Monthly Archives: September 2014

Scholarship v Plagiarism

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Plagiarism spectrum & Did I Plagiarize? are beautiful, concise expressions of poor practice, but I wish we could focus instead on a spectrum of valuable scholarship.

Academic writing is a continuation of a worldwide, centuries-long conversation, and if my writing doesn’t connect to the conversation, or doesn’t advance it, I don’t count. 

  1. Is it easy to verify the source of my ideas, words, images and data? (Unverified = untrustworthy.)
  2. Have I contributed any original understanding or expression? (No insight = insignificant.)
Author typing on laptop surrounded by newspapers

Credit: dave, 2004

Declarations of interest

Is it coincidence that the ideas for both charts are ultimately sourced from iParadigms, which profits from beliefs about plagiarism, while protesting that Turnitin is not a plagiarism detector?

Turnitin is important in my day job. I encourage academics to provide Turnitin in their courses, to allow students to check for unoriginal text before submitting their writing; and I train staff to use GradeMark to provide auditable, inline feedback on assignments to students.

Like most educationalists, I recognise emulation as a stage in a learning process.

References

iParadigms (2013) Does Turnitin detect plagiarism? Turnitin. Online at http://turnitin.com/en_us/resources/blog/421-general/1643-does-turnitin-detect-plagiarism retrieved 26/09/2014

iParadigms (2012) The Plagiarism Spectrum. Turnitin. Online at http://www.turnitin.com/assets/en_us/media/plagiarism_spectrum.php retrieved 26/09/2014

Newbold C (2014) Did I Plagiarize? TheVisualCommunicationGuy. Online at http://visual.ly/did-i-plagiarize-types-and-severity-plagiarism-violations retrieved 26/09/2014.

Schaum B, Stohrer M (2014) Plagiarism, Emulation, and Originality. Slideshare. Online at http://www.slideshare.net/beths0103/plagiarism-emulation-and-originality retrieved 26/09/2014.

dave (2004) pro_author. Morguefile. Online at http://mrg.bz/nH5vv9 retrieved 26/09/2014

Complex activities in Moodle

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Learning design

 

Can you build an extended, interactive lesson in Moodle?

Yes!

I’ve seen (and set up) some quite complex sequences. The activity mapped out here engaged students over several weeks; several meetings of teams, individual, small group, large group and plenary work; and was highly active and personalised.

After a team selection and formation activity, individual students submit a short video (explaining a revision topic) for peer assessment, and review several others for correctness and effective communication (inter alia). Each team chooses and submits their best video to a shoot-out in a tutorial for team points; and the best of each tutorial goes into a shoot out in a lecture for team points. The video collection provides revision resources for the next cohort.

However…

Complex, extended learning designs are hard to maintain, and hard to migrate to a different platform in the future. How portable is the learning design (to the next version of device, browser, or LMS)? How soon will it appear maladapted to incoming learners? How many people are competent to revise it? How costly is it to modify and test as the curriculum or content changes?

And perhaps more importantly, can it flex for students with unique needs or circumstances?

Acknowledgements

The course design illustrated was originally developed and piloted by Waldron, Kinkaid and Whitty for UNSW Australia.

Illustration prepared with CompendiumLD, Open Learning UK’s special purpose adaptation of the open-source software Compendium, available from http://compendiumld.open.ac.uk/