® BuscaLegis.ccj.ufsc.Br

The Death and Rebirth of Plagiarism

Ethics and Education in the InfoSphere

Rodney P. Riegle, Ph.D.1

"Thou shalt not steal, but paraphrasing is OK."

- Exodus 20:15, King James Bible, Teacher's Edition

For almost all of recorded history, both ethical and educational issues have been grounded in a geographical location (a neighborhood, community, or nation). Today the Internet forces us, for the first time, to deal with ethics and education globally and without reference to geography. This new non-geographically based information space can be called the InfoSphere (the place where information exists virtually), and it is changing how we work and live. Moreover, the InfoSphere creates ethical issues that are unique to it (e.g., cracking, spamming, electronic invasion of privacy, computer viruses, access inequity, etc.), and has both positive and negative ethical consequences. For example, crackers and terrorists can use the Internet to organize and support their evil activities. At the same time, however, ordinary people can use the Internet to escape from provincial ethical thinking, learn to embrace diversity, and to construct a global ethic based on moral principles that are cross-cultural (e.g., opposition to cracking and terrorism).

In the Information Age, the primary obligation of all educational institutions is to ensure that teachers and students are wise in the ways of the InfoSphere and moral in their use of it. Unfortunately, many educators are trying to apply old ethical and educational concepts to the InfoSphere despite the fact that it is an entirely new kind of place that requires entirely new kinds of thinking. For example, many educators are concerned about how easy the Internet makes plagiarism and the concomitant difficulties this causes for teachers. Various coping strategies have been suggested: outlaw websites that sell or store term papers, emphasize critical thinking and synthesis instead of fact gathering, create checkpoints throughout the entire research process instead of just the end, and so on. These suggestions miss the bigger picture: the concept of plagiarism will die and be reborn with a positive connotation in the Information Age. What we now call plagiarism will become a basic skill. Instead of trying to prevent it, we will teach it.

In the Information Age, educators will embrace a new reference principle -- ubiquitous asynchronous access. That is, if the information is not available to all students regardless of place and time then it is irrelevant. It may be accurate information, but it will not be pedagogically useful for an educational system which is no longer tied to buildings or clocks. This means that documentation will be limited to what can be located and linked to on the World Wide Web. Critics of the principle of ubiquitous asynchronous access will argue that it eliminates vast amounts of valuable information. Those critics will be unsuccessful because:

A vast amount of valuable information is already available on the Web.

If information which is not now available on the Web is truly valuable, then you (or someone else) will make it available on the Web.

All new paradigms change the definition of "valuable information." For example, the oral paradigm emphasized narratives, the paper/print paradigm emphasized texts, and the digital paradigm emphasizes multi-media.

The principle of ubiquitous asynchronous access facilitates analysis of information by more people than has ever been possible before. This encourages higher quality information and debate which in turn fuels social and scientific progress.2

However, in a dynamic milieu like the Web, even URLs are of limited value because they become dysfunctional over time as the existence or location of websites changes. This problem will get worse in the future as millions of individuals setup their own web-servers with their own addresses. They will constantly publish and change the location of their own files. Obviously, in such a world the value of hyper-linked citations is diminished. More fundamentally, the value of linking an idea to a person will be diminished. The notion that it is important to know the author of an idea is a recent phenomenon. During the Middle Ages, for example, the scribe was more likely to be recorded than the author.3 In the Information Age anyone can be an author and millions will do just that. Thus, we will return to an era where the idea, not the person, is of paramount importance.

Most of the time there is no good educational reason for a student to know who invented the light bulb or who first thought up the idea of freedom. It is more important for a student to be able to acquire, analyze, and display these concepts. There is little of educational value in those essays we all wrote paraphrasing and citing some one else's ideas. After all, the student who can find, analyze, and display an elegant solution to a task possesses the skills necessary to prosper in the Information Age. Whether the solution is his/her own or someone else's is irrelevant. Employers are interested in the bottom line, not the footnotes. In an era of a rapidly expanding global knowledge base, it is more important economically to be able to plagiarize existing elegant solutions than to create your own inelegant solutions. Of course, people who can create their own elegant solutions will be the most highly sought after, but even they will benefit from mastering the basic skill of plagiarism.

Clearly, the merit and the origin of an idea are separate4 and unless there is an over-riding reason (e.g., historical or political), it is neither necessary nor desirable for students to identify the origin. We must cast off the notion that the knowledge pool is static and embrace change as an inescapable and desirable fact of education and research. This means that educators must focus on teaching information skills (e.g., acquisition, analysis, display) instead of the documentation of the origin of ideas. In some ways an Information Skills curriculum is reminiscent of ancient Greece when the curriculum was comprised of the skills-based Trivium (i.e., grammar, rhetoric, and logic) instead of the current discipline-based curriculum. Skills-based curricula are not a new idea; they are only new to educators who require historical references but lack historical perspective.

Critics traditionally insist on judging new paradigms by criteria generated by the old paradigm. For example, educators initially resisted books because they feared a degeneration in the ability to remember oral lectures. Of course, they were quite correct about this, but misguided in their belief that oral memory would forever remain the most significant educational skill. Today, educators fear that the Internet will cause a degeneration in basic skills. What is really happening is the replacement of the basic skills of the past few centuries (the 3 Rs and core subjects) by the basic skills of the Information Age. (For more background on these new basic skills, see InfoSkills: Basic Skills for Survival in the Information Age. You can also test your basic skills by playing the game HYDDYN.) If we judge the success of the new paradigm by criteria which measure the basic skills of the old paradigm, we are likely to be disappointed in the outcomes. Analogously, attempts to apply old paradigm concepts such as plagiarism (which assumes a finite, stable knowledge base) to a new educational paradigm (which is characterized by an infinite, unstable knowledge base) are doomed to failure.

In the end, the new paradigm is inevitable. Educators could not resist the printing press, and they will be unable to resist the Internet. These technologies change society and the very meaning of the word "educated." To be sure, Luddites will be morally outraged about teaching students to "steal" ideas and scholars will whine about the need for students to understand where they "enter the scholarly conversation" and about the need for a "shared cultural background" (another archaic concept leftover from a more hegemonic, less-global time). This is nothing more than blatant self-serving protectionism. Indeed, it is in society's best interest to get good ideas into the public arena and so we will develop ways of rewarding scholars who have good ideas.5 But this reward will not include punitive educational policies or practices which are counter-productive in the Age of Information. Plagiarism is dead. Long live plagiarism.

Works Consulted

Gibaldi, Joseph, and Walter S. Achtert. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 3rd ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1988.

Plagiarism R Us. Online. Internet. http://www.justplagiarizeit.org Accessed 30 Feb 2001.

Riegle, Ezekiel. "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Plagiarism, but Were too Lazy to Look Up." Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Guild of Plagiarists. Stone tablet. 1 (1): i-m.

Riegle-Van West, Kate. "All the World's a Stage, and All the Men and Women Merely Plagiarizers: A Meta-Analysis of the Contents of the Journal of Modern Basic Skills." Diss. University of the Future, 2020.

Van West, Patricia E. "Sex and Plagiarism in the Dark Ages." Handbook of Research on Plagiarism. Ed. Rodney P. Riegle. 5th ed. Vol. 3. N.p.: privately printed, 1998. 234-277. 16 vols.

Retirado de: http://www.coe.ilstu.edu/rpriegle/wwwdocs/plagiari.htm

Em 25/04/05