Stealing: Defined (300 words, course-specific entry)

One of the topics for this week is "stealing, defined."

Now that we've reached the midpoint and just past it, I want to move is into thinking about research and how we use others' words and ideas. It's one thing for me to talk about plagiarism as theft; a completely different thing to have students put it into sanctioned practice.

The first think I'm asking for this week is that each student steals two sentences from a classmate. In this instance, we're going to give credit for them because that is appropriate. Later, we won't be so thoughtful or honest.

Teaching plagiarism--or, more specifically, the importance of avoiding plagiarism--is one of the toughest parts of the job for me. On the one hand, I believe that borrowed work should be credited. On the other, well, we are an increasingly collaborative society.

A couple of examples of this that I find most compelling and telling are Wikipedia, of course, and Found magazine.

Wikipedia is a fascinating example of true collaboration in action--together, we know more than we can possibly know individually and nowhere that I know of is this more clearly demonstrated. Of course, we occasionally know things wrong and that too is demonstrated here. I admit to being intrigued by our ability to shape knowledge in this large and public way; in this anonymous way. When we credit Wikipedia, we're kind of crediting an unknown collective. It's terribly unacademic of me, I know, but when I have questions, that's often my starting point--sometimes, I just want to answer Commuter Son's question such as one from this weekend: "Mom, what was the Enlightenment" and Wikipedia does that just fine. (The Enlightenment, as I now know, was also called the Age of Reason and largely relied on reason and scientific observation. What I don't know is why CS asked me this.)

Found magazine, which as far is I can tell is now mostly-defunct, was/is a product of our collective that is largely unattributed. Found bits of writing such as grocery lists, love letters and notes to home are/were organized in ways that create meanings extending beyond the individual item. The collected notes and effluvia had a kind of gestalt that could only come from a collective.

So as we're heading into the last brave portion of our semester, we'll be focusing on items stolen, and things found. Our goal in all of this is to think about ownership--who owns what, and how can we, any of us individually, claim knowledge as proprietary.