Semioclast

iParadigms’ Turnitin software has been a point of contention for some time in both secondary and higher education, where it seems to be the most utilized. By utilized, I mean that the educational institutions themselves have shelled out big bucks to iParadigms for access to their database of sources against which they check student submitted papers. Unless specific institutions mandate its use, it is up to the individual instructor (at least that is the case here at Pitt).

At the beginning of the spring semester I was provided with a Turnitin account and started to play around with it because it seemed to me, at least initially, to be a fairly good idea. This quickly faded, however, the more that I learned about how it worked and the more I thought about using it in conjunction with current course management systems. (I’m using Blackboard again this semester and, while it’s useful in some respects, it’s just overkill in a lot of ways. I think a mixture of wikis and blogs might be more appropriate for my particular teaching style, but that’s another post altogether.)

My initial hesitations revolved around the way I thought using Turnitin would change the dynamic in my classroom from one (hopefully) of open and collaborative exchange to one that is predicated on suspicion and distrust. The whole idea of forcing my students through some kind of gate keeping procedure still gives me the willies. Also, to some extent, it invites what I feel are dangerous comparisons, such as those responding to a recent Chronicle of Higher Education blog post, that invoke images to metal detectors and other “pre-screening” devices that help maintain a post-9/11 culture of pervasive fear and distrust. Of course, these are the very connections that iParadigms wouldn’t (and doesn’t) exactly discourage teachers and administrators from making, because they tap into the tendency towards technology as a “necessary” prophylactic against a perceived evil.

I also see it as an attempt to exploit overworked and under-trained (or under-interested) instructors, many of whom either cannot or will not change their teaching practices to account for the most common types of plagiarism today.

“In the absence of clear direction from faculty, most students have concluded that ‘cut & paste’ plagiarism - using a sentence or two (or more) from different sources on the Internet and weaving this information together into a paper without appropriate citation - is not a serious issue. While 10% of students admitted to engaging in such behavior in 1999, almost 40% admit to doing so in the Assessment Project surveys. A majority of students (77%) believe such cheating is not a very serious issue.” (Don McCabe, http://www.academicintegrity.org/cai_research.asp)

Last year the Intellectual Property Caucus of the Conference of College Composition and Communication drafted a statement (PDF!) which they have now finalized. (They also have a nice bibliography of resources on plagiarism detection services that goes back several years.) From the introduction:

Concerns about plagiarism in educational settings have given rise to the increased use of plagiarism detection services (PDSs). Such services generally use software to search digital databases for correlations or matches between student texts and already written materials. In addition to web sources, databases often include previously submitted student texts.

While it is true that effective teaching requires instructors to know when students turn in work that is not their own, the use of PDSs raises important ethical and pedagogical concerns.

The Intellectual Property Caucus of the Conference on College and
Composition therefore resolves:

1. To identify compromises to academic integrity—and effective teaching— that arise when PDSs are used as a component of postsecondary instruction as a whole, and in writing classes in particular; and

2. to recommend that compositionists lead their institutions in formulating university policies concerning such services.

Problems, both ethical and practical, made me sour on the whole idea of Turnitin and this $900,000 intellectual property case filed by four high school students further confirms concerns about who owns (and controls) students IP:

The legal dispute comes amid a debate over the best way to ensure students are doing their own work at a time when the Internet can make it easy to cheat. Many educators, including Fairfax County school officials, say Turnitin is an effective way to police for plagiarism.

Attorneys for the company and various universities and public school systems, including Fairfax , have concluded that the service doesn’t violate student rights. Turnitin is used by 6,000 institutions in 90 countries, including Harvard and Georgetown universities, company officials have said. Some public schools in Arlington, Prince George’s and Loudoun counties use the service.

According to the lawsuit, each of the students obtained a copyright registration for papers they submitted to Turnitin. The lawsuit filed against Turnitin’s parent company, iParadigms LLC, seeks $150,000 for each of six papers written by the students.

I wondered about that exact point. It’s interesting that along with their own search algorithms designed to troll the web for potential sources of plagiarized material, iParadigms was essentially selling access to the contents of student’s (legitimately) written work. I would much prefer if students were educated about, and could opt out of, certain aspects of text archival and handling. I think this misses out on a powerful chance to show the effects of IP and licensing issues.

CCCC’s statement attempts to address IP issues as well as ethical ones:

1. Because some PDSs routinely incorporate student work into their databases, the use of PDSs can undermine students’ authority over the uses of their own writing. Even when students sign release forms, they do so within an unbalanced power differential which can be experienced as coercive. At a minimum, before prospective students are accepted at an institution that uses such services, they should be informed of submission requirements and the nature of the PDS’s use of their work.

Now, I know this is old news from an IP law perspective and it doesn’t really sound much different then what Google went through years ago with assaults on the legality of their search and cache practices. Then again, I’m not an IP lawyer.

What I also find interesting is that other subscription databases, such as UMI ProQuest’s Digital Dissertations, do something very similar but for different purposes. Their both still subscription services that bill for access to other people’s work. This is compounded by the compulsory nature of submission. In most programs, university policy precludes opting out of such archives and requires the candidate to submit a copy to the library for archival purposes. This raises other questions for me: what do libraries get for providing access to, in the case of Digital Dissertations, Ph.D. graduates’ work? Is this effected by where funding for completing the dissertation comes from? And, what if I want to license my dissertation under a particular license? Isn’t that my right as author?

As production and archives move more exclusively onto the web, and there is an increasingly vocal movement (via) to consider work published online as part of the credentialing process, I think these questions become more and more pressing for academics.

As this semester declines towards a close I am starting to think a lot about upcoming projects and about writing in general. I’ll be writing a draft of my project proposal over the summer, so my thoughts have tended to gravitate in that direction. On that note, I present to you, our reader(s), the first-ever post at the new Semioclast.net:

Game scholar Jane McGonigal of 42entertainment and I Love Bees fame (among other neat things) has been posting chapters of her epic, 573 page dissertation titled “This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” over at AvantGame. She’s been releasing it chapter-by-chapter on her site and it is shaping up to be quite a thorough and engaging piece of scholarship that works on some key questions about what it means to experiment with play these days. As always, McGonigal’s work is innovative and exciting.

The dissertation itself is only part of the story as I just learned today. Throughout the process of writing the dissertation, McGonigal blogged what she called her “Best Sentence of the Day”. Some, like best sentence #87 (”There is nothing inherently fantastic about receiving a fax.”) are short and sweet, while others are more involved and take the “best sentence” designator fairly loosely. Others still, like this conversation with Ian Bogost, give us a look inside the process behind the document. The whole thing has a rather informal feel to it, which is a nice change from the seriousness with which we normally treat projects of this size and importance.

I think it’s nice to focus on this level of the writing process as it feels more compartmentalized and manageable than the chapter or section sized chunks that we are used to hearing about people suffering through. The idea of having a daily best sentence must help with the feeling of accomplishment that makes the grind of daily authorship more manageable.

I have to say that I am intrigued as we don’t often get a chance to look at what goes into writing one of these things if we’re not on the author’s committee (and if you are, then you’ve experienced this meat-grinder of a process for yourself). The whole endeavor is very Web 2.0 and seems to invite annotation and commentary. I look forward to seeing more sites like this (perhaps my own) in the future.

Having recently defended his own dissertation, I ‘m interested in what Dr. Robertson has to say about this.

Edited to add: I see one more way of thinking about this. There is a storytelling element here. The blog itself seems to unfold the process through a narrative that includes not only selections from the dissertation, but through the personal experiences and thoughts that circulate around its production.