"It wasn't me, was it?" Plagiarism and the Web by Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati

In the article “ ’It wasn’t me, was it?’ Plagiarism and the Web”, the authors Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati emphasize on how the vast amount of information available to people in the Web has facilitated ways for students to plagiarize. The authors address techniques and exercises teachers can include in their class curriculum to help students avoid plagiarizing. The authors based their study on experiences teachers had in the past of students plagiarizing. These experiences were used as supporting evidence and explanation of ideas.

The terms “patchwriting” or “kidnapping”, sometimes used as nouns of plagiarism, differ from the concept of plagiarism as theft. When referred as theft, plagiarizing means taking ideas that belongs to someone else without permission. When used as patchwriting or kidnapping, the student is able to put themselves is the writer’s shoes and evaluate the writing with a different perspective. From here, the student can develop new ideas and concepts.

When a student is asked to develop a correct and/or original idea, the student must back up this idea with supporting evidence. When the students look for supporting evidence, most of the time this supporting evidence becomes their “original idea” leading them to plagiarize.

The Internet provides a great amount of information that is available in just a click. The ease in availability of information, leads the student to find easy and fast information to complete an assignment where many times plagiarizing is involved. Common computational controls such as copy and paste also facilitate the student to obtain information and transfer it to a paper and claim it as theirs.

The authors explain of an interesting term for plagiarizing, “intellectual property”. The stealing of ideas does not only apply at an academic level, but also industrially. Intellectual property refers to the rights a person has to their creativity or design. The ideas and creativity of a person must also be seen as property. Such creativity and design can be copyrighted and trademarked for security purposes.

The authors suggest a couple of exercises a teacher can do with the students to make them “Web smart”. These exercises involve knowledge of credibility, different types of plagiarizing, and ways to correctly cite sources. When working on the Literature review, knowing how to borrow and give credit to people’s ideas and concepts is important to avoid plagiarism since we will be using a lot of sources.