Just came out today:
http://salaswildthoughts.blogspot.com/2008/01/intute-search-engine-for-teachers.html

How would you define plagiarism? If I change some words to something equivalent or synonymous (so that the professor wouldn’t find it online) and keeping the thought or ideas intact, would that be plagiarism? It still is!

My colleagues and I had a big debate with professors/scientists/researchers about plagiarism last year and we couldn’t resolve the issue. Plagiarism is also very complicated in itself.

okay, i don;t want to start a new forum here…

I agree with some of the others that there has to be a balance. Just using wikipedia is no good. At the same time, the internet offers a virtually unlimited amount of information–even to those with limited library access.

I used the internet for some of my research back when I was doing graduate studies. The trickiest part was citing it according to the format that my school required.

The book I’m about to publish would not have been possible without internet research. My book is not really an academic work (its a book about relationships), but I did my best to make sure my sources of info were good. I never would have found my stats without search engines.

OK, I’m rambling . . . time to go to bed.

the grade of research or term paper constitutes a small percentage of the final grade.

Not unless the student presents a complete plagiarized work, can you justify a failing grade.

Get real.

Use the same technology hehehe.

I agree with cat’s last line. A researcher has to agree or dispute on existing theories and findings then elaborate to a more in depth theories of his own. The problem of most students, undergrad and even grad students (in the Philippines), is that the related literature is copied from books or worse from Wiki. Most think that the review of related literature is just like a chapter of a book, that you can just copy a paragraph just the way it is written. Maybe even teachers think that same manner too.

But it mustn’t be like that. If a professor has to be strict on research studies done by undergrads (who don’t have enough background to properly conduct such a mentally-stressful task or write a research paper), then the students must be taught “proper research”. One way is to only accept peer reviewed articles in the related literature. No magazine/newspaper citing. No website address citing. No conference proceeding citing. But just pure peer reviewed papers. These papers can be found in scientific journals related to the field of study and in most cases are published semi-annually. If this option is taken, students will be forced to search for these papers, read and cite and use them for their own work.

I have done a lot of scientific research in Pinas and abroad and saw in my own two eyes how students built their papers from unreliable sources. Wiki is not really bad information-wise. But that’s it. It must not be copied nor cited in research papers.

But I do have a question - why ban Google? Finding the right stuff for your research can be done by simple Googling. Google scholar for instance is a good medium to broadly search for scholarly literature.

“From Google scholar, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.”

The technology we have today must not be seen as a difficult wall to climb for the development of future researchers. Teachers and students must learn to appreciate how the technology can help research scientists to reach their full potentials.

I give them a reading list to work from and expect them to cite a good number of them in any work they produce.”

is nothing extraordinary. That is a “must” in the syllabus preparation.

The syllabus is not merely a list of topics to be discussed during the semester; it also provides the suggested readings or the bibliography of books that the students can use to comply with the requirements.

Some professors merely copy the titles of the books that they include in their syllabi which make them worse than their students who do not know the importance of the books that are found in the bibliography. There are even lecturers who do not give syllabi to the students. If ever they do, they were merely outlines of the chapters of the textbooks that they use.

The thing is, these professors should have read whatever references are given, cite the chapters as well as the pages so that the students will do the same in the preparation of the paper which is better known as FOOTNOTING.

To merit the title the word professor, the academician should be several volumes of books ahead of the students and not just one chapter away.

The research design will also lessen the students’
copy and paste practices. If the research paper asks for the student opinion/observation/ conclusions based on the data gathered, the writer will be pressured to do better than merely copying. First thing I do when I get hold of the research paper is to read the review of related literature. This should contain whatever principles, theories or facts that the researcher found to have contributed to his own research. The researcher’s agreement or disagreement with these findings would give me the depth of how the research was conducted.

pero books parin!

Wikipedia and Google are not bad for kids. All sources of information have their pros and cons.

Even the best encyclopedias out there cannot claim 100% accuracy as all published academic books lag three (3) years in terms of updated information. This is precisely the reason for the existence of academic journals.

It’s a matter of how students and reseachers use the medium.

As with all research work done using online references… not everything you read is factual so don’t rely on a single source… you should do your homework by checking that the info posted have been verified or came from a legit and reliable source and try to cross reference it with other reputable sites.