Monday, July 28, 2008

Plagiarism is and is not ...

Cut and paste 'not plagiarism'
HIGH-PROFILE educationalist and long-time commentator of online learning Dale Spender has accused universities of being out of touch with their students in seeking to clamp down on "cut and paste" appropriation from the internet, arguing that what is dubbed plagiarism is just part of the way students learn.

Wikipedia page on Dale Spender here. She certainly has a point that the goal of education should be to instruct and then determine what has been learned. Counting similar phrases and wording is so much easier, however. Numbers never lie. Oh my, did I plagiarize that?

From Wikipedia page on plagiarism: "... plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship."

So if I state that I have a dream will I be committing plagiarism or copyright infringement or both.

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