on rethinking plagiarism

This morning, I've been thinking about the role of new media in my composition classroom. I got stuck, for some reason, on the issue of plagiarism.

Copying or using other people's thoughts, words, ideas, etc. has changed so much in the past decade, or so. And while us old schoolers might have been panic-stricken enough to contemplate writing out, word for word, that article we found in a dusty volume of Funk and Wagnals, we cannot assume that our students are any more inclined to do so simply because they have the cut and paste option at the click of their fingertips. It might be easier technologically to cheat, but the argument doesn't follow that it is any easier morally to do so.

The whole scenario is just much more complicated in this "information age." Encountering words printed on paper in real books lined up on shelves in libraries with rules and order that make us feel a bit like foreigners treading on sacred ground is different than all of these words on screens. The whole sanctity of the book has been dropped into the bin. And while we might argue that there's no reason to be precious about our printed texts -- that we should not regard them as holier than our electronic versions, we do have to learn how to read and navigate our electronic texts. We need to understand what is out there and how we can tell the difference between our sources. And also the differences between the texts we produce.

As students, thinkers, and writers, we need to be conscious of both what we're putting out and what we're taking in. And perhaps this moment is where I need to start spending more time with my students.

Plagiarism has never made that much sense to any of the classes I've taught. Not in 1999. And not in 2010. They know that cheating is bad. Some of them will inevitably try to pass off another person's work as their own. Some of them will re-use text from another source in an inadvertent way. But, I wonder if there isn't some other way to make the concept more a part of the world they are already living in. To use the right language. To talk, instead of plagiarism, about copyright, public domain, open source, and creative commons. These concepts, words, terms, are part of their worlds as the born-digital generation.

As a digital archivist, I balk at the idea of privileging the physical artifact over the digital object. Why then am I grasping at these highly traditional artifacts of academia, when more obvious and appropriate language and conventions exist?