Hello, fellow peers. My name is Jesi Baltezor and this is my first blog post for TED 4590 in University of Nebraska-Omaha’s 2016 Fall semester. I look forward to meeting all of my classmates and learning alongside you for the next several weeks.
Response to readings:
When I initially started reading Townley and Parsell’s article “Technology and academic virtue: Student plagiarism through the looking glass”, I did not take in to account the issue of spam and how much money that costs internet subscribers. 10 billion dollars a year is a big chunk of change and when looking back on the classrooms I’ve been in and the speeches made about internet safety and the consequences for plagiarism, spamming really never entered in to my consciousness.
Another point I really found interesting from this article that I hadn’t before taken in to consideration was the different areas where students can get borrowed material. We usually think of plagiarism these days as information found online because of the extremely fast growing technological age we are living in. However, course materials, lectures, and works presented in class in other means than the internet can be just as much of a source. The point that our students know that certain materials are borrowed by us can send the wrong message as to what borrowing and attribution is versus what constitutes as plagiarism. I never thought about it in terms like this, so this was extremely interesting for me to consider and reminded me that I need to be aware of the materials I am using and actively giving credit when credit is much due in front of my students to set an example.
Gilmore’s article “Write from Wrong’ also opened my eyes to the gap between how teachers view plagiarism versus how students have come to view it. 40 percent from a survey admitted that they did not see copying a few sentences from another work without attribution a “serious offense”, which makes me wonder how the “don’t plagiarize” speech commonly given at the beginning of a school year is being delivered and what is being inevitably lost in translation. I was aware before reading the article that cheating happens more often amongst athletes, as they have limited time to do homework and adequate research for a non-plagiarized paper because of the strain and hours spent on extracurricular activities. One factor I hadn’t really looked in to that this article presents is the praise and feedback given by teachers and the incentive to do well also can feed in to a student’s motive to cheat. This brought me to question how many students who are plagiarizing materials truly believe they are cheating or are doing it innocently and unaware because they are unclear about what it truly means to plagiarize. Can you truly be cheating if it is not an active, conscious decision? It can look the same either way to administration and claiming ignorance is not the answer, as in the technological world we live in, we also need to live in a world of accountability. This is a very odd mix, considering accountability can be almost lost, if not totally perpetually absent in the online world, as we can be anyone we want to/claim to be.
Using these articles to think further on plagiarism, considering I will be teaching Language Arts courses, definitely opened my eyes to some new ideas and points that I otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. I only hope that the more I learn in this class and about these topics, the more I’ll be able to educate my students so they can be successful in their OWN work and not reep the consequences of academic dishonesty because they weren’t aware of how serious the issue really is.
Jesi Baltezor UNO Blog 