Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

8.5.10 | As part of a series on cheating in education and the efforts to stop it, The New York Times recently looked at plagiarism on college campuses and how students in the digital age understand concepts of intellectual property, copyright and authorship.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University told The Times. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Trip Gabriel interviewed educators who study plagiarism along with writing tutors and administrators who say students today do not understand the seriousness of using words that are not their own. Some examples:

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Educators say that one of the reasons incidents like these occur is that students are not leaving high school prepared for the rigors of college writing. The students may know it is wrong to lift directly from the web without attribution, but they are often “unwilling to engage the writing process.”

The Times also reported that with the ease of copying, pasting and file sharing, digital technology is causing students to rethink traditional notions of text and authorship. Some educators say students are more interested in remixing and reusing then they are in having unique authorship of an original work.

This reimagining authorship has led to reimagining copyright as well. In fact, when it comes to copyright, says Jaime Wolf, an intellectual property attorney at Pelosi, Wolf, Effron & Spates in New York, “The law isn’t evolving, but practices are.”

With one exception: Creative Commons. With more than 250 million pieces of content under its licenses, CC provides a variety of legal and technical tools that help authors share their work without weakening or giving up their right to protect it. The group also assists individuals in accessing those same works without incurring legal consequences.

Under a Creative Commons license, authors can specify exactly how and when they will allow use of their work. The options serve their own interests and those of the student or artist who wants to share or remix the content.

“One thing that’s changed significantly is that you can’t interact with media without triggering copyright law,” Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito told Spotlight in an interview earlier this year. “Before, the average person – even if they wanted to – probably wasn’t running into it. Now, if you sit at your computer and go online, you are having some kind of interaction with it.”

To be savvy authors, readers and consumers - today’s students need help not only understanding how to choose credible information and attribute it correctly – but understanding their options for protecting, sharing and publishing their own work.

Plus: For a related look at how kids find and use information online see So-Called ‘Digital Natives’ Not Media Savvy, New Study Shows also published in The Times. The piece reports on a study by researchers at Northwestern University that found students often have difficulty determining the credibility of search results when assigned information-seeking tasks. The students most often said that they had chosen a website because - and only because - it was the first search result atop Google’s results page. [Spotlight covered this study here.]

Also, Andrew Flanagin and Miriam Metzger, both associate professors of communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have examined how younger students are negotiating online information.

In “Kids and Credibility: An Empirical Examination of Youth, Digital Media Use, and Information Credibility,” a report from MIT press, the authors find that kids are not blind to the shortcomings of the information they find online and are skeptical of the right kinds of things. Read an interview with the authors at Spotlight.