Stopping Plagiarism Takes More Than Software

This article caught my attention because at my institution we’ve never adopted software to detect plagiarism. I’m sure that detection software can have a deterrent affect for some students, but as the plagiarism researcher profiled in the article points out students are savvy when it comes to doing just enough to avoid detection. I confirmed this with my college-age son. They use a well-known plagiarism detection software product at his university. When asked if it works he replied that students determined to cheat can do so any number of ways, from changing what they’ve cut and pasted from internet sites just enough to get past the detection software to outright paying other students to write their research papers for them.

The simple advice offered in this article makes good sense, but it’s much easier to preach it than it is accomplish it. Sure, if parents and teachers made it clear from early on that plagiarism is unacceptable it might have an impact on young, impressionable students. By the time they get to college it’s probably too late to change bad habits. That where the researcher’s other observation, the one faculty at my institution are working at, is worth more attention. It’s the prevention versus detection debate. Developing more creative assignments that avoid repetition, that require the use of local or locally unique resources, that call for a series of drafts, and that have higher expectations for research methods and content can all make plagiarism more difficult. But, these methods require more front-end development and greater effort from faculty. It’s certainly easier to require the same term paper assignment year in and year out, and then let a piece of software catch those who weren’t clever enough to mask their plagiarism.

Academic librarians have certainly been doing their part to combat plagiarism on their campuses. Through workshops, creative digital learning materials, and efforts to promote sensible research, we are on the frontlines of helping faculty to help our students to avoid plagiarism. But if the researcher has correctly determined that plagiarism, like many problem behaviors, must be confronted early on by parents and teachers, then we may need to realize combatting plagiarism will be an ongoing challenge.

Google’s (Lack of) Privacy

Before I read this article, I didn’t fully realize the extent to which Google stores users search data and puts cookies on their computers so that searches can be tracked to individual people (how do they store all that data?), or that it scans the content of g-mail to create advertisements. The author claims there is a tension between Google’s mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and it’s motto, “don’t be evil.” Google might want to flesh out that motto a bit, perhaps by turning to how libraries have balanced these two conflicting priorities. Yet Google has another motto, “make money,” which is arguably a more direct source of the conflict.
What Google Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade, New York Times

All Things Googled

Tony Sanfilippo, of Penn State’s university press, talked with The Ethicist on All Things Considered about Google’s library program. The Ethicist thinks the opt-out idea is not nice at all, and likens it to a burglar requiring you to list the things you don’t want stolen – only a good analogy if you assume what Google is doing is stealing – but he does point out there are other ways of looking at it. (I’ll steal your television, but I’ll only watch snippits?)

Sanfilippo does a good job of naming his real problem with the program: Google and the libraries they work with will have digital copies of books that the presses themselves don’t have in digital format (since they were produced in a pre-digital era) and he fears one or the other could undermine the market for digital sales, and without sales UPs can’t publish new research. Personally, I don’t agree on the library side of the issue: I find it impossible to imagine the Unversity of Michigan would illegally distribute their digital copies and one library having one digital copy seems unlikely to undermine sales in a significant way. What Google might someday do … well, that’s harder to predict.

Including what they call the program: it’s suddenly been renamed Google Book Search.

Who Needs A College Campus

This seems to be the week for prognostication in higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education devotes quite a few pages to an exploration of what higher education could be like in 2015 – with positive and negative predictions for each topic covered. While that’s worth while reading I think another article that will get far less attention is also worth consideration. It’s titled “Who Needs a College Campus?”, authored by David Gelernter, and it appears in the current issue of Forbes magazine. I cannot provide a link because this article is available only to those who wish to register for Forbes online. I imagine that many of your libraries carry the print edition (Nov. 28) where it can be found on page 42.

Gelernter provides a vision of higher education in which an online free market rules. He predicts that scholars will create and market online courses available for individual purchase. Students could access courses from wherever they wish; there will be no need to affiliate with a single institution. Students will own the course and access the content as often as they wish. He sees the development of degree-granting institutions that will inspect a student’s credentials, administer tests, and determine if one is worthy of a B.A. or other degree. Of course, his escape clause is that there will always be top tier universities for those who can afford them. But for the rest of us he sees an electronic marketplace with affordable, convenient access to higher education. He doesn’t reflect on the fact that for many students higher education is a social and cultural rite of passage and learning experience as much as it is about earning a degree.

But if trends are pointing to an increasingly unaffordable higher education it suggests that an electronic marketplace – which technology certainly makes possible – is not completely out of the question. His model suggests you could also have a few, free-floating electronic academic libraries to serve the needs of those who pursue totally online education. While it doesn’t necessarily mean the demise of all physical libraries attached to traditional insititutions, who is to say that a significantly transformed online higher education marketplace couldn’t eliminate many of our institutions as well as our libraries. Will many of us end up working as toll-free support operators for some global online library? What do you see in your crystal ball?

Tension Between Personalization And Privacy

Most academic libraries would probably want to offer the sort of personalization features to their user communities that those users have come to expect with web retailers such as Amazon and Netflix. Consider “pushing” to a user news about some recent articles that are on the same topic as ones he or she retreived within the last few weeks. I imagine our users might like that sort of thing – or they might consider it an invasion of their privacy. It appears that concern won’t stop a few libraries from moving further into the realm of personalization.

Personalization versus privacy is the subject of an article in Sunday’s New York Times. It mentions projects at North Carolina State University and Notre Dame that will make it possible for the library to recommend new articles or other items based on previous uses of the collection. Other librarians from different segments of the profession, as well as a user or two, are asked about their concerns over data collection for the development of a personalized research system. Given the current Patriot Act environment in which we find ourselves there are some who observe that the less private data collected by libraries the better off we all are. But then again, should we let those concerns stand in the way of progress. Sounds like we’ll need to talk about this more with our users to find out if they are willing to sacrifice privacy for personalization.