Andrew Trounson | July 16, 2008
HIGH-PROFILE educationalist and long-time commentator of online learning Dale Spender has accused universities of being out of touch with their students in seeking to clamp down on "cut and paste" appropriation from the internet, arguing that what is dubbed plagiarism is just part of the way students learn.
And she took a stick to academics, noting that while universities were quick to clamp down on students for plagiarism, academics recycled their own research papers, effectively plagiarising themselves.
"What they are all calling plagiarism isn‘t plagiarism at all, it is in fact a new and fast and obviously digital way of synthesising information," Dr Spender told the HES.
Dr Spender was speaking ahead of participating in a public discussion on plagiarism next week at the University of South Australia.
"What kids are doing in downloading text is exactly what they are doing in downloading music," she said.
"They take bits and pieces, mixing and matching them and making something that is their own product."
Her remarks extend her thinking in her online publication, From Books to Blogs, where she wrote: "Today there is really no such thing as online reading. You are taking charge of the information that is there."
When software programs such as turnitin.com could quickly identify repeated or plagiarised phrases, Dr Spender argued that rather than focusing on the failure of students to properly cite downloaded text, assessors should be focusing on whether the student had answered the question and demonstrated their own understanding.
"I don‘t really care if there are bits and pieces in their initial information that is downloaded from different points. What I care about is: do they understand it and did they use that information to come up with a solution to solve a problem?" she said.
"At the moment kids download huge amounts of stuff online; some of them alter it quickly, some of them use it to come up with something new, some of them leave bits and pieces of it in their assignments, and then the university feeds it through a software program that says this person has a match with four other things, so it is plagiarism."
Dr Spender said that in trying to police such plagiarism, universities were wasting resources on something that "has no educative value whatsoever".
Tracey Bretag, chairwoman of the Asia-Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity and editor of the International Journal for Educational Integrity, said universities weren‘t about to give up on the need for citation and integrity. But she agreed that assessment practices were no longer in line with the realities of "digital literacies" and mass university education.
She noted that class sizes of 20-25 students, compared with tutorials in the past of just six, meant it was more difficult to engage with students and deal with plagiarism in an "educative" way.
And in an era when students are increasingly seen as customers, Dr Bretag said, it was incumbent on institutions to encourage learning and provide second chances to those who might otherwise fail simply because of some cut and pasting.
"I don‘t see that as a dropping of standards but as really taking the educative process seriously," she said.
"We still have this responsibility to maintain integrity, we still have a responsibility to ensure that our students are actually learning something, but in the process perhaps we do need to rethink our assessment practices. I don‘t think citation practices are going to go out the window."
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