According to the New York Times, the creation of tools for spotting plagiarism has become a growth industry. As someone who has to mark online assignments, I’m astonished at how easy it is to spot plagiarism — at least in the form of unacknowledged copying from web pages. (A Google search for a phrase is usually enough to locate the real origin of a suspiciously elegant phrase.) Some academics are very po-faced about online plagiarism, treating it as a heinous crime almost on a par with sleeping with one’s pupils. But the whole point of the Web is that we have easy access to other people’s ideas, and sometimes I’d prefer my students to locate and make good use of intelligent stuff than trying to make up their own (mediocre) summaries. The problem is not copying per se, but unacknowledged use of other people’s material — so what we should be teaching them is (a) the search and discriminatory skills which enable them to find and evaluate suitable material, and (b) the importance of always being scrupulous in acknowledging the provenance of what they find and use.

Ah! Now I get it. The buttons for my various ‘categories’ have just appeared. Finally, I have one source for my different logs. :-)

Just installed categories, in an attempt to rationalise the crazy variety of things I post. Not sure exactly how it works yet. :-(