I have been pondering the whole notion of plagiarism. When I taught Survey of American Lit. 1 & 2 online last year, I required my students to do "Multimedia Presentations." A majority of them uploaded a ton of information about a particular author, along with images, into Powerpoint slid shows and posted them. They were indignant when I accused them of Plagiarism and told them that they needed to document their souces, use in-text citations for all quotes, paraphrases, summaries, and images, and include a Works Cited page. Of course, all this had been explained on the Assignment Sheet under Course Documents, along with specific examples of Pp presentations from previous classes--which none of them had bothered to consult.
In my English 1120 classes, I also require them to use a parenthetical citation for any images they use in the body of their research paper and include a separate citation for the image on the Works Cited page.
Am I being too "old school" here? Nobody today said a word about citing the sources of images that we incorporate either into our course handouts or Powerpoint presentations?
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Jayne,
ReplyDeleteThis is something I think we've got to work out as a dept, and probably even as an institution, as application of the Academic Integrity Policy requires some consistency. Please bring this matter up at the next Academic Integrity Task Force meeting, and let's take up this issue when we get to the education piece of our work (next year?). I think we need to get feedback from a wide range of sources on this. My own feeling is that we need to be somewhat context specific. If we are asking students to produce a multimodal work for an academic audience (us, scholars using the web), citations are critical; if we are asking them to produce jazzy infotainment that mimics magazine-style web productions, then citations are probably just in the way. But I'm really struggling as I think about this, and I know we need to look at the matter from multiple angles and bring in a host of voices. I hope other people will comment on this issue here!
NCTE has an interesting note on copyrighting and fair use policies you might want to check out prior to determining a policy of our own. I am a big believer in training students to understand the role of fair use versus copyright and get a little uneasy by the idea of not citing things (even if the citations are listed on a separate sheet rather than maybe directly by the image, if that might alter the visual appeal of a text.
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