bleckblog: musings of a community college english teacher

I arrived a few minutes late to the IP Caucus meeting and found it in full swing. Charlie Lowe (along with co-chair along with Karen Lunsford and John Logie ) was just finishing his pitch to draft and send a resolution forward to the Executive Committee on the promotion of open source software solutions. Both John and Karen encouraged those in attendance to submit briefs on a variety of IP issues for inclusion in Kairos I think it is. For the most part, this was preliminary to the real work of the caucus, but interesting nonetheless.

Most of what I'm about to write will probably be found at the IP Caucus site in a bit, but what the heck. The bulk of the meeting was spent in working groups, of which there were six. Jeff Gailin led a discussion of the impact of open source archives on higher ed. Jim Donelan led a discussion on negotiating faculty IP rights. Kelly Lowe led a discussion on fair use. Clancy Ratliff led a discussion on IP and blogs. Carol Peterson Haviland led a discussion on IP in the classroom, urging more interaction with students on notions of IP I was part of a discussion of IP and students' rights, specifically concerned with plagiarism detection services (PDS). Finally, Laurie Cubbison and Traci Pipkins discussed plagiarism in the real world, such as a recent instance of a man putting out piano music in his late-wife's name to "honor" her memory.

The discussion of IP and student rights was interesting, not in the least because Turnitin.com, what I think is the leader in PDS software, sent a representative. I would probably have been better to send a big shot. Instead, a sales rep was sent into the lion's den, unfairly I think. The remaining presenters had some affiliation with the University of Tampa, one a recent graduate now at Central Arkansas or some such place. What was nice is that each of the presenters had used turnitin, largely because UT instituted it campus wide and they were compelled to by their administration. Since the bulk of the presenters were doctoral students, it's not like they can tell the admin to bugger off. I have never used turnitin, or any PDS, and don't want to for many of the reasons but it was good to hear how it can be used, though it seems in that respect a solution in search of a problem.

The concerns expressed touched on the ethical and pedagogical. Among the ethical were that, with the software touted as a way to instill ethics, that all students were being viewed as unethical or ethically challenged and in need of compelling to be "ethical." Of course, when you submit to such a service, you don't have a choice about your ethics that I can see. It's something of a Hobson's, choice, the choice that is no choice. Plagiarism is a problem, but it's more a teaching problem than an ethical problem. The work of those students who plagiarize blatantly is so obvious it hurts. There is no need for software to catch the blatant cheaters. Policing students doesn't make them, or teach them, to be any more ethical than they would be otherwise. Not cheating because you might get caught doesn't make someone ethical. Another ethical concern is that turnitin keeps student work in their database and profits from that work because the larger the database of essays, the more useful their service.

The upside of turnitin is that it can be used as a teaching tool. Yes, it actually can. The way it's done is that students submit successive drafts and they can document the changes between drafts I, however, as do many of my colleagues, do the same thing with highlighting and/or track changes. If students merely highlight what they have changed in a draft, they can visualize just as well as they could with turnitin. They can also use MS Word's "track changes" feature and do the same thing. I'm guessing Open Office allows for the same sort of thing, so why pay for a PDS? Seems like a waste of money.

There is also the opportunity to problematize (sorry about the latinate) PDS services. But it's late at night so I'm going to let that goe. For those concerned with PDS and other IP concerns, the focus needs to be at four levels: national, institutional, departmental and individual. After that, it's all up to us!