Online learning facilitates communication, interaction, and collaboration between students in an unprecedented way. Students are not constrained by time, geography or economics from linking up with other who share a common interest. Professors and other experts are now vastly more accessible to students by email and websites, and indeed, students may casually request information and opinion from experts and expect to receive an answer more or less instantly. The very existence of the internet encourages open sharing of ideas, words and objects.
One of the potential consequences to such openness is that students are learning to use what they find on the internet without sufficient thought or background reading. Because Googling a topic will instantly throw up thousands of hits, students can - and in my experience, sometimes do - use the first 5 or 6 hits as the authority on the topic, without reading deeply or widely enough on the subject matter. They are searching, but they're not investigating.
Furthermore, the potential to use material found on the internet without attribution is enormous. Students are accustomed to copying and pasting, to downloading, and to sharing material found on the internet - this begins in elementary school. The plethora of information on the internet provides unlimited possibilities for creating a pastiche paper on any topic imaginable. Obviously, the further along in their education a student gets, with an increasing demand for specialized knowledge and language, the more difficult this copy-and-paste approach will be. But are we teaching schoolchildren and university students how to use the technology to create knowledge and, at the same time, to understand where that knowledge came from, and to cite it properly?
The New York Times recently ran a series of articles on cheating and plagiarism in education which report widespread plagiarism in higher education. Organizations like plagiarism.org cite other research confirming that plagiarism is common and accepted among many students.
Cheating and plagiarism breach principles of academic honesty. Most institutions have policies about academic honesty, explicitly require students to learn about them, and have developed procedures for dealing with students who violate them. This Youtube video by Capilano University film students and Patrick Donahoe, Vice-President Student and Institutional Support, illustrates one strategy for informing students about plagiarism and cheating:
Institutions are now using plagiarism-detecting software such as Turnitin. Professors are becoming more canny in assignment and test design. At the same time, the potential for students to plagiarize and cheat using the internet continues to get bigger and bigger. It would appear that a silent arms race is underway.
The reasons for plagiarizing are cheating are numerous: poor time management, not enough time, laziness, poor writing and researching skills, and so on. The consequences of plagiarism and cheating are that students fail to learn, and more importantly, that they fail to develop the skills of investigation, analysis, evaluation and synthesis that underlie critical thinking and turn one into an educated person. The technology that now allows us to instantly connect, communicate and collaborate, also facilitates cursory and shallow thinking when the amassing of information is easier than thinking about the content. Learning has never been easy, but previous generations did at least have to read hard copy so that copying and pasting in a few key strokes were impossible. Furthermore, they had access to the same works as everyone else - typically whatever was in the library - making it harder to find more obscure sources to copy from. What took days to write a couple of generations ago can now be written in a couple of hours. Taking ownership of a piece of writing is not a prerequisite for writing a detailed and professional-looking paper.
What are some of the strategies that educators can use to encourage students in the acquisition of knowledge, critical thinking, and the ability to synthesize and create knowledge? How can we encourage investigative skills beyond those used to conduct internet searches? Technology has changed our capacity to create - how can we use it to foster academic honesty, creativity, and originality?
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