A recent allfaculty email from a caring and concerned professor brought our attention to yet another term-paper mill. This one purports to create original papers that cannot be traced.  Yet, we still hear the call for the College to invest in anti-plagiarism software.  In fact, our course-authoring software will soon offer this option. The question remains, is this the best approach at a two-year college? 

As a reference/instruction librarian I’ve beat the Information Literacy drum for many years and continue to work with classroom faculty to help prevent these incidents. My recent response to the email evoked many positive replies and more suggestions. Here are some of mine. I urge everyone to comment and include their thoughts to this thread.

Although plagiarism has always been a problem, the digital age brings new complications.

 Here are some techniques that may help avoid plagiarism. Granted, they require more work, but are worth the effort.

Bring your classes to a  Library information literacy instruction session tailored to your assignment.  A library faculty member will discuss the research process, show students  how to locate and evaluate quality information and explain how to cite the material correctly. It makes the process much less overwhelming.  Although the syllabus is packed, the time it takes from the “course work” will be well worth the final results.

Explain plagiarism and its consequences early in the semester.  Many acts of plagiarism are accidental - that is, students feel using/quoting  material from other sources is cheating, or they do not know how to properly cite. Alternately, they have been taught in another country that collaborating with others is an acceptable practice.

Make students aware of the Writing Center. Tom D’Angelo and the other faculty who work there are great.

Make no assumptions about their previous experience writing papers.  Many have never done research beyond an encyclopedia, if at all.

Assign the paper incrementally, with separate due dates: thesis one week, abstract the next, outline etc.  Each part should include sources found in the NCC library collections in print and online.  Insist on hard  copy of at least two resources, either a printout or a photocopy of pages.

Be meticulous with citation styles.Spot check the references and citations. (Have other students spot check citations.) I am often approached by students who come in with a completed paper and just want “some sources for their bibliography because the professor wants sources.” )

Assign topics that are specific to your class discussion and require a source you have brought to that discussion in the paper. Avoid the favorite topics that have been done and done in high school.

Have students keep a “research journal” either in paper or on a blog. This should include the process of locating and selecting material as well as  challenges and successes they encountered while working on the paper.

 

After the papers are submitted, have students write a three minute summary of their papers’  main points or have them explain the main points to you/the class orally.

Plagiarism detection software can be useful to show students what they may have done wrong after the fact, or to scare them into avoiding it in the first place, but prevention is a better learning tool.

As for the turn paper mill cited, this is an extract from their sample:
Therefore, the problem arouses: how to make the communication in business effective enough that it would help to achieve professional goals?

It seems this industry may have been outsourced to a country with less than perfect English skills lol.

Come speak with a librarian- We are here to work with you

Just got back from SUNY CIT full of ideas and insights.  My colleague Ricky Glass and I presented on some of the games we have created for information literacy instruction. A part of our presentation was devoted to our foray into Second Life as a gaming platform for instruction. Many SUNY faculty are exploring Second Life as an educational tool thanks to funding from the SUNY Learning Network. SUNY LIVE, an active special interest group  that meets in SL on Tuesdays@ 12:30 gained many new members at the conference. Certainly there were some who questioned the value of virtual worlds, but they were far outnumbered by those who see this exciting technology as a place for distance learners to come together, as a means for collaboration across campuses and as I draw for our gaming millennial students. Do you know anyone using second life for instruction?

It seems wherever I go in the libary world, people are discussing the future of print newsletters; should we continue to publish, just dissminate a link to the “print” version, ditch the print altogether in favor of a blog or some hybrid of the choices?   The conversations seem to parallel our earlier discussions about print vs. online periodicals.   As of today, Blogpulse, a service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics reports 73,703, 197 identified blogs, 93,041 created within the last 24 hours.  Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia New Media Professor and WNBC-TV Tech Reporter commented last week that most blogs are read by two people: the author and his/her mother. But how many print newsletters get tossed in the circular file without a glance; how much paper and ink is wasted on their production; and how dated is the information due to time lapses between compilation, editing, printing and distribution?  What is your library doing?

This month Sage Publishers, Oxford UP and Cambridge UP filed a lawsuit that alleges Georgia State University was involved in the “systematic, widespread, and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works “  through their e-reserves and WebCT CMS.  The College, the Dean of Libraries and the Provost for Information Technology were all named in the suit.  The complete complaint is available in pdf in Dian Schaffhauser’s article in Campus Technology. http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/61139

To read some of the news articles and blog postings, try Charles Bailey Jr’s blog, DigitalKoans: http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2008/04/17/georgia-state-copyright-infringement-suit-coverage-and-commentary/

The publishers are asking for no monetary damages but this seems like a test case to once again define fair  use in an educational setting. 

Returned from the Computers in Libraries Conference last week filled with ideas, questions, certainties and doubts.  Our presentation “Gaming and Learning” was well received and caught a mention on the Information Today blog. http://www.infotodayblog.com/2008/04/09/gaming-to-teach-information-literacy/ One of the highlights of the conference, the Pecha Kucha ( the Japanese word for the sound of conversation), allowed five panelists six minutes and forty seconds to sing the praises of a particular Web 2.0 application.  The sixth panelist offered the skeptic’s view of all of them.  This session left many wondering which are worth the time and effort, which may be today’s pet rock and which have no application for libraries at all.   I signed up for Twitter but still do not see how it might be used in libraries. Any thoughts?

Back in February, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue posted some  old jokes from Readers Digest.  One struck home.

Working as a computer instructor for an adult-education program at a community college, I am keenly aware of the gap in computer knowledge between my younger and older students. My observations were confirmed the day a new student walked into our library area and glanced at the encyclopedia volumes stacked on a bookshelf. “What are all these books?” he asked.Somewhat surprised, I replied that they were encyclopedias.“Really?” he said. “Someone printed out the whole thing?”

In his March 16, NYTimes column, Noam Cohen wrote an obituary for print encyclopedias.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/weekinreview/16ncohen.html?ex=1363320000&en=e1f4ae6af56cff51&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Each time the newest issue of Choice or Library Journal appears in my mailbox, I ponder the value of recommending new print reference sources.  The old ones sit, like bricks, on our reference shelves. Take a student to those shelves and see his eyes glaze or over or hear her say, “that’s okay I think I can find something myself” only to see her looking longingly at the computer terminals.   How often do we librarians turn to print reference ourselves? 

Recently we did a user survey in our library. Among other things, we wanted to determine why our students ask for help.  We discovered that many students misunderstood the phrase “print reference books” and assumed we meant help with printing on the computers.  On the other hand,  as a community college, we still have a great number of students with limited computer expertise.

How are you spending your reference budget?