Okay, Boomer Academy: This Plagiarism Thing? — Get over it!
In 2016 I published a piece in Hybrid Pedagogy taking issue with how the educational establishment interpreted, taught, and policed “intellectual dishonesty” in the (even then old) “new” tech environment. Five years later, boundaries between the academy and “the real world,” shifting since (in modern times) World War II, are morphing still. Accusations of plagiarism, once a specialized word important only in academic environments, arise in mainstream politics and media, once- arcane scholarly concepts like Critical Race Theory have become hot button issues in local school board discussions and state legislatures. The nature of knowledge itself is the subject of heated conversations in the grocery store and the local pub — although it’s not typically called epistemology.
My five years ago thoughts about using someone else’s work as one’s own are transitioning too. Here are continuing and recent observations as deadlines for fall syllabus completion loom.
Is there originality in unique combinations of existing pieces? Pattern-matching AI’s like Turnitin police plagiarism by identifying percentages of re-used material. They cannot (yet?) determine how the re-used material is remixed and reformatted to express entirely new insights. The photographer may have framed and composed her picture to send one message, but the documentary videographer digitally manipulating and positioning that image in a different context with a voice-over from someone else in combination with elements from other artists intends a new message entirely. Do we call this out as cheating because we recognize individual pieces or recognize and reward a powerful creative technique that makes use of the viewers’ recognitions and connections with the identified pieces? What makes something a unique creation and not merely an assortment of used parts is a complex human judgment about which various humans are likely to disagree. Cut and paste technology — in combination with virtually infinite libraries of sound, image, and text instantly available — empower today’s content creators in ways difficult to encompass in academic honesty codes.
Further, the existing plagiarism screeners built into most academic learning management systems are exclusively text-centered. Yet real-world communications depend on multiple modes. Even in this text-centered context, the pattern matching algorithms’ discovery and enforcement work is threatened by newer service apps that take a student’s “borrowed” text chunks and substitute different words in order to foil the detection mechanisms. A robot thesaurus, anyone?
We are expending time and energy in the pursuit of very petty crime that should be spent empowering humans to attend carefully to each others’ messages — in all modalities — and respond purposefully with their own. It should not be an effort to meet my page limit on a topic of my choosing, but rather a need to express — and even monetize — their own evolving truths,
I Did the Research Homework and Unknown Knowns
Elementary school curricula typically teach beginning writers to “put things in your own words.” when writing reports. Turn off the screen or close the book, and explain what you just read in your own words. Sounds simple, right? Except, academic vocabulary and appropriate scientific terms are important, truthful, and accurate content in these reports. Using them proves that writers have mastered credible sources and know what they are talking about, but they also present complications of their own. If I am reviewing a science fiction movie, or reporting on recent research in quantum computing or black holes, or artificial intelligence, the word “singularity” has very different meanings in each context. Contrast this with “photosynthesis” or “hypotenuse, ” generally accepted technical terms with uniform meanings across contexts or disciplines. In the case of singularity, the various meanings are or can (should) be attributed to their associated “discoverers/users.” In the case of photosynthesis and hypotenuse, this is not the case. Background knowledge of two sorts is required on the part of the writer: to recognize which words to copy exactly and when and how to include credit along with the words.
For all learners, there is a first time. Parents and teachers thrill at these knowledge awakening moments: “So that’s how rain happens, that’s why the plant died.” At the beginning, we do not know what everybody knows; there are no accepted truths that may stand naked in the text. The first time through, everything deserves a footnote, and this is as true of graduate students as of third graders.
Equity of Access: The Research Review and Original Thoughts
The Academy purports to reward new insights, while it dismisses and ignores divergent voices. In order to merit a seat at the panelists’ table and a place in the journal, one must join the existing club, be an already-known quantity —not attempt to form a radically new club or break in without appropriate introductions. Hence, the need to prove that one respects and courts the gatekeepers, that one is relying on the work of those who have gone before. Citations and attributions in the work as well as thank you’s and appreciations in the preface do this. What happens, then, to the truly divergent, paradigm-shifting, minority view, — the idea with no footnotes? What always happens in closed, hierarchical human tribes.
(Warning note: this silencing of what does not meet our established and (typically) unexamined norms is not my idea. It has lots of footnotes and attributions, and has, in fact, been much more gracefully expressed.)
So what to do now?
I teach Communication. Here are three notes to self for this fall’s Academic Integrity section: Reduce, Recycle, Reuse.
- Develop assignments that actually require and reward the purposeful critique, analysis, and re-use of existing media bits.
I plan to insist that submitted work include hyperlinks to research references. No more “select bibliographies” pasted directly from Google. If you did not actually use the source in your submission in a meaningful and original way, it doesn’t count.
There will be fewer assignments, more independent choice of topic, and more attention paid to student reflection about why they chose the topic, the sources they used, and their thoughts about those sources and the topic itself.
2. Admit my own ignorance about popular culture and media formats in which I am illiterate.
We start the semester with a brainstorming exercise: How many different ways are there to send a message? And then I proceed down a traditional rabbit hole in which students share their messages with PowerPoint, Papers, Oral presentations. Traditional norms and conventions do matter — if only because mastery of, and confidence with, them conveys power, grants entry, and establishes a common foundation. Nevertheless, I am working on a student-judged, end-of-semester award for the most un-typical, risk-taking message sending act, — suitable for general audiences. (Stay tuned for more about this in future posts.)
3. Remember to re-activate and re-use the fun circuits
In March 2020, the pandemic changed life, learning, and communication for everyone. It is not over, and, even if it were, much will be forever changed — even academic credentialing, grading, knowledge creation, and sharing. Care for human relationships and the habit of gratitude for small favors, listening to others with undivided attention and empathy are old-fashioned values. As are moving beyond narcissism and enjoying the outdoors, having fun without phones.
Nebla Marquez Greene, mother of two children at Sandy Hook on December 14, 2012 and founder of the Ana Grace Project, shared a reflection about teaching and learning that is worth packing up and taking with us, as we jump out of the boxes into which we have crammed our thinking about intellectual property for too long. It ends with a reminder about fun.
