Confessions of an elearning skeptic

An item from the news links within my learning community caught my eye today. It concerned students from the University of Texas and their recent development of an anti-plagarism honour code. Under this code students would pledge to not commit acts of plagarism. All very honourable sentiments I hear you say. Indeed, except that sections of the code were copied directly from the honour code of Bringham Young University! On the surface this seems a clear cut case of irony in its purest form but, as the comments that follow the article point out, this is not as simple as it appears. You can read the full article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

As well as giving me a great laugh, the article has got me thinking about plagarism. Its a word you hear a lot in the world of education and something that I have already been pondering this week, largely because my workplace is in the process of developing its own plagarism policy. As well as reinforcing the fact that we need to reference any plagarism policy that we draw inspriation from, this got me thinking about the issue of plagarism in the on-line setting and how easy it is to take the ideas of others as pass them off as your own. Clearly the use of online media in education needs to have strict guidelines and I will be working to ensure that any plagarism policy that we develop is future-proofed by factoring in plagarism in all forms and all media. My studies in this area will prove invaluable in informing this process and the guidelines set down by my university will be a vital starting point.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 3:52 am and is filed under Online communities, Ponderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.