Charlie, I'm glad you posted this. I too just started teaching on a new campus, and I was a bit surprised to learn that not only was turnitin.com being used here, but a lot of the teachers I otherwised admired were standing up in meetings to praise it. Ack! I was reminded that when I first heard of turnitin, I didn't have any objections either -- I hadn't really thought it through from the student's perspective.

A few years later I'm completely befuddled by the contradiction in logic it presents. I'm reminded of the bumpersticker which reads "Why are we killing people to show them that killing people is wrong?" I'd like a plagiarism version which would read "Why are we violating authorial integrity to teach students that violating authorial integrity is wrong?" If one actually has to surrender property rights to the database to "check" their work, then aren't the students being forced to plagiarize, since they no longer own the rights to the work they turn in to you?

Yesterday I walked in to the campus bookstore (owned by Follett, of course). The textbooks were completely cordoned off. A staffer had a desk nearby, and I asked why I could not reach the books. She told me that she would go to the shelves for me, and hand me the books. This was a new theft prevention measure. It was for my own benefit -- to keep prices down. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. In a way, Follett's insulting policy is just an extension of what is going on the turnitin classrooms -- students are assumed thieves upon entering the room.

I'm 100% with you. Our aim with this document is just to get people talking about it. We don't expect the university to cancel the service (it's not going to happen; too many people love it, as you point out), but we have hopes to change people's attitudes over time so that it falls into disuse (at which time the university would cancel it).

While I'm definitely against Turnitin's use of student IP, the real shame is that students get to be labeled a plagiarist with the teacher having to take zero responsibilty on teaching how to cite and paraphrase effectively. I often wonder how those teachers would feel if their institution required *all* faculty to submit all of their course materials to a third party vendor who would determine if people were bad teachers (not even good teachers). I'm sure most of them would screaming to the heavens in every media possible even though there are some work for hire considerations; students don't work for us. As far as I'm concerned, we have no right to ask them to give their IP to Turnitin.

Arggghhhh! I have to stop. I've been going off on this for days. It was extremely difficult to restrain myself when composing that document and not just start blasting away in the strongest language possible. In the immortal words of Daffy Duck, Turnitin, "you are despicable."

(Note: I think Matt's tongue and cheek, satirical posts here on Kairosnews as of late are having an effect on the voice of my writing here. LOL)

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Charlie | cyberdash

I'm with the both of you on this. Once we treat each student as if they are a plagiarist, or we're just too lazy as a group to develop assignments that don't foster plagiarism, then it's time to get out of teaching all together. Sure, students cheat. I failed a student last spring for a blatantly plagiarized essay, word for word copied from a blog, and I sure as hell made it clear that is the sort of thing that will get a student failed, but he went and did it anyway. He missed so much class, it's not likely I could have done anything with him as he got desparate near the end of the term.

Because I knew his writing and voice to some degree, his plagiarism jumped off the page and slapped me in the face it was so obvious. No turnitin needed for that sort of thing. Poor citation? That's what we're teaching in fyc (not poor citation, but citation) so students can't be expected to do a great job. They have to make mistakes to learn. I loathe the notion that we treat all students as cheats out of our own, collective sloth, present company excluded of course. :-)

bradley || bleckblog.org

It seems like to me this is bad policy not only for all the reasons mentioned above, but also because plagirism at the University level is a symptom not a problem.  I have taught at both small and large institutions, class sizes of less than 14 to over 40.  And I would say that in the small classes plagirism was never a real issue (maybe once or twice-but not a high percentage), but at the large institution the issue seemed greater. Why? Because with 40 students in each of two-three classes a prof. cannot give careful attention to each paper/student.  In a small class I know the students writing styles, see them progress, take time in class to write, etc. (they had to write 5 papers for this class) If a student plagirized I would have a sense of this, where in a large institution where students work for the class is limited to one or two papers a prof. does not have the time or ability to look at students work.  And students know this, they realize the logic of the institution here.  I would argue that the more students feel that prof. will take time to analyze and work on their papers the less likely they are to plagirize.  Thus increased plagirism is a direct result of increased class size and teaching load for faculty.  And so what is the Universities solution? To hire a company to fix the problem of corporatiziation of the University.  Secondaly, not that I am arguing for plagirism here, but there has always been a market in paying people to produce ones academic work.  However in the past this was rather expensive, paying someone to write a paper for you. So plagirism was limited to those who could afford it, it seems to me that what the proliferation of text in the age of the digital has caused is a democritization of this, made it easy for people to not do the work.  I think there is a certain socio-economic bias in the analysis that we should stop those people who are sliding by for cheap.  Finally, I find it more than a bit ironic, that this company works with WebCT and Blackboard, who argue that one should use Course Managment software to protect student's privacy (alah FERPA) when turnitin.com fundamentally violates student's rights.

Let's not forget that turnitin.com can be used as a preventative rather than as a "gotcha" program as well. There's a way to set it up so that students get to see the report it generates and decide after that whether they still want to submit it or not. To my mind, that's a much better use and ought to be the default. If nothing else, you can use it as a springboard to talk about copyright issues. If a student says, "Well, this is absurd," then you can say "EXACTLY" and hand them a copy of Free Culture. Preferably gift wrapped.

Check out Barton's gaming blog at Armchair Arcade.

At our institution, we have had numerous conversations about the SafeAssignment feature of Blackboard that are akin to this thread about turnitin.com. Actually, our composition program was approached several years ago about a contract with turnitin.com, and our faculty's conversation mirrored the post and comments here in terms of the unsavory aspects: assuming all students guilty, giving up intellectual property rights, etc. When Blackboard began offering a similar service, we worked with the Blackboard maestro on campus to be sure that faculty across the university would be educated in the proper use of this tool: as Matt says, it can be a good way to educate students about citation. For reasons I don't fully understand, many students, even after you explain citation to them, don't get it. So our Writing Center now offers a service whereby students come to the WC, submit papers to SafeAssignment, and then go over the results with a tutor.

So, I'll go against the grain for a second. My experience with Turnitin comes at the very end of the master's program. Students at this point in time have gone through a complete undergraduate and graduate experience. They have had many classes that have required and taught writing skills. In my field, the vast majority of these students are teachers themselves, so they're teaching their students about plagiarism and fully understand what it is. They're also working on master's in technology in education, so the curriculum requires a component about plagiarism and how technology can enable new and innovative forms of plagiarism. There's no way they can not know when they commit plagiarism. <p> While I want to be trusting of my students, I also realize that I have very little instruction time with these students. The instructional time for writing came in the previous 30+ hours of master's work. I give them feedback when they submit chapter and the feedback is very constructive, etc. But, I don't know all of the students I get in a thesis group (12+ students) because I teach many undergraduate sections to avoid teaching nights. So, I haven't had a chance to build much of a rapport and built trust and stuff like that. Anyway, I started using turnitin this past summer and told my students this in our first meeting. The very first person was caught copying 50% of his chapter and it was turned in early. I asked him to come in and meet with me. He decided to drop the course and not finish his master's degree. Fine, that wasn't my recommendation. I let me other students know that someone had been caught with the service and I provided them with a sample screen shot showing how the service could even detect parts of a sentence. 2 other students had very minor issues that were detected and I merely called them and we talked about what the service how found and I explained how they could have handled that kind of writing differently. I wasn't accusatory and approached the conversation as though turnitin is certainly not perfect and what it had found was very minor. If anyone had objected to what turnitin revealed, then I would have been more than happy to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I was already giving them that, so there was no need to object. And, after that first chapter I stopped using the service because I felt it was kind of evil; it didn't feel right with me. I think the thing that hit me was that turnitin was going to be keeping the chapters to compare with other writing in the future. That was the thing that put my practice to a halt. But, my students assumed I was still using it, I think (I was submitting their papers after they were submitted to me). Anyway, I have taught thesis students previously many times, but this past summer was the worst quality I had ever seen and it wasn't even close. Did turnitin make their writing bad? <p> And, as bad as the writing was, I felt good knowing that they were doing their own writing. I ended up working much harder over the summer than any other summer of thesis students, but I felt better about the help I was giving. Turnitin is not a instructional tool, but I think the service helped me see my students writing more accurately than not and therefore my feedback was more constructive than usual and I saw the kind of improvement that made me feel proud. Now I just wonder about previous summers. Hmmm.

EDIT: my paragraphs didn't work. hmph!

Hmmm....looking at the code of what you submitted, I'm wondering if you used the WYSIWYG (I saw some div's and br tags in your original code submission--drupal stripped it)? I never use it (have it disabled). It seems to misbehave.

Plus, Drupal is set here to automatically format new paragraphs with blank lines in between with p tags and I can mix in HTML. So I never use the WYSIWYG.

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Charlie | cyberdash

I can see that as long as it doesn't store student papers in the Turnitin database. I still don't like it because of the overall premise of Turnitin and how it is being marketed and then used by most people. But it is somewhat less objectionable in the use case you describe.

However, I suspect that most people who would use it as a teaching tool in this manner would also be the kind of people who would teach effective citation, paraphrasing, and notetaking at the same time. So they aren't depending on it. That's not the way that most people view it. They want it as a subsitute for teaching, not an enhancement.

If a student says, "Well, this is absurd," then you can say "EXACTLY" and hand them a copy of Free Culture. Preferably gift wrapped.

Yeah, and before giving them the copy of Free Culture, we can also teach them how to protect themselves and do it legally. LOL

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Charlie | cyberdash

I didn't add any code to my original submission since i saw below the text box the following: "Lines and paragraphs break automatically." When I previewed, I saw that this wasn't happening, so I tried html paragraph breaks (or, maybe it was after I submitted and hit edit)? 
I have noticed some issues on my own Drupal site with TinyMCE and Safari (that's what I am using), so perhaps that's it.  I used nothing in this submission and have 2 paragraphs, so we'll see what happens.
<img src="http://homepage.mac.com/jayhawk/.Pictures/drupal_wysiwyg.jpg">

also, i tried using the add image feature and it failed, so i just used html above to add it; though, even though <img> is an allowed tag, it's not allowed for me. ;~)
Sorry to hijack this topic. I'll stop now.

I just sent you the text stored in Drupal. I edited your first comment and copied the text. Weirdness.

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Charlie | cyberdash

Yeah. The TinyMCE seems to be acting up. Here's your image. I have TinyMCE disabled via my user account, so I've entered the image in manually.

The WYSIWYG's Drupal uses are all a pain...I've given up on them.

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Charlie | cyberdash

I'm curious where you got the information that most people "want it as a substitute for teaching, not an enhancement." Can you provide a source?

I wish I had a source; this is just my general opinion based on experience in how people in other disciplines (1) complain that students don't have the good writing skills--such as citation and paraphrasing--that they should have gotten in FYC (and it's not their job to teach it) and (2) often assign papers in which there is no draft reviewed by the teacher prior to submission. I've even heard these opinions and seen these practices in English departments (from non-writing faculty). Other teachers resuse the same paper assignments for years in all of their classes, which is an obvious no-no if you are concerned about plagiarism; most wrting teachers and others interested in pedagogy tend to change their assignments over the years as they refine their pedagogical skills. Moreover, the excitement I hear surrounding Turnitin matches up with their marketing message-- Turnitin is a plagiarism detection service where students submit their final drafts for grading. It's the magic tool for catching plagiarists, not teaching.

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Charlie | cyberdash

Well, I expect that most people who use turnitin.com are those folks who end up with a paper that's way, way better than what they were expecting from ol' Johnny (of Why Johnny Can't Read, or Download a Paper from a Paper Mill for that Matter, fame). For the love of all things hunchbacked, it's infuriating to think some juvenile delinquent is trying to pull one over on his betters. AS IF we're supposed to be so stupid to not realize his paper was downloaded from myprofessorisgullibleanddefinitelynothotpeppermaterial.com. Sure, you can google (oops, excuse me: MSN SEARCH) particularly literate sentences from the paper, but it's much more efficient to use turnitin.com. Ah, the glee when that report comes in and provides you all the evidence you need to stick it to 'em and feel damn good doing it. It's like your own personal Kojak. "Who loves ya, baby?" (Kojak, 1973). I'll tell you who: Turnitin.com and the RIAA.

Check out Barton's gaming blog at Armchair Arcade.

Absolutely eye-opening article

Now, seriously, DantheMan, if you just came across this article, how did you happen to just come across posting to Kairosnews twice, having never posted here before, and then also on cyberdash.com (where you have been deleted).

LOL

And nice gender change. Strangely, your email address begins "amy_amy..."

SPAM...DantheMan is SPAM

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Charlie | cyberdash

... because he has a degree in rhetoric.

I don't recommend that you actually read the article posted by DantheMan, unless you're looking for a break from grading papers, but if you did, you'd see this amusing section:

For those who are unaware, John Barrie earned a degree in Rhetoric. Among other things, Dictionary.com defines rhetoric as:

• the undue use of exaggeration or display;
• language that is elaborate, pretentious, insincere, or intellectually vacuous;
• confused and empty talk. (Dictionary.com)

Maybe I'd better reconsider my goal of getting a PhD in the subject.

Tom

The article is well referenced and very convincing. Anyone who reads it will concur.

No. Everyone who reads it will not concur. Tom's observation is right. It's also a big leap to make that just because someone doesn't like a text because of the way that is is written that they would agree with the opposing view. That doesn't follow. I can't really speak for Tom, but it doesn't seem obvious at all that he is not concerned about students' rights.

It's also ironic that you would describe Tom's post as misleading people and then criticize him for where he is pointing out how the other text is doing the misleading (something the text does more than once, by the way). None of those are the primary definition of rhetoric and do not accurately describe what a degree in rhetoric is about. Whether the author of the text is intentionally misleading the reader or doesn't understand what rhetoric primarily is, I couldn't say, but it is inaccurate to describe rhetoric in that way.

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Charlie | cyberdash

However, the article, except for the bit about rhetoric, seems to take TII to task, maybe going so far as to trash TII. Not sure how legit any of it is, or how distorted it might be, but I just couldn't bring myself to read the whole thing. I'd rather read student essays.

bradley || bleckblog.org

Teaching247, you may be legit or you may not be. It's hard to say at this point since you've been a Kairosnews member just over a day. Most of the regular posters here are Rhetoric and/or Composition specialists, either with a Ph.D. in it, on the way to that Ph.D., or college/secondary/other classroom teachers with a strong interest in the teaching of writing, especially as it connects with technology or technology-enriched settings.

If you want to be taken seriously here, it would be a good idea to do some back-reading to see the scope of the conversation. Spam and flaming are not appreciated, not only for the obvious reasons, but because of the underlying logical fallacies involved. It's just plain insulting to try to flame a rhetorician. Dictionary.com, forsooth.

Occasionally one of my freshman students will try to define a term based on a dictionary definition, and I have to tell them that in academic writing, they need to go deeper than a one line definition. When I took Theory of Rhetoric as a graduate student, a continuing point of inquiry was framing a definition of rhetoric. One semester was not adequate time for the task, and a dictionary, with its purpose of giving correct word spelling combined with various common usage definitions that often contradict each other taken, as they are, out of context, is not adequate for term definition in an academic forum, of which this is one.

I'm not sure I'd grant any of my students that much leeway in using something well beyond a tertiary definition of a word, even though it was prefaced with an "among others things" phrase of some sort. One of the three elements of propaganda is the use of loaded terms, and in this instance, even though I tend to agree with the original denigration of TII, the way rhetoric is used is as a loaded term, one meant to carry more baggage than it actually could or should be carrying. That's why the particular passage about rhetoric can be deemed misleading, and rightfully so. There's nothing unfair about exposing fundamentally dishonest rhetorical strategies.

bradley || bleckblog.org

I respect everyone's opinion, but I do not like unfair attacks.

Neither do I. But make sure you eat your own dog food in this regard. Refer again to your original post about Tom, something I have already pointed out:

I presume you're a teacher, as am I, but you obviously see nothing wrong with stripping students of their rights.

That statement is ungrounded. Besides, in relation to what Lanette has stated, this is a weblog for discussing rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy. I don't believe that those definitions represent what people here feel rhetoric is about. Tom's point is going to stand with most people here.

As for the text in question, Brad's comment about the text trashing Turnitin is correct; there is a strong tone reminiscent of the use of rhetoric mentioned in the definitions quoted within the article itself. There is obvious sensationalism and general claims which are unsupported or full of holes. For example,

• In addition to unfairly violating students' intellectual property rights and costing schools a fortune, Turnitin has become extremely ineffective. The small percentage of students who cheat tend to do so in very intelligent ways. They know about Turnitin, and it doesn't "scare" or dissuade them any longer.
  This statement is unsupported. It's doubtful there is anyway to prove that, yet the text lays out as evidence of fact. I find that students who cheat don't do so in very intelligent ways at all, as I'm sure other writing teachers would agree. It's typically very blatant and easy to spot, to the point of having no thought put into it at all.
• The scenarios regarding destroying martketability are wildy speculative.
• Fortunately, an increasing number of universities have banned professors' use of Turnitin.com because it creates an atmosphere of distrust and presumption of guilt.
  Follow that link. Kansas didn't ban the use of Turnitin for this reason. The main reason was cost and they have resubscribed now that they have gotten a deal.

Perhaps someone else would like to spend additional time on critiquing this text written by an anonymous person that uses the first person "We" on a site which has a disclaimer suggesting that it is not written by the site authors, on a site which has a questionable focus, especially for people here on Kairosnews. Not much credibility there for me no matter how you look at it.

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Charlie | cyberdash

Well, you are not reading carefully. Reread this quote,

In addition to unfairly violating students' intellectual property rights and costing schools a fortune, Turnitin has become extremely ineffective. The small percentage of students who cheat tend to do so in very intelligent ways. They know about Turnitin, and it doesn't "scare" or dissuade them any longer.

I do not disagree that Turnitin is ineffective. This is something quite different from what is said. It says that "Turnitin has become ineffective" and implies that it is because students are becoming very good at working around Turnitin. Who knows this to be true? I don't think anyone has proven this, and your response to me has gone off on a generality rather than addressing the particular problem with this statement.

And look again at the other quote,

Fortunately, an increasing number of universities have banned professors' use of Turnitin.com because it creates an atmosphere of distrust and presumption of guilt.

First of all, pay attention to word choice here. Kansas did not "ban" Turnitin use; they simply chose not to subscribe any more. That's not the same thing. Obviously not because now they are using it again.

Also, the news article linked to states that Kansas was discontinuing use because of copyright concerns and the cost, not, as the statement says, because "it creates an atmosphere of distrust and presumption of guilt." It doesn't provide evidence of that, doesn't support that statement at all. In fact, that news report is full of faculty testimonials about how they like it. The use here is clearly inaccurate and even more obvious when one reads the follow up and sees that Kansas has decided to subscribe again when they were given a lower cost with only a slight nod to the copyright issues: now the writing center at KU can remove student papers from the database. No mention there, either, about how this was about mistrust and guilt.

I don't know what else to say. If you want to be a part of the fan club of that text, that's fine. But the text is not very credible by academic standards for a number of reasons (or journalistic standards) and I'm not going to invest anymore free time in critiquing it to someone who doesn't listen.

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Charlie | cyberdash

Dear Teaching 24/7,

Who is Teaching 24/7? Well, I guess, most of us here on Kairosnews are doing so. The question is, if we're on second, who's on first?

If I click on Teaching247, I find only that this poster has been a member for 2 days 19 hours. Otherwise, he or she is unknown to me, to Charlie, or anyone else. I'm sure we all appreciate the virtues and venerable nature of graffiti. But we also appreciate ethos.

So, tell us who you are, and then we'll all be in the same room and can have a reasonable discourse.

Where I come from, visitors are welcomed, not attacked.

LOL

Reread your original first post in response to Tom. That was a little rude to start things off with. You set the tone and have escalated things hiding behind a pseudonym. Given that your conduct and anonymity fit the profile for trolling, glmaranto's request is more than fair. You won't find that anyone else who has been posting regularly in this community does so anonymously. Regulars on this site are personally known by a majority of the other regulars.

Regardless, as with most other discussion communities on the Internet, posting here is a privilege, not a right. Active members of most communities have certain expectations that new people trying to participate in the community have to adapt to. That's how discourse communities work. If you don't feel welcome here and don't want to honor Gina's request, then stop posting. Otherwise, you won't be posting here much longer anyway at the rate you are going.

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Charlie | cyberdash

Turns out that Teacher247 didn't take the hint. I have removed his last post and have blocked his account because it seems that Teacher247 is also probably DantheMan.

Last week, I received a hostile email from DantheMan threatening me with a lawsuit. On a whim, I compared the IP addresses that Teacher247 has been using with the email from DantheMan. There was a match. The main IP used by Teacher247 is the same.

As a consequence, I've not only blocked the user account on Kairosnews but also the IP addresses from accessing the server.

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Charlie | cyberdash

That reminds me, does anyone know of any opinions out there about managing online communities such as wikis and forums. Like using real names, allowing anonymous contributions, etc.

Citizendium, for example, is going to be like Wikipedia but only allow real names (and qualified experts are the editors).

We really need to teach kids more about netiquette, too many of us are learning about "trolling" and "flame wars" the hard way. It took me a while in the 90s to learn not to respond to emails too quickly, for example :)

-Doug Holton

p.s. How do you like Grand Valley State? It is one of the places I am applying for an ed tech position. It looks nice and my wife likes the area.

GVSU is great and Grand Rapids is good place to live. Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions (cel4145 @ cyberdash.com).

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Charlie | cyberdash