“Awesome job!” — Or was it? The “many eyes” of Asynchronous Writing Environments and the Implications on Plagiarism

E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

While digital technologies may contribute to the apparent rise in plagiarism among students, these technologies can help teachers develop constructive, rather than punitive, course environments that discourage plagiarism. In an online writing course taught by the author, a student who plagiarized on the message boards was caught and identified on those boards by two other students. The author argues that various aspects of the boards created a community dynamic that enabled the two students to identify the plagiarism and to react to it. The students’ identification of the plagiarist stemmed partially from indignation, but they also, because of the extensive writing on the boards, discerned differences between the plagiarized material and the plagiarist’s other contributions during the term. The author draws from several constructive plagiarism approaches, especially Williams’ CORD method, to frame five ways message boards facilitate a constructive approach to plagiarism: allowing many readers, including students, to see the writing; providing multiple opportunities for assessment; creating bolder participants; allowing students to read beyond content; and providing a means for students to enact justice when outraged at their peers’ cheating. Asynchronous writing environments can curb plagiarism while complementing a positive writing and learning environment.

Constructive Writing Environments

It should surprise no one that those interested in writing and communication have focused a good deal of attention on message boards and other asynchronous writing technologies. Such technologies provide a vehicle for fresh perspectives on an array of topics ranging from class participation to postmodernism. I offer here that asynchronous writing environments, specifically message boards, can also be a practical, teaching-friendly platform to help instructors re-think their approach to plagiarism, allowing them to foster an open writing community in which students are part of the check system against plagiarism.

Using a case of plagiarism that occurred in an online writing course I taught, I will discuss the idea of how what I call the “many eyes” of asynchronous writing tools, primarily message boards, can operate to create a constructive—rather than punitive—plagiarism environment. This case of plagiarism had an unusual aspect that was enabled by the technology: the other students, not me, uncovered the plagiarized material—and publicly called the plagiarist on it. “New technologies [... ] continue to keep concerns surrounding plagiarism in the forefront of the collective academic psyche,” says English Professor James Purdy. “In other words, if plagiarism is easier to commit because of the Internet, it is also easier to catch because of the Internet. We in English studies must, therefore, now think about plagiarism in light of technology” (275-6). Overwhelmed by reports and surveys attempting to quantify the numbers of students who cheat, teachers can easily be led to believe that plagiarists lurk at every turn in their classrooms. In response to this ubiquitous perceived threat, teachers have adopted various technological solutions to the problem, with commercial plagiarism checkers becoming status quo in many writing departments. However, message boards are an easy-to-use technology that can curb plagiarism while complementing a positive writing and learning environment. Following the spirit of communitarian thinking, which advocates that people “attend to our responsibilities to the conditions and elements we all share, to the community” (Etzioni 15), the use of these environments can help incorporate students in the prevention of plagiarism while de-emphasizing the teacher’s role as enforcer. As communitarian thinker Amitai Etzioni said, “The best way to minimize the role of the state, especially its policing role, is to enhance the community and its moral voice” (44). The message board environment, for many reasons, can empower students’ moral voice—and enables its articulation.

I Do Not Want to Police My Students

Before I describe the case, I want to outline briefly my teaching philosophy vis-à-vis plagiarism. I think it is important that people who are discussing plagiarism make their philosophy and approach clear, because this topic tends to elicit a polarized response: some teachers claim plagiarism is hardly a problem at all, while others view it as one of the most important issues in education (for a range of writing teachers’ views on plagiarism and the “plagiarism industry,” search the Writing Program Administrator list for “plagiarism” [“Archives...”], or for more general commentary, read one of the many Weblogs about this topic that have emerged such as Plagiarism Today or CyberCheats). In my work training college teachers and conducting in-service workshops for secondary schools, I have encountered a wide range of teacher attitudes to plagiarism. Some instructors, especially in large content classes, rarely vary their assignments from year to year yet claim they do not receive plagiarized work. Plagiarism is a primary concern for other teachers, who try a variety of strategies and develop a mindset of suspicion in the struggle against inauthentic student work.

While we cannot ignore the possibility of plagiarism, when the avoidance of plagiarism becomes predominant in a teacher’s mind, the result may be a disintegration of a positive learning environment, particularly the kind of coaching-centered environment of many writing courses. The metaphors often used to describe/depict plagiarism reflect this. Purdy, for instance, points out how plagiarism can be framed in a martial way, with language of “violence and struggle,” and how the instructor’s role can thus become “combative and aggressive” (277). Rebecca Moore Howard, who has contributed greatly to compositional thinking about plagiarism, describes how plagiarism has been viewed almost as an assault on the body, perhaps even akin to rape (“Sexuality...” 475). The word “plagiarism,” she said, is derived more from the concept of kidnapping than theft. She goes as far back as Defoe to show how plagiarism has been viewed as a disease, often a sexual one, or as a type of adultery (“Sexuality...” 479-81). The ways we have conceptualized plagiarism have helped us develop a combative mindset, a mindset that leads us to want to eradicate it and to punish wrong-doers.

One of the problems, of course, is that the result of such a mindset is a police-type teaching state about all plagiarisms, blurring the line between deliberate cheating or accidental citation errors. Shades of difference are elided, and such generalizing has led Howard to recommend ridding ourselves of the term “plagiarism” altogether, replacing it instead with “less culturally burdened terms” such as “fraud,” “insufficient citation,” and “excessive repetition” (“Sexuality...” 475). [1] Many educators have indeed expressed concerns about pedagogy framed around mistrust of students. In such classes, Howard, says, the “Focus shifts from the writing process to the investigation of the ‘crime,’” creating a “criminal-police relationship.” This corrupts the teacher’s normal practice, shifting the role of teacher away from mentor to that of cop (“Forget about...”). Purdy adds the idea “that neither is the role of a teacher aristocratic hunter or super sleuth—unless perhaps it is to hunt down the most effective pedagogical approach to issues of plagiarism” (290). While Howard, Purdy, and others warn against the police-teaching mindset, they know, as we all do, that sometimes teachers encounter students who blatantly cheat: someone who buys a term paper, hires another student, or slyly cuts and pastes a significant part of a Website or other resource—Howard’s “frauds.” Estimates of how many students cheat vary: Do 40% of students commit Internet plagiarism (Hansen)? Could it be that 80% of all students admit to cheating in American schools (Williams 227)? Has cheating really increased more than four-fold since the 1960s (see Austin and Brown)? Regardless, some good-sized chunk of students cheat—and they know it.

While I am aware that some students commit “fraud” consciously, I decided some time ago that I will not become so focused on the possibility of plagiarism that I become mistrustful of, and perhaps even antagonistic to, my students. I sought a more progressive approach that addresses the complexity of plagiarism and actually is part of good teaching. Good models exist to assist those seeking such an approach. Howard advocates structuring courses and assignments in ways that prevent or discourage plagiarism rather than spending our time trying to catch students in the act (“Forget about...”). In her article, “Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty,” Howard presents the language of a plagiarism policy that reflects a better understanding of the gradations of plagiarisms (798-802). Martin Weller said that in an online course, portfolios and frequent interaction between instructors and students create an environment that obstructs plagiarism in a healthy way (115). Purdy says that instead of panicking about rampant plagiarism, “We must take a step back to consider the role the writing technologies [students] use play in their writing processes and consider how we as teachers—rather than hunters, police officers, or super sleuths—can pedagogically address these technologies.” Purdy suggests teachers keep focused on connections between plagiarism and technology—while remembering their role as teachers. Indeed, a teacher’s time seems better spent educating students about plagiarism rather than “at the computer testing student papers for unattributed language” (291). Especially for the purposes described here (and I will revisit this again at the conclusion of the article), I have found the CORD approach as described by Sadie Williams to be useful in thinking about how to address plagiarism: a culture of honesty; observation of students’ continuous work; review of intermediate drafts; and ongoing discussion with the student (230). Her approach is framed by the concept of creating a classroom community in which plagiarism is unacceptable.

In line with many of the people above, I attempt to create assignments that are difficult to plagiarize. I am involved closely with the process of my students’ writing. I want to create a classroom culture in which cheating (because there are many opportunities for evaluation) is more trouble than it is worth. And by using message boards, I can subtly include the students themselves in maintaining the classroom’s integrity in a constructive approach that uses the technology to help them improve as writers at the same time, which of course is the primary goal in a writing class. This model is close in spirit to communitarianism. While my purpose here is not to wade into the politics of communitarianism, the idea expressed by Etzioni that the only way “moral integrity” can be preserved is for “most of the people, most of the time, to abide by their commitments voluntarily” (30) resonates with this approach to plagiarism.

The Case

In my online composition courses, students are responsible for about 30 substantive mini-essays on the course message boards (via WebCT Discussions). [2], [3] I start each week with several prompts, and students then either respond to some of the prompts or build from each other’s posts. I think the whole experience creates a vibrant message board classroom community, one numerous students have complimented in end-of-term anonymous course evaluations as being more engaging than the in-class conversations in many of their courses. (I describe my message board practices and philosophy fully in a blog I maintain about teaching writing online: onlinewritingteacher.blogspot.com.) The subject matter of the prompts varies: sometimes students take a stance about issues raised in our readings; sometimes they reflect on the writing process; other times they connect our readings with a current issue. Because the course I discuss here focused on argument, I gave the students the following prompt in the middle of the term:

This was a low-stakes, “lighter” assignment, but I still felt it would help them think about the different contexts of argument. I should note that every week they had the option of choosing among several prompts; in other words, they could pick the prompts to which they wished to respond. Also, each post was worth only 1% of their total course grade (10 points out of 1,000).

One student, Jack (all names are pseudonyms), submitted a lengthy interpretation of a song by a popular band in response to my prompt, starting off with “I like this post alot (sic).” As would normally happen, other students subsequently responded to Jack’s post; many of them said how much they liked his interpretation of the song.

One, Shayna, posted the following:

In retrospect, perhaps it is surprising that Jack was silent in the face of this gushing praise.

Toward the end of our ten-week term, as one of their choices for the week, I asked students to review the Discussions from the course, choose their favorite post by another student, and explain why they liked that post and why they found it effective. Shayna posted on this thread, and she referred back to Jack’s song lyrics post as her favorite, reiterating some of her earlier praise. The next day, another student, Pat, responded to Shayna, saying,

Pat was a skilled writer and a frequent contributor to the boards. Pat was assertive and had strong, often well-researched opinions, but he was also good at building community in the class, creating a light banter with many students on the boards and being supportive when someone wrote a solid post. After having him for two consecutive online terms, I felt as if I knew his thinking as well as I did any student I have had in my face-to-face writing classes, and I felt he was one of the students who maximized the experience of an online writing course.

I say all of this to show that I felt I knew Pat well—or at least I knew his message board self quite well (a clarification those like Sherry Turkle and Julian Dibbell might insist on). His brief, enigmatic message—e.g., the use of ellipses, the hinting comment about “somewhere”—left me confused. Suspicious after reading this post, I performed a quick Google search, which led me to a song lyrics site, www.songmeanings.net, on which I found the exact interpretation to the song as the one Jack had posted. Evidently, Jack had cut-and-pasted the interpretation directly from the site’s message board into his Discussion post. While he cleaned up a few grammatical mistakes and typos, he even maintained the same formatting, such as the use of equal signs between lyrics and interpretation.

All teachers know the feeling of despondency that followed my discovery. I looked at Jack’s post and at the song Website post again, and it was clear what had happened. I emailed Jack privately and informed him what I had discovered. After I had sent the email and while I was awaiting Jack’s response, yet another student, Barry, posted to the “favorite post” thread, saying,

This post made it evident that other students were aware that Jack’s interpretation was egregiously plagiarized, and they had taken the step of identifying the culprit (with strong evidence, because all of us could easily access the site and compare it to the original) on the public forum of the board. All the students would soon know. As the instructor, I found myself in a difficult, complex situation. The discussion was public, and while I decided I could not ignore it, I also did not wish to make a potentially dangerous public accusation of Jack. After thinking it over, I felt obligated to post on the thread:

Jack did not respond on the board, but the next day he contacted me via email me and in a contrite message admitted he had plagiarized. The consequences of this plagiarism on Jack are a subject for another article.

Shared Outrage

Particularly when engaged in writing across the curriculum-type work, I am disheartened by some faculty conversations about plagiarism. Some faculty paint the picture of a valueless “everystudent” who lies and cheats all the way through school, or, worse, a “prisoner vs. guards” environment in which groups of cheating students are in league against faculty. While technology certainly facilitates cut-and-paste plagiarism, these perceptions have also contributed greatly to the growing popularity of plagiarism detection software. This case, however unique as the particulars of it may be, demonstrates a stark contrast to these perceptions about our students’ mindsets and attitudes toward cheating. In 2005, Dean and History Professor Bryan Lebeau’s commencement speech at the University of Missouri at Kansas City contained unattributed portions of a speech by Princeton Professor of Religion Cornel West. The professor who uncovered this, via Google, Sally Greene of UNC-Chapel Hill, told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I was outraged. I can’t fathom an excuse for it” (Bartlett). Students too can share this sense of outrage about “fraud”-type plagiarism, and they do not need an honor code; they simply need a vehicle/medium to express themselves. The message board environment provides them with the opportunity to see a great deal of their peers’ writing as well as enabling them to have the relative anonymity to then act upon evidence of dishonesty. The environment builds a writing community, and the semi-anonymity of that community, following from a core idea of communitarianism, might allow participants to degrade the crime of plagiarism, not the person who commits it (Etzioni 141). Certainly, an online class differs from the experience in a face-to-face class, but the communicative dynamics of a message board used for a face-to-face class are also often radically different than the in-class conversations of that class (I remember two students in a composition class I once taught who sat next to each other in silence all term. Yet during a message board conversation, they engaged in a spirited argument that escalated into a bitter flame battle that I had to extinguish).

Because I wondered what motivated Pat and Barry, I interviewed them several months after the class concluded, asking the two via email several questions about the incident and their responses to it. First, I was curious why they initially suspected plagiarism and also what steps they took to verify their suspicions. Pat sounds almost like a seasoned writing professor:

Barry too based his suspicions on the poster’s previous writing history:

Both indicate a familiarity with the stylistic nuances of Jack’s writing. Pat says he grew familiar with “the common writing style” of his classmates. On the message boards, students had many opportunities to read peers’ writing, and it appears this exposure creates opportunities for them to learn a great deal not just about the content but also about the style of each other’s communications. Barry also mentioned how some of his teachers “have noted [they] can typically tell when a line is plagiarized, usually just by seeing content that seems unlike the student's usual work.” Teachers, evidently, are not the only ones who notice such things.

Pat’s method of discovery was simple: Google. He said, “A simple search on google or a metasearch engine will always tell you if it's been written before. It was as simple as could be.” While Barry was familiar with the lyrics site, he also said “I'm sure ‘googling’ for a few of the lines would have yielded the same result.” In Purdy’s evaluation of online plagiarism tools, he noted Google was as good in many cases as for-profit plagiarism checkers (283), and he ended up recommending the use of the search engine at his school to check plagiarism. These tools are at our students’ fingertips, and some (most?) of these students are more expert than their teachers in the use of them.

One student making the effort to uncover the plagiarism of a fellow student is one thing. Revealing that discovery is another. Both students’ sense of justice was piqued because they felt that the plagiarist had “fooled” one of their colleagues. Pat said, “I was a little upset. The comment [Shayna’s compliment] was really the reason I hunted out to see if it was his work.” Barry also said Shayna’s compliments heightened his feelings about the plagiarism:

The trickery of another student, the sloppy methods, the violation of the community’s mores—the careless deceit frustrated both of these students, and once they suspected fraud, they felt it necessary to identify it.

In an online classroom conversation, there is a subtler, but greater, cost of plagiarism, and Pat places it front-and-center in his comments about this case:

Pat makes a brilliant observation. The cost of plagiarism on class message boards, where student writing is not just a finite grade transaction between writer and evaluator but part of a dialogue, includes the loss of that dialogue. Plagiarists cannot build the conversation that often serves as the lifeblood of online classes because, simply, the initial ideas are not theirs. While educators often frame plagiarism as a crime affecting everyone, on the message board that is not just idealism: the community of that classroom is affected. Plagiarists do shortchange everyone on a message board by posting ideas they are unable to develop. In any conversational or action-oriented environment, the true uselessness of advancing ideas not one’s own is that that person cannot further them or act on them. [4]They are not original, so if someone pushes the plagiarist, that person will be hard pressed to elaborate or build. In addition, the exercise of writing in a technological environment about complex issues is as valuable in many ways as the content itself (in McLuhanesque fashion). In this light, note that Jack did not even respond to thank Shayna for her compliments; perhaps he had some sense of shame that prevented him from adding to his dishonesty, but such response comments build and then sustain the online class community.

To go one step further, while discovering plagiarism is one thing for a student and revealing it yet another, revealing it publicly is a considerable additional leap. I was also curious not only that these two students called the plagiarist, but the way in which they chose to do it: on the public space of the boards. Pat initiated this subtly: he used ellipses, for instance. He said he used these hints “to let Jack know in a discrete way that he was caught. There's a certain kind of justice unlike any other in this kind of situation.” Pat and Barry told me during through the interviews that they did discuss this situation, and Pat said he and Barry “actually were running through the best way (and the funniest way) we could call [Jack] out.” As to why he posted the URL, Barry said, “Honestly I'm not sure what made me identify the plagiarism on the Discussions.” He said that when he discussed it with Pat and they discovered that they both found it “blatant and somewhat offensive,” he felt that perhaps posting the URL was an appropriate form of justice: “Perhaps it seemed an appropriate result: a public confrontation for publicly posted plagiarized content.” Barry also observed that the nature of the message boards made this situation different:

Again, several times Barry referred back to both the sloppy nature of Jack’s post and the audacity of the public fraud, as if to say that it is one thing to plagiarize, but it is altogether another thing to take “5 minutes” and plagiarize in lazy fashion in front of the whole class. These two students, simply put, seem to feel cheated.

You may be, as I was and still am, struck by the sophistication of Pat and Barry’s ideas. They are both very bright, but they are also normal students in that they felt the consequences of Jack’s “calling out.” Pat wrote to me: “After I posted I felt horrible. Nobody likes a snitch. I felt even worse when you posted calling out [Jack's] act to the whole class and asking him how he felt.” I think many more students are like Pat and Barry than we realize, and by using asynchronous writing technologies to provide opportunities to curb plagiarism and as a means of responding to instances of it, we can tap into students’ natural conscientiousness to create a more constructive plagiarism environment.

What the Technology Might Enable

Plagiarism is discussed too often in education circles. Philosophically, I feel I have little in common with plagiarism hunters. However, it is important to stress that the case I describe was not one of those fuzzy-area cases, the kind of plagiarism Candace Spigelman found in a writer’s group in which the writers “maintained that both imitation and influence were intrinsic to the process of writing, the natural outgrowth of the development and circulation of ideas” (65). In short, this was not what Spigelman called a “difficult question”-type plagiarism (109); we are talking about the cheating Howard would call “fraud.”

Teachers have to make reasonable attempts not to be lackadaisical or foolish about plagiarism—Howard’s approach to plagiarism conceptually and practically is progressive, yet she still says: “I don’t like cheating. I’m mad when I discover that a paper has been ghostwritten. I don’t think teachers should look the other way” (“Sexuality...” 487). But we also should continue to think of ways to build our course environments to dissuade it. Referring back to the CORD approach described by Williams to check plagiarism, I think message boards create opportunities to allow students to be included directly in each aspect of the CORD approach:

• The culture of honesty includes a heightened understanding by students of the consequences of plagiarism on the course conversation; it really does affect them.
• Observation of students’ work takes place not just between instructor and students (in what too often perhaps rapidly devolves into an eerie Foucauldian-like surveillance scenario) but also among students themselves, who as part of the class community all take part tacitly in maintaining the authenticity of each other’s work during the normal course discussions.
• Review of intermediate drafts occurs subtly, as students see their colleagues’ work all term, learning not just the content but, as Pat and Barry pointed out, the style of each other’s writing. They also can see how individuals build ideas and wage arguments, with the understanding that a massive deviation from what they have grown to expect from each other (as again both Pat and Barry noted above) would set up the same red flag it does for instructors. This does not mean innovative students or those who take writing risks will be punished, but students, as well as instructors, have a broader baseline from which to begin to think about problems of authenticity. On a good message board, peer review is continuous.
• Ongoing discussion with the student becomes overtly peer-to-peer in the message board environment; again, as the students write they also converse, so everyone can see the development trajectory of a particular writer’s ideas.

Building from how asynchronous technologies can augment a plagiarism strategy like Williams’ CORD approach, I will conclude by describing five ways that asynchronous technologies help create a more constructive plagiarism environment while also helping instructors teach writing more effectively; these are not at all unique to the message board environment, but many of them are facilitated in that environment more readily:

• Many eyes
• Many opportunities for assessment
• Bolder participants
• Reading beyond content
• Justice: A means of shifting the outrage

Conclusion

Electronic asynchronous writing environments may be a natural way to discourage plagiarism through a constructive, shared classroom writing environment. By making a substantial amount of the writing in class public, they increase the responsibility each author has for original material and each reader has to maintain honesty in the course. The onus falls on the individuals to maintain the good of the community. We might also think broadly about how this case illustrates ways technology and teachers can work together to create such a positive environment. Williams emphasizes that in such partnerships the teacher’s observation and involvement are key: “rather than [computers] being a substitute for teacher involvement, they require a contribution from the teacher that is different and innovatory but equally demanding” (237). Innovation is important, but I do not think we need to be as technologically radical as we sometimes feel pressured to be. Easy-to-use technologies are available that can help us re-think our approach to plagiarism as well as our overall pedagogy. Purdy says technologies to detect plagiarism are not the solution: “Thoughtful pedagogy addressing plagiarism is” (286). And as Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe poignantly said, “Unless we remain aware of our electronic writing classes as sites of paradox and promise, transformed by a new writing technology, and unless we plan carefully for intended outcomes, we may unwittingly use computers to maintain rigid authority structures that contribute neither to good teaching nor to good learning” (64). Message boards, through their natural openness, can serve to discourage the potential plagiarist while doing the important thing: helping students be better writers in a constructive, supportive, practice-friendly community of writers.

Because the message board utilizes not just teacher-to-student communication but student-to-student communication as well, students in these classes can develop awareness of a responsibility to the “knowledge communities” that Hewett and Ehmann say are generated in this writing environment. This student awareness and sense of obligation can help educators create learning environments that constructively discourage plagiarism, and many aspects inherent in the electronic environment make it especially conducive to the practical application of these theoretical ideas about honesty and community. Plagiarism can make the teacher a suspicious autocrat who forgets the communitarian spirit that everyone is responsible for the authenticity of the writing work in a course. Again, message boards offer an approach in line with Etzioni’s thinking that “the best way to curb authoritarianism” is to introduce “carefully calibrated responses to urgent and legitimate public concerns...” (11). Students in this environment, he might argue, recognize duties “that lay moral claims on [them] from which [they] derive no immediate benefit or even long-term payoff” (10).

Many teachers and researchers point out that educators should not be so preoccupied with plagiarism that they sacrifice their pedagogical goals and philosophies, instead succumbing to the “game,” as Purdy calls it, of plagiarism detection (277). Howard says unless we teach to police students, “let's calm down and get back to the business of teaching” (“Forget about...”). A decade ago, Andrea Lundsford and Lisa Ede attacked the “obsession” over plagiarism and called for student writing to be better recognized in the spirit of collaboration and as part of a pool of common knowledge (436-7). [5] Instead of obsessing over the integrity of our students’ work, Purdy says:

Teachers may be unable to foil the dishonest plans of the true cheater, but when much of a class’s writing is public, when teachers use technologies that help students to share the responsibility—and Wikis and blogs can serve the same role as message boards—they can develop strategies to create courses in which the teacher and the students share accountability for the authenticity of the writing.

REFERENCES

Archives of [email protected]. (1993-2006). Writing Program Administration.<http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=WPA-L>.

Austin M.J., Brown L.D. (1999). Internet plagiarism: Developing strategies to curb student academic dishonesty. The Internet and Higher Education, 2 (1), 21-33.

Bartlett, T. (2005, June 24). Missouri Dean appears to have plagiarized a speech by Cornel West. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24, A13.

Brooks, C. (2005, July 19). Re: academic dishonesty. Message posted to DEOS-L Listserve. <http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/deos/deos-l/deosl.asp>.

Dibbell, J. (1998). My Tiny Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Elbow, P. (1981). Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford University Press.

Etzioni, A. (1993). The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society. New York: Touchstone.

Hansen, S. (2004, August 22). Dear plagiarists: You get what you pay for. The New York Times. Retrieved from <http://www.nytimes.com>.

Hawisher, G. (1992). Electronic meetings of the minds. In G. Hawisher and P. LeBlanc (Eds.), Re-Imagining Computers and Composition (pp. 81-101). NH: Boynton/Cook.

Hawisher, G. and C. Selfe. (1991). The rhetoric of technology and the electronic writing classroom. College Composition and Communication, 42 (1), 55-65.

Hewett, B. L. and C. Ehmann. (2004). Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Howard, R. M. (2001, November 16). Forget about policing plagiarism. Just teach. Chronicle of Higher Education. Accessed online 9 September 2005 via LexisNexis.

Howard, R. M. (1995). Plagiarisms, authorships, and the academic death penalty. College English, 57 (7), 788–806.

Howard, R. M. (2000). Sexuality, textuality: The cultural work of plagiarism. College English, 62 (4), 473–91.

Lafer, S. (1996). Audience, the computer, and the development of writing ability. Computers in the Schools, 12 (1-2), 141-52.

Lundsford, A. A. and L. Ede. (1994). Collaborative authorship and the teaching of writing. In M. Woodmansee and P. Jaszi (Eds.), The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 417-38.

Purdy, J. (2005). Calling off the hounds: Technology and the visibility of plagiarism. Pedagogy 5 (2), 275-296.

Royster, J. J. (2005, September 24). Defining the issues, finding the solutions. Originality, Imitation, Plagiarism: A Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Writing. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Spigelman, C. (2000). Across property lines: Textual ownership in writing groups. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.

Turkle, S. (1997). Life on the Screen. New York: Touchstone.

Weller, M. (2002). Assessment issues on a Web-based course. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 27 (2), 109-16.

Williams, S. (2001). How do I know if they're cheating? Teacher strategies in an information age. The Curriculum Journal, 12 (2), 225-239.

Notes

1. Howard also offers a variation of her categories in citing E.B. White’s three types of plagiarists: thieves, dopes, and “total recall guys” (“Sexuality...” 480).

2. Nearly all course management software (CMS) systems (e.g., Blackboard [which purchased WebCT early in 2005] Edutools, Moodle) provide some type of asynchronous communication tool, and any of these message board-type tools would be appropriate for the strategy I am discussing here.

3. In my face-to-face classes, my students also work a lot on these boards, and I think the implications for plagiarism can be similar, as I mention toward the end of the article.

4. In a keynote presentation at Originality, Imitation, Plagiarism: A Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Writing at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Writing Center, Jacqueline Jones Royster discussed a quote by President George W. Bush following the Hurricane Katrina disaster in which he said, in effect, that the disaster made apparent to us how many people live in poverty in the United States. She said that Bush stated that we all must do a number of things to address this, including make opportunities available to these people in need. Royster said that essentially Bush’s comments were in the language of affirmative action, not an issue Republicans traditionally support. Royster’s analysis of this fits in with my commentary because she argued that because the idea of affirmative action was not original for Bush, there was little hope that he could follow through with it. A similar dynamic occurs in the conversational environment of a message board, in which plagiarists will have trouble continuing a conversation because the ideas they are advancing are not their own. How, then can they be expected to develop them?

5. Howard also points out how there is a long history of the collaborative author (“Plagiarisms...” 794), and she urges that we stop obsessing over the idea that plagiarism is immoral (“Plagiarisms...” 796).

Scott Warnock, PhD, is an assistant professor of English at Drexel University, where he coordinates the English Department’s online first-year writing initiative. He is co-author of the writing handbook The Writing Tutor, and he has written several articles and presented at national conferences about issues in the field of computers and composition. Warnock has been a freelance writer for a decade and has published hundreds of journalistic articles for trade medical publications. He is also co-founder of Subjective Metrics, Inc., a company created to develop Waypoint, a writing assessment and peer review software.