Ethics: March 2006 Archive Page

The 10-year-old winner of a children's poetry competition had to hand back her prize money after newspaper readers noticed that her poem was the work of a well known writer.

"It's a mini drama for her. She did not realize it had been written by someone else," a member of the competition jury said Tuesday. --Child poetry plagiarist unmasked (Reuters|My Way)

That's one way to get ahead in life. Let's hope the young poet has learned her lesson.

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday. --Ben Domenech Resigns (post.blog)

That was quick.

Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age: Copying, Remixing, and Composing (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

This was a jam-packed, no-downtime, hardly-time-to-breathe presentation. I'm posting the notes that I took while the presenters were speaking, very lightedly edited afterwards in my hotel room. I hope whatever inadvertent remixing I did while taking these notes doesn't distort their intended message too much. In many ways, this panel felt like the continuation of, and one possible fulfillment of, the discussion raised by a panel from last year's Cs, "Writing Teachers Writing New Media."

Jim Porter addressed the crowed room by noting that plagiarism is, in many respects, a normal part of the writing process. Especially normal in the realm of digital writing. “Composing in the digital age is different.” The technical functions of copy/paste change everything. Remixing makes sense. “We do believe in the ethic of fair use.” The issue of plagiarism is more complex than it’s typically portrayed. Playing copyright police supports the business practices of corporations that have a vested interest in the status quo.


Catherine Latterell, Penn State U, “What is Remix Culture?”

Latterell showed clips and examples of remix culture. “My presentation is very consciously a collage and a sample of other people’s work.” Streetwear movement of customizing sneakers; the tuxedo T-shirt. The remix uses media in ways independent of the original designer’s intentions. The Tangelo and “Sprite Remix.” Pets: Labradoodles. (Labrador poodle.)

Quoted Emerson on Quotation and Originality. “By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”

A State of the Union remix that chops up Bush’s statements.

Pete Rojas, “Bootleg Culture.”

Office Space meets Super Friends (classic mash-up).

Sampling assumes or recognizes a shared network of meaning.

“Sampling plays games with memory.”

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation.

Sampling implies breakdown of boundaries – truth/meaning, author/audience.

MySpace: The Movie

Lessig: “Everyone in the life of producing and creating engages in this practice of remix.”


James Porter, Michigan State University, “Forget Plagiarism, Teach Filesharing and Fair Use.”

Reiterated what has been said by people in our field before. “If you don’t like what I say, you can blame all the immoral influences in my life.”

Brian Martin, “Plagiarism: A misplaced emphasis.”

Mark Rose, “The author as proprietor: Donaldson v. Beckett”

Lessig – “Many kinds of piracy are useful and productive, either to create new content or foster new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition, nor any tradition, has ever banned all piracy.”

“We are all pirates.” (“Image used without permission of Disney.”)

Criticizes the black and white view of plagiarism, which insists on some gray area, “context-dependent issues” where the answers is “it depends.”

“Be rhetorical about plagiarism.”

Copying without attribution and without permission is not always unethical.

Is it ethical to use somebody else’s design content for a web page, without attribution, if you plug in your own content?

Students – “well it depends on what course you’re doing it in.”

“We are all ‘plagiarists’ “ but in an ethical context.

Chris Dussold was fired for copying another professor’s teaching statement. University couldn’t make a sexual harassment charge stick, so they went after him for the boilerplate teaching. Have we ever plagiarized boilerplate syllabus text without acknowledging the source. Ever use an existing PowerPoint template? Cut and paste bibliography entries? Reuse paragraphs from your own presentations?

Much of our professional work involves reusing templates and boilerplate without attribution. A laboratory director who did little of the actual work may have his name appended to a list of authors.

Plagiarism not reduced to unattributed copying. The real issue is “taking someone else’s work and representing it as your own, in situations where it matters.”

Got a big laugh noting that “like you” he goes to Wikipedia for a definition of a term – in this case, “plagiarism.”

Teach not so much “what is plagiarism” but “how to you make the decision” of what’s right or allowable in which context.



Danielle Nichole DeVoss, Michigan State University. “Pastiche, Remix, the RIAA, and/in the Writing Classroom.”

IANAL

We are digitally literate technoretoricians. Not the hobby horse, but the bull in the china shop.

Our culture clings to an antiquated, romanticized notion of what writng is. Most, if not all writing takes place today in computer-mediated places. (Showed slides of people working together.)

The ability to compose documents with multiple media, to distribute, and to allow audiences to interact with that writing, changes many of the principles and practices of composition, which favors and privileges print-based notions.

(Included Leeroy Jenkins as an example of digital delivery.)

Offered 3 scenarios by “Amy Deel” a master’s student. If students translate and illustrate a piece of writing into a multimedia piece. Most students choose copyrighted material. Can you encourage them to publish their work? Can you publish it yourself in a conference presentation?

“When you’re downloading MP3s, you’re downloading Communism”

Copyright vs Copyleft.chart (attributed it to Jim.)

Puttign writing teachers on the grid almost squarely in the copyright domain.

Jack Valennti – “who’s just a rhetorical treat”

Mapped the values of composition instruction on top of the RIAA values of individual benefits.

Michael Day, once a student project goes public on the web, there is much more to consider. [I botched the 2nd half of the quote.]

Says it is “phenomenally difficult” to secure legitimate permission.


Johndon Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson U.

Begins with remixed movie trailer – Shining.

Plagiarism “as stealing” is about 12% of reported cases. Of more interest is cases where the concept of authorship fails to keep up with the creative processes. Defining “creativity” as the production of an original, unmixed text is a narrow view, idealizing the isolated genius. Take a problem-solving or problem-posing approach should push our students to use existing information to solve real problems. Composition hews pretty closely to those traditional views.

Shift the goal of writing from performance to action in context. Shift away from one extremely limited concept of reality, away from the hidden genius, away from writing as an isolated, de-contextualized process.

We tend to remain committed to that final artifact – original words, produced by the student. The ghost of the authorial genius remains between the lines, propping up what is becoming and increasingly unrealistic artifact in our digital age.

Thinking of composition instead of assemblage of parts, independent of what is original and what was existing. The distinction is “if not meaningless, at least secondary.”

Students recognize the hierarchical value of originality, causing students to hide their borrowed fragments. Focusing on problem-solving values assemblages.

Web design and design patterns – available from numerous sources. (Autocomplete, breadcrumbs, tabs.)

In theory, a web designer could create a new site only from assembling assisting material.

Ethical concerns. “Stop encouraging students to produce original texts all the time. Tell them to work, at least occasionally” on collages. We don’t want students to claim that they wrote something that they didn’t actually write. Honesty about authorship is honesty framed within a binary arrangement between original text and borrowed text… asking students to be “honest” about what they wrote and what they borrowed is simply a tool that helps us preserve the value of the original writing.

Creativity moves to the assemblage. Citation is no longer a way of making subordinate elements in text, but rather a way to reward students for their new skills, to situate texts in preexisting, but new contexts. Their goal should be to filter and remix existing texts in order to solve problems. Students are encouraged to make explicit their borrowing. Encouraging writing instructors to recognize the value of this compositional skill.

Using Genre to Help Students Envision Themselves as Writers (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

I volunteered to chair this session, so I wasn't taking copious notes, just jotting down possible discussion prompts.

Scott Whiddon, Louisiana State University, "From Cellblock to Center: Literacy, Identity and the Angolite."

The Angolite is an award-winning news magazine produced by the inmates of the Lousiana State Penitentiary. He noted that criminality and illiteracy are often taken as synonymous. This publication lets its contributors and editors transcend their role as "prisoner" and lets them participate in the outside world that their circumstances and mistakes have denied them. He also mentioned the Angola Prison Rodeo, in which prisoners particpate before a sold-out crowd. [I asked whether the print-only Angola might perpetuate some of the power differentials that we see eroding in the outside world, with the rise of digital distributed culture. I also couldn't help but think how both the magazine and the rodeo are attempts by the prisoners to take control of and even invert the panopticon. Instead of being subjects, observed by the invisible eye of authority, they become performers, interacting for and with the public who has paid to come see them. Whiddon noted that the articles in The Angolite feature redemption stories -- precisely the kind of thing that the general public wants to hear from inmates.]

Lisa Bickmore, of Salt Lake Community College, prestented "Writing 'Just on Paper,': Genre, Exigency, Situation." Since I've taught web design and writing for the web, I had to bite my tongue when she showed a slide featuring a mockup of a student website. The students had cut and pasted colored paper to indicate buttons and menu bars on a piece of poster board, and pasted what looked like an 8 1/2 x 11 paper printout in the center of the board.

My own biases made it hard for me to see beyond the paragraphs of plain text, poured into an approximation of a web design. You can put your boots in the oven, but that don't make 'em biscuits.

I can certainly understand the value of a paper prototype, and of course I know nothing about the technical literacy or access to computers that Bickmore can expect from her students.

At any rate, Bickmore applied Jim Gee's definition of literacy as social action, and presented samples from two student projects who chose to write on progressive topics. During the Q & A, I noted that as a journalism teacher, I make it perfectly clear that no human endeavor is ever perfectly objective, and I briefly described how I use the story of an article that appeared in the student newspaper when I was an undergraduate. An article reported that two demonstrations of equal sides took place at the same time, with pro-choice demonstators on one side of the downtown mall, and pro-life demonstrators on the other. The student reporter included four direct quotes and one paraphrase from protestors on one side of the issue, and merely quoted the slogans shouted and carried by demonstrators on the other side of the issue. I tell my students that, if they're waiting for me to tell them which side of the issue this reporter favored, then they're missing the point of the story -- it's bad journalism, no matter which side it favors. Students don't have to adopt a neutral tone of voice in the composition classroom, but still, in light of the activist framework she supplies to this wriiting assignment, I asked her whether her conservative students felt comfortable expressing themselves in the same way. (She answered that she was glad somebody asked that question, and noted that one group of mostly male students wrote about their opinion that Title IX was unfair.)

Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish? (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Lila Harper, Central Washington University, Ellensburg. “What Can We Learn about Plagiarism from Master’s Theses?”

Is often asked, “Why in the world are you reading so many of these theses?” For the past 3-4 years, she has read, copy-edited and checked the references of every completed MA thesis. Not normally on the grad committee, nor directing student research. With the help of a half-time assistant, she checks theses for correctness. About 50-60 theses a year. Also teaches in composition, has cross-disciplinary experience.

Initially assumed that plagiarism would not be a problem. Found a student’s thesis that included an unexplained acronym, and when searching to see whether it should be spelled out, she found the student had plagiarized several pages from someone else’s website. While communicating expectations about plagiarism is very important for foreign students, she finds problems across cultures. Graduate students often fail to clarify indirect or secondary citations. (Some faculty argued that there is no need to differentiate between direct and indirect citations.) Some students assume that one only needs quotation marks when the student quotes the entire sentence. She notes that some of this confusion is tied to the kind of style manual the student refers to. Plagiarism at the MA level is particularly troubling, since students are no longer considered outsiders who are being asked to write in the discourse mode of the insiders. By completing an master’s thesis, the student is demonstrating membership in that scholarly community.

She focuses not on the theft of knowledge, but on the value of transparency and accuracy that is threatened when full citations are considered a last-minute formality. Poor citations damage reproducibility. She noted that faculty members in the humanities often assume that handbooks from other disciplines do a good job teaching the rules surrounding citation. She found that style manuals were prescriptive (direct, emphatic guidance – thou shalt do this, focused towards researchers), permissive (which emphasizes options; Chicago Style Manual is much more optional that MLA – these are focused towards editors, describing general practices in particular journals); descriptive (in the sciences, where students are given different examples and presumably left to their own devices).

She showed examples from the MLA Style Book and Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers, in which Hacker was more strict than the MLA. While she had to cut considerably from a longer article, she concluded with a list of practical guidelines. Her final statement was the suggestion that introductory textbooks use the citation style that students will be expected to demonstrate.


Joel Bloch, The Ohio State University, “Blogging about Plagiarism: Dealing with the Problems of Generation 1.5 Students in an Academic Classroom.”

Bloch began by referring to his earlier work, in which he argued for the abolishment of the criminal metaphor for plagiarism, and instead suggests a games metaphor, in which there are rules that have consequences, and the rules must be discovered through active efforts. He focuses on immigrants who came to America during their school years. He described a course that is “all plagiarism, all the time.” He describes the plight of ESL students strangled by the 5-paragraph essay they were forced to write in high school. The metaphor “we stand on the shoulder of giants” reminds us that literacy is important in learning new information. The organizational patterns of academic writing force student to make abstractions. Vernacular literature achieves cohesiveness with “and,” but academic literacies require writers to show a wider variety of connections, and to make those connections more explicit. A writing sample showed a combination of “and” and more complex linkages (I didn’t catch the technical term he used to describe those connections).

I was fascinated by his discussion of how the military leadership of Somali positioned a literacy program as a weapon against foreign influences, but I’m not typing much because I’m still waiting for the “blogging” part of the talk. I’m not quite sure what to make of his references to the movie Girl, Interrupted, which seemed unnecessary. (Of course, maybe I missed something, since I'm multitasking, listening and writing at the same time. I'm not just taking notes, I'm composing complete sentences and correcting typos, so perhaps I missed something because my attention is divided.)

He uses blogging as a way to give students the opportunity to develop their ideas in the classic process-oriented classroom, but also a way they can express themselves using the vernacular. He also has students cite each other (a strategy I also use for informal class discussions). He asked students to blog about their personal lives, with the understanding that whatever they write can be read by anyone. He compared the work ethic and family importance of the blogs his generation 1.5 students write, the social blogs written by students who attend his daughter’s “wealthy” private school. [But those girls are not writing for academic credit. Certainly the generation 1.5 students have a cultural perspective that may distance themselves from the boys/friends/pop culture topics one expects to find in an adolescent girls’ weblog community, but I’m sure that when those girls become college women writing for their professors, they will change the topics they write about for class.]

Students either worked so closely with primary texts that they plagiarized, or they moved so far away from them so quickly that they barely mentioned them. (He also asks students to blog responses to an article before contributing a more formal reflection.)

Indicated that building a whole course around plagiarism was designed to let students write from a position of expertise. Presented an example in which a West African student drifted away from the text completely, contrasted with Asian students who stuck very closely to the text.

“By using blogs as a form of continuous online discussion,” it was hoped students would use them “any way they wished.” The study focused on a single student, so he was cautious about conclusions.


Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University, Fort Collins. “Beyond Twentieth-Century Paradigms for Scholarly Publishing.”

Palmquist says the scholarly publishing crisis is “overblown.” In fact, there is so much demand for scholarly works, there isn’t enough capacity to meet it. [There was a bit of a buzz in the audience at that, but we resolved to save our questions until he’s finished. He says there are more books being published now than ever before, but of course they’re expensive, small runs.]

Noted that a small press can be put out of business if it misjudges the market for the book. “Academic publishing is essentially a barter system. We do the work, they take the risks… it works out pretty well.”

Notes that the acquisitions editors may only have MAs, which calls the system into question. A really successful book has 3000 copies. Printing and distribution technologies require 9-14 months, so books are already out of date when they hit the shelves.

Sympathy for junior colleagues in the humanities, where books are so central to the faculty evaluation process.

Argues for adopting a digital publishing model that enhances, rather than replaces, the traditional model. No change at the initial analysis (is the idea good), but drop the market analysis, replacing it instead with a faculty analysis. If it’s a good book that only 400 people would be interested in, a digital publication model can do a better job. Instead of in-house publishers doing all the editing of a book, shift that responsibility to the editors of series. Shift the copyediting to faculty, in collaboration with students. Cut down the publication time to as little as a month. “I’ve actually done it in a week.”

Estimated 10-20 thousand people see a very successful book.

He proposes a model of publishing a free digital web version, and also a print-on-demand version. Example – wac.collegestate.edu “Writing Selves and Writing Societies.” A PDF of the entire book downloaded 21,000 times. 67,000 visits to the site, 31,000 unique individuals.

“Legitimacy should be a reflection of the strength of the editorial review board.” Says there’s a fundamental flaw in the system if commercial viability is such an important part of the publications winnowing process.

Benefits of a distributed, collaborative publication mode.

1. Reduces distributed costs.
   
2. Authors retain copyright.
   
3. Supports publication of work that would not be commercially viable.
   
4. Ensures scholarly merit is the most important factor.
   
5. Reduces amount of time to get work out there.
   
6. Increases access to published work.
   
7. Ensures that the work is easily accessible for longer periods of time.

Mike Edwards (sitting next to me as I type) asked the speakers whether they had any concerns about people blogging their presentations. Harper said she hadn’t had much experience with conference bogging. Bloch said he blogged last year, so he’d be hypocritical if he complained. Palimquist said it depends on what the bloggers are writing. [I joked, “Oh, I’m slamming you completely!” and he said “Then I’ll come after your website!”]

Another audience member noted that the elite quality of opera is what gives it its cultural cache. Palimquist noted that Stuart Moluthrop and Nancy Kaplan’s earlier promises that everyone will be a publisher is a bit misleading, since “I don’t have time” to be my own publisher.

Palimquist ended with an invitation to anyone who has an idea for a good book to send it to him.

“Oh, no,” I exclaimed several years ago, when a student in a composition class stepped out afterwards to explain that she had been absent because her grandmother had died. “Another dead grandmother!”

The girl immediately burst into tears.

Of course I wished I was dead. The student’s grandmother really had died. Or else her granddaughter was a good actress. But you want to try to avoid being too cynical about excuses, especially those involving death. Question these particular excuses and you may as well be questioning respect for the dead or the suffering of those left behind. --Terry Caesar --The Time of Dead Grandmothers (Inside Higher Ed)

When former Gizmondo executive Stefan Eriksson wrecked his million-dollar Ferrari on the Pacific Coast Highway last month, it simply seemed like a fitting metaphor for the death of his hapless handheld - the destruction of one expensive piece of machinery to mark the end of another.
--Gizmondo Bizarro (Game Revolution)

If all the news reports are accurate, the Gizmondo game system seems to let you race a Mercedes SLR, crash a Ferrari, manage the careers of special agents as they rise from eldertransport rent-a-cops to homeland security agents, and elude the authorities via a luxury yacht.