The Internet and Education: Online Communication, Research and the Business of Plagiarism
By Diane Fenn
In his book, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Landow discusses the changing roles of student and instructor in relation to hypertext and the Internet. While it is true that hypertext demands a much more student-focused approach, that of discovery learning rather than the traditional and, frankly, outdated rote-learning approach, it also demands a higher level of independent functioning and reasoning on the part of the student. The role of teacher has changed, for the better; rather than the “sage on the stage” required to lecture to a room full of children who may or may not follow the lesson content, the teacher may take a coaching role while the student actively engages with the material him or herself. This has obvious benefits for the students, as they are more responsible for their own learning. The interconnectedness of teachers and students, widespread information sharing and the ease of research access are definite benefits of hypertext technology in education. However, hypertext has also paved the way for plagiarism as a business. These issues will be discussed in relation to the Thames Valley District School Board (serving Elgin, London, Middlesex and Oxford counties in southwestern Ontario).
Online CommunicationHypertext and the Internet have become efficient, instant methods of communication that cannot be achieved through traditional pen-and-paper methods. This is especially true in an educational environment. Landow points out that printed material rarely is shared among course instructors, even if they happen to share office space in the same school, whereas electronic media are more easily transferred (222-3). The Thames Valley District School Board has addressed this issue by means of a system wide website for employees, students and parents. Through the employee portal, teachers can upload subject-specific handouts, assignments and the like, which can then be browsed and used by other teachers in the Thames Valley Board. The student portal allows students and parents to check attendance records, course grades, credit summaries and even homework and assignments as posted by the teacher. Attendance records are available “in real time”, meaning that as soon as the individual class attendance bubble sheets are scanned by the main office computer, the records are available for parental viewing online. Parents have expressed positive interest and experience with this system, which supplements the computerized “synervoice” system (a computer which calls home to report class period and/or full day absences for individual students). The student portal provides an increased opportunity for communication with the school.
Teachers have also expressed positive views of the system, as they are able to upload course-specific and even class-section-specific handouts, grade reports, homework reminders and additional information for student and parent viewing. Many use it regularly, updating information on a daily or weekly basis. As well, teachers may provide links to supplementary material, either for students who are having difficulty with current course concepts or for those wishing to enhance their understanding of course material through more advanced readings. Many teachers provide links to material in other courses that complement areas studied. As Landow points out, this allows students to “[experience] text as part of a network of navigable relations” and “provides a means of gaining quick and easy access to a far wider range of background and contextual materials than has ever been possible with conventional educational technology”(225). Rather than compartmentalizing courses, this web system allows students to access information from all courses with a single click, and helps promote the idea of subjects as intermingled rather than studied in isolation. For example, by accessing information about the societal conditions under which an author wrote a particular novel or play, students make connections between concepts studied in history and English classes. All subjects may be linked in this manner through hypertext.
Beyond the employee and student portals, individual schools maintain their own web pages, hosted by and accessible through the main Board site (www.tvdsb.on.ca). Student committees, guided by staff advisors, develop and update these sites, which offer information about major events, fundraisers, charity operations, parent council news or activities and the daily routines/policies of the school. This provides valuable experience to students and allows them an opportunity to demonstrate their critical thinking and design skills as well as fostering a greater sense of community involvement. Landow points out four distinctive contributions made by students when writing in hypertext:
(1) reading, in which the reader plays a more important role in shaping the reading path than does the reader of a book, (2) creating links among documents present on the system, (3) creating text documents and linking them to others, and (4) creating graphic documents and linking them to others (236).
This is student-directed learning at its finest; the individuals who participate in the creation and refinement of the school web page demonstrate each of Landow’s four points. Though these students often do not receive formal credits for their work as HTML clubs are not courses per sae, students experience success through the operation of the site itself and the aesthetically pleasing designs they create. They receive feedback both from other students and from the school community and this is just as satisfying as a good grade.
Student councils also maintain their own web pages (linked to the school/board site) to promote activities, social awareness, and to serve as a means of direct communication (via email) between the student populace and its representatives on council. Many students who are too shy to speak up in class or approach members may use email to contact student council and/or individual teachers for information or help. It may seem insignificant to those who have never felt so isolated, but simply having an email link to caring people willing to help has been the protective buffer that many students do not have elsewhere in their lives and can mean the difference between success and failure in both academic and social situations.
Such communication obviously benefits students and parents as well as teachers. It is not an alternative to personal contact via telephone altogether, but it does serve as a bridge between teacher and parent in the time it takes to get to telephone calls. A parent can check his or her student’s information online and, in a matter of minutes, know where the students stands in attendance and course grades as well as homework assignments. This may serve as a springboard for further communication with the teacher or parent. Naturally, such a system is only as good as its usage; if teachers do not upload information for their students, it is of little value. Similarly, if students and parents do not check their accounts, the handouts, grades and homework tips/course links are wasted. Nonetheless, the employee and student portals have served to increase communication between home and school and have been beneficial.
Online ResearchAs far as research is concerned, the Internet is an invaluable resource to students and teachers alike. As Landow states, hypertext-based research demands a higher degree of critical thinking from students; they must not only distinguish between credible and non-credible sources, but must further decide which information is directly relevant to the particular project at hand (225). Further, this exposure to mass quantities of available information “[teaches] students to read in an advanced manner” and this advanced ability translates into better use of print materials, such as textbooks, in class (Landow 225). In an age where reading is considered boring by many as it lacks the strongly visual, fast-pace of video games, hypertext provides an engaging form of literature for students. It is no secret that students enjoy working with computers; I have successfully “tricked” my grade 9 students into reading entire works online, such as the Interactive Raven (http://www.teachersfirst.com/share/raven/), because they enjoy the multimedia experience. Hypertext literature has a life that the printed text cannot achieve. As Landow states:
hypertext…permits the student to encounter a range of materials that vary in terms of difficulty because authors no longer have to pitch their materials to a single level of expertise and difficulty. Students, even novice students, who wish to explore individual topics in more depth therefore have the opportunity of following their curiosity and inclination as far as they wish (227).
This is definitely the case with my students. They were eager to follow the various links provided, and were able to make connections between the poem, the age in which it was written, the life of the poet, and the changing meanings of words in the English language. My classes even lose their initial fear of Shakespeare after an introductory web quest. When we return to the printed textbook itself, the majority of students are fairly well grounded in the context of the Elizabethan era and can better appreciate the written words. Many are able to recall information from the websites visited and apply it to the printed text as well. As Landow would say, they have been “[inculcated] with the culture of a specific discipline” (226). I have seen, firsthand, the benefits this provides.
Nonetheless, it must be noted that there are times when online research aides are not so easily classified as purely “good”, but rather, areas tinged with grey. One such situation is that of the Thames Valley District School Board’s membership with eLibrary online (http://elibrary.bigchalk.com/libweb/elib/do/login). The eLibrary Canadian Curriculum database is a fantastic resource; it provides users with recognized Canadian and international resources including full text magazines and journals, newspaper articles, reference books and encyclopedias, television and radio transcripts, maps, pictures, and audio/visual sources. Given access to such credible sources, students are able to research topics that vary from traditional literature (i.e. Shakespeare) to more unusual requests, such as those on the paranormal research project I give my grade 10 students. Searches may take the form of “natural language", which students are familiar with, or more complicated Boolean operators – a popup window appears to aid students with Boolean operators and will actually paste the necessary operators into the search box for them. As well, students may choose which media types to include in their searches by means of check boxes beneath images of the different available media (i.e. newspapers, journals, audio images etc.). Extensive help is available to users, making this a very easily accessible resource.
Though eLibrary has proven invaluable to students, it has also raised issues regarding individual research and plagiarism. eLibrary provides a listing of the “percent of relevance” its results have to the specific search. It also will take the reader directly to “the best part” of the retrieved article, which undercuts its initial value of teaching critical thinking and reading skills. It provides a “readability” rating as determined by the number of syllables in the article words etc. Students can sift through results in search of the “easiest” articles or more advanced as desired.
Further, eLibrary provides a direct method of emailing specific articles from the database to one’s email account through the use of an online form. There is no need to actually print pages if one makes use of this feature. In itself, this feature is ecologically positive as it reduces paper waste. However, obtaining an electronic copy of an article presents a strong temptation to students; many choose to simply copy and paste sections of these articles into their work and call it their own research. This form of plagiarism is, unfortunately, very common, particularly among junior students at my school and others within the Thames Valley Board.
There are two distinctive forms of plagiarism as far as I am concerned. One is the unintentional mistaking of information, which results from the unsophisticated students’ clicking link after link and losing track of where the information eventually comes from. As Paul Amore states:
If students cannot discover the speaker (source) of the idea, they may be tempted to appropriate the idea into their own conversations (compositions) without crediting the original speaker… [T]he collaborative voices of hypertext blend to the point that the student may be unsure what she heard and from where. (the_agency_of_collaboratio.html)
Certainly this is a fault of hypertext links themselves; original sources are not always provided when links are established, though the more responsible writers among us will include that information. Sites that incorporate bits and pieces of original research or information within a single page, but fail to provide links or citations to reference the original sources, increase this problem. Intellectual property is difficult to defend online; it is very easy to copy and paste or simply right click and save information to the hard drive and forget about the website the images/text came from. Students, particularly those in junior years, do not seem to realize the importance of giving credit to the original authors.
It is not surprising that students are confused about citations when one considers the varying view of plagiarism displayed by contemporary hypertext theorists. Barlow distinguishes between negative and positive forms of plagiarism:
What our students are finally doing as autonomous agents in positive hypertextual plagiarism is creating works of intertextuality. The work of positive hypertextual plagiarism does not engage the mind of the students any less than creating something “new” and “original.” What is wrong with our current policies toward hypertext and plagiarism is that the student’s teacher does not get to see how this intertextuality functions. The teacher only sees the finished process of hypertext reading/writing, whether it is when the student uses a hypertext document as a source for a paper, or when the student turns in a hypertext composition. If a student produces a hypertext document for an assignment, one way to externalize the intertextuality of the composition process would be for the student to provide a brief statement describing her collaboration with both other hypertext writers and hypertext documents. This statement could include a list of the addresses (URLs) of the Web sites students have copied text or information from and a brief comment on what the student saw as the value of recombining the information from these other sites into a new hypertext. (As quoted in Amore)
Though the list of URLs used does seem to lessen the impact of plagiarism in Barlow’s example, I do not believe that this demonstrates Landow’s idea of collaborative writing. Nor do I believe that the student has learned much by simply copying and pasting information that belongs to someone else. It has been my experience that many students do not even read the entire sections they copy; they assume that the last paragraph(s) is/are just as important as the first they’ve copied. It is a fast, easy way for them to complete an assignment with the minimal amount of effort on their part.
This directly reflects the second form of plagiarism: the intentional use of another’s work. Unfortunately, this is another common problem that does not limit itself to junior students. I have received papers by seniors which have taken me less than five minutes to locate online in their entirety. In some cases, students research their topics and paste in large chunks of online material, if not the entire online article itself. In its worst form, plagiarism has become a thriving online business. Sites such as essay.ca, duenow.com, schoolsucks.com, gradesaver.com, papers4you.com, sparksnotes.com and a myriad of others list essay topics, grades received, and the price per page. They offer papers for high school, college and university levels, including Masters and Ph. D. theses. No subject or topic is exempt. It is worth mentioning, though, that these papers are typically very poorly written and are usually quickly identified as something other than the student’s honest efforts.
To combat the growing online paper mills, there are various programs available to search for plagiarism. While they may be useful for some, they present their own unique problems. Consider the case of Eve, an anti-plagiarism program used by the Thames Valley District Board in 2002-2003. After purchasing the site license, my particular school experienced a number of problems with the program. Eve was about as effective at detecting plagiarism as Net Nanny is at screening out inappropriate material for young computer users; it labeled direct quotations (properly referenced or not) as plagiarism and missed entire chunks of text that were not quotations from literary works and couldn’t identify the papers from the pay sites. It was also very time consuming; a typical search run on a single essay of 1500 words required 30 minutes of uninterrupted computer use; to run a class set of 34 papers, required an entire day. While running, Eve would not allow use of the computer for any other applications, either; this posed obvious problems for teachers. (In my department, there are three computers shared by the twelve members. We quickly grew to despise Eve.)
As well, the program was not user friendly at all. There was no GUI for unsophisticated users to follow, and operation of the program itself involved several steps before the search could even be run. If a file was not formatted correctly, Eve would not find any results. Rich text or text only formats were generally acceptable, but Eve could not run a search on Word Perfect or Microsoft Word documents; students had to be shown, repeatedly, how to save their work in txt format rather than the standard doc defaults. (We always had at least four essays submitted incorrectly and had to reformat them ourselves before running the plagiarism program.) Not surprisingly, our administration chose not to renew the site license after the initial year had expired.
These problems are not unique to the Eve program. Any anti-plagiarism program, including those operating solely online, involves subscription fees and computer access time. School networks and servers tend to be heavily burdened with student net traffic, which slows down any plagiarism search program. As well, the servers may be shut down at night and over the weekend as cost-cutting measures (the one at my school is and the site license for Eve did not cover stand-alone computer use for teachers at home).
Clearly, there is no simple solution to the online plagiarism problem. Costly, time-consuming anti-plagiarism programs may serve as band-aid solutions, but the underlying problems remain. Students must be taught explicitly how to use the Internet and how to properly reference/cite information they find. This may mean, as well, that teachers require PD sessions about effective Internet use.
ConclusionThe Internet is a valuable educational tool for communication and research, but it does lend itself to the academic problems of plagiarism. When used responsibly, the Internet is an invaluable source of information for students, parents and teachers alike. It allows communication about student work and attendance, school functions, and school groups. However, it also allows easy plagiarism either by accident or by design.
The truth of the situation is that not everyone is familiar with hypertext and the Internet, nor is everyone able to use the resources to their full potential. A 2004 study by Weideman and Stremph, involving “1,109 learners, spread across forty-six institutes of higher education on three continents”, showed that younger users have more success with Internet searches than older users, and that the number of keywords used in a given search affects the outcome. Clearly, the generation of children brought up around computers has an advantage to those who were not. Teachers would benefit from more PD sessions about using the Internet in their courses (i.e. designing effective assignments and new forms of evaluation to suit them) and how to instill a stronger sense of responsibility in their students as far as plagiarism is concerned. The Internet must be seen as something more than a frenzy of loosely connected information bits floating around in cyberspace, waiting to be copied and used. This means that teachers as well as students must learn to efficiently use the online resources and to properly credit the sources of information used. As Collins states:
If we are to make our students members of the academic knowledge community, we need to avoid a gap between the standard that we hold their work to and the standard that we practice in the classroom. Students may be bullied into citing their online sources, but without seeing a similar awareness of online sources on the instructor’s part, they are unlikely to believe the sincerity or utility of the motives behind it. (the_plagiarist_here.html)
This is an issue that many teachers do not even consider, but which involves the same principles as the CanCopy code (http://www.accesscopyright.ca/licenses.asp?a=11) for photocopied materials. True, current intellectual property laws are fuzzy at best, but if we begin to instill a sense of responsibility in students from a young age, they may not be as necessary in future.
Copyright 2004 Diane Fenn
Works Cited
Amore, Paul. “The Agency of Collaboration: Hypertext and Positive Plagiarism.” ACE Journal. 1.3. (Fall, 1998) Available online: http://english.ttu.edu/ace/journal/the_agency_of_collaboratio.html
Collins, Paul S. “Who’s the Plagiarist Here? Using the Web to Reciprocate Source Disclosure.” ACE Journal. 1.3 (Fall, 1998) Available online: http://english.ttu.edu/ace/journal/the_plagiarist_here.html
Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Weideman, Melius, and Strempher, Corrie. “The Effect of Search Engine Keyword Choice and Demographic Features on Internet Searching Success”. Information Technology and Libraries. 23.2 (2004): 58+. eLibrary/ProQuest Information and Learning Library. http://english.ttu.edu/ace/journal/the_plagiarist_here.html