Blogging Pedagogy

There's a really interesting discussion happening at Kairosnews about Turnitin - a web service that helps teachers detect plagiarism. Charlie Lowe, Ellen Schendel and Julie White posted a critique of Turnitin at Cyberdash, Charlie Lowe's website. A spokesperson for Turnitin has posted a response at Kairosnews.

Charles McGrath had a great piece in the Sunday NYT on bought papers, "At $9.95 a Page, You Expected Poetry?" I found it both amusing and reassuring.
Check it out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/weekinreview/10mcgrath.html?ei=5087%0A&en=564282105c2116f9&ex=1158206400&pagewanted=all

Matt Russell just forwarded this to me:

http://www.fratfiles.com/essays/index.php

Fratfiles.com offers students papers on many different topics - for a fee of course. There's been a bunch written in Composition studies about plagiarism - so I won't try to review the literature in a blog post. Kelly Ritter published a great article in CCC: "The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition"

I've always thought the best way to avoid plagiarism is through effective assignment design. If you make your assignments specific enough, it at least takes things like Fratfiles out of the equation (then again, many instructors I know have had very specific assignments where students copy/paste text from web pages into their paper). However, not much can stop a student from getting someone to write the paper for them.

LaShawn Barber has a useful discussion of plagiarism in the blogosphere, including examples and links.