Category: Libraries and Librarians

I really wish there were an easy way to keep track of which students I’d taught in classroom situations, and what I’d taught them. With a population of just under 2000, it’s entirely possible that I’ll start seeing some of them over and over now that I’m getting invited to meet with more classes.

Now, I very rarely teach the same library session twice simply because each session is (hopefully) tailored to the needs of a specific assignment or set of assignments, and even if the same assignment comes up in future years there’s usually a new resource or something that keeps me on my toes. But there are a couple of components of these sessions that I find myself teaching over and over again in different contexts: the MLA International Bibliography, for example, or getting your hands on the actual text of an article, or the disciplinary importance and conventions of citation. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had some way of knowing if most of the students in an upcoming class had already practiced with one or more of these components and would want me to approach them in new and interesting ways? Even if I still had to cover the MLA IB because they needed something new or because a few of the students hadn’t worked with it before, wouldn’t it be nice if I knew to change things up enough that it would keep the interest of the veterans while still feeding the newbies what they needed?

I keep notes about this kind of thing for my individual appointments, and it really helps when this year’s seniors come to me for help with their senior theses and I can look back over the sessions I’ve had with them in past years to figure out what they might be expected to know already, and where I can push them to grow a little more in their research prowess.

Alas, I just can’t think of a good way to keep on top of this for the classroom situations, though. I mean, I could create a database that allowed me to describe the components of a class and link that class to all it’s enrolled students. Filtering by class could help me see what I’d included for that course number over the years. Filtering by student would show me if I’d seen individuals more than once, and what they’d supposedly learned from me. But honestly, I don’t think I’d be able to keep up with it.

Has anyone else done anything like this? How?

I don’t hate plagiarism because it’s “stealing” or “cheating” or any of that. Sure it’s ethically incorrect, but everybody knows that. I don’t condone it, certainly, but that in itself isn’t enough to make me ponder in the early morning.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen plagiarism in action at the lowest levels of education, and at the highest levels of scholarship. I’ve seen it’s consequences, and I’ve the way it eats up the lives and risks the careers of those who think it’s important to expose a high-profile plagiarist. I’ve seen this stuff up close and personal, and it’s not pretty. Heartbreaking, terrifying, sad, disappointing… but not ponder-worthy, generally.

No, what makes me ponder is the way plagiarism has insinuated itself into undergraduate education in what I think are unhealthy (and sometimes flat out improper) ways. Sure, it’s important that undergraduates learn the ethics of scholarly communication. But it is not necessary to have plagiarism be the bully whip behind other problems of scholarly communication.

Take, for instance, citation. Students are told to cite their sources so that they don’t plagiarize. What does this do? Well, it doesn’t deter the plagiarists. No, instead it sends a steady stream of freaked out kids to my office right about finals time, each of whom is trying to figure out when to cite and when not to as much as they’re trying to figure out where the quotation marks and italics go in MLA style. It’s often not very clear when a particular statement needs a citation, and the poor students are terrified that they’ll miss-step and inadvertently plagiarize.

And really, however heretical it sounds, I don’t think that citation and plagiarism are inherently linked in the one-to-one relationship that most first-year writing courses seem to teach. Failure to cite a direct quote or a paraphrase constitutes plagiarism. But the act of citation itself should be much more a context-building act than an act of punishment avoidance. So when these students land on my doorstep, the only thing that seems to make sense (barring having us both read through the paper and discuss every sentence) is to explain that citation allows your readers to situate themselves in your context. You cite to give credit, but you also cite to allow your readers to find further information. So if you state a “fact” (one of those nebulous things that don’t need citing but that nobody can explain because lots of “facts” need citations, too) and you think your readers might benefit from more context, cite it. If it’s a “fact” that your friend’s roommate would already know and, more than that, already know or be able to accurately construct its historical, social, theoretical context… there’s no need to cite it.

Oh, and one thing that citation is not in any way related to is copyright. It does not make it OK to copy an image if you include the image URL or other citation information. Copyright is a legal process; citation is an ethical and communication process. Neither is related to the the other even a little bit. Including citation information is a good thing to do, but it does not eliminate or even reduce the need to weigh Fair Use or get permission. I mention this because this was the single most pervasive urban myth that we encountered when we started doing copyright training on campus.

So why do I hate plagiarism? Because I think those of us who work with undergraduates have adopted it as the boogie man of scholarly communication and then generalized it to domains where it doesn’t belong. In the process, it’s become unhelpful to students. Using punishment-avoidance rather than scholarly communication as the sole impetus for citation has actually made the process of deciding when to cite harder rather than easier. Even more importantly, it has shut them off from some of the joys and richness of using citations in their own research. As one of my colleagues likes to tell her students, “The literature in each field indexes itself” via it’s citations. But if students skip over reading these citations, perceiving them simply as legalistic mechanisms that the authors are using to cover their behinds, they miss out on uncovering new pieces of context surrounding their topics.