realities"; "this veneration of old textual authority....is not necessarily....an inherently conservative construction of authority....rather, it can also be understood as according primary importance to the text rather than to the world"; "there are important distinctions to be drawn within forms of memorization rather than between memorization and understanding"
223. "the distinction between plagiarising ideas and plagiarising language" can be a problem for students in ways we don't anticipate: as one student explained "if he took the ideas but rephrased the langauge, he would be plagiarising ideas....it seemed almost more honest to simply keep the langauge the same"; another student "knew that rewriting would bring about more mistakes and probably a less powerful message."
225. one more (the patchwriting angle): "i don't think if one plagiarises, that means he doesn't learn anything....perhaps plagiarism is a way of learning."; "a final issue that emerged from these interviews...concerns the extent to which these students feel the english langauge remains a langauge of colonialism....as one student put it, 'the teaching of english is a kind of cultural intrusion in hong kong and may be regarded as a political weapon'"; "many seem to feel that they have no ownership over english--it remains an alien language--and thus to write 'in their own words' is not something that can be done in english."
227. thus: "many of the ways we approach supposed plagiarism are pedagogically unsound and intellectually arrogant"; "part of any discussion of citation, paraphrase, textual borrowing, and so forth needs...to include discussion of how and why these notions have been constructed, how authorship, authenticity, and authority have been linked together, and how these pratices may be in a process of flux."