Houghton Mifflin has been sending out a message about webcasts for WriteSpace which seems to be a customized Blackboard with additional proprietary technologies built in, including MyDropBox plagiarism detection service, SafeAssignment.
One thing in favor of MyDropBox over Turnitin. According to their brochure, while they do store student papers, they do so by institution. Each school has their own database of student papers. I'm guessing this means that each school can only access the papers from their school (if so, this is good). And an institution can request that their database be emptied:
Authorized persons from client institutions can request partial or complete removal of their institutional databases from the MyDropBox servers at any time.
Okay. I'm a former student. I've graduated. Don't I have a right to have my papers removed, or does only the insitution have control of my writing in this regard? Something not quite right here.
BTW: Does anyone else just love the name, "Safe Assignment?"
Keeping Student Papers Beyond Graduation
Charlie,
Mydropbox.com doesn't maintain a national database. Given that an instructor can remove a student paper, or an institutional account administrator, the student, before graduation, might request that his or her work be removed. But the decision to remove it rests with the institution or instructor.
However, the fact is that many institutions --and writing programs-- are keeping and maintaining databases of student work. They make no claim to the intellectual content. However, they keep the papers electronically for program evaluation, to see trends over time in the writing of students, and other uses.
So there's a bit of grey entered into it since how institutions use the work will vary. I don't know, frankly, what laws allow this. I don't know if there's an agreement or an opt out for students who at places they maintain e-archives of student work. There may be.
By the way, for what it's worth, every publisher other than Thompson has an arrangement with Mydropbox.com. In addition to not having a national database, they also have an option where an instructor can designate an assignment as a draft. When students upload a paper as a draft, the paper is checked against the WWW and other papers in the institution's database, but the paper is not yet added to the database. As a draft, the student can submit, get a check, and use any findings of matching as an opportunity for revision (if the matches aren't in fact properly cited).
In theory, an instructor could simply designate every assignment as a draft and let students do the check, but then the paper would never be added to the institution database. I don't know if that's especially useful and practical, but seems like it might a work around.
Nick Carbone
sounds much better
Thanks, Nick. This is very insightful. It certainly seems like SafeAssignment is trying to put student IP rights in the right perspective. That's a big plus. And I would definitely recommend that anyone determined to purchase a PDS put SafeAssignment at the top of their list far above Turnitin based on what you've just said (even though I don't advocate using a PDS).
I can also see how giving students the right to remove their own papers would be a problem. How would one authenticate the student after they have left the institution? Perhaps an automatic removal after X number of years. I doubt that a student who had left college and was pursuing a career elsewhere would go to all the trouble to sell their papers.
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Charlie | cyberdash
<emma> asks permission
emma asks students for permission to study their work when they first sign in to the system. Students can opt out with no penalty whatsoever. But having that database of work is allowing us to research the relationship between portfolio-inspired revision and the improvement of writing, as well as the administrative benefits that Nick mentions. We've never used the database for plagiarism checking.
--Bob Cummings