Share and Share Alike: Digital Natives and Plagiarism

Keeping Up with Digital Natives - Part II
Share and Share Alike: Digital Natives and Plagiarism

This is the second installment of my series on digital natives and how we can meet their needs in the classroom.

In the fifteen years I've spent in education I have never ceased to be amazed at how often students resorted to plagiarism and sharing of work on homework, quizzes and tests. I have never understood the phenomenon until recently. As I've read and study about digital natives, a light bulb slowly has appeared and finally I had a Eureka! moment. What I'm about to discuss is not an excuse for the academic dishonesty phenomenon faced by educators at all levels but rather an explanation.

Digital natives have grown up ripping CDs and burning CDs on their computers. They've spent countless hours filesharing with the original Napster, Kazaa and Limewire. Today with other services they upload and download music as often as they please with not so much as a second thought. They share playlists and tracks more often than they share gum and pencils at school. Digital natives upload and watch videos on YouTube, including scenes cut from movies, TV shows and other copyrighted sources, on a daily basis. They upload photos to Flickr, PhotoBucket and other sites so their friends and the rest of the world can see, and have for free, their photos. They edit wikis more often than digital immigrants use wikis. They mod as much as they play video games. I'm willing to say that the overwhelming majority of digital natives never intend to rip-off or steal from music and media companies. Digital natives do all these things simply because they can be done in the digital world into which they've been born. While many of these things are appalling to digital immigrants, for digital natives these actions are value-neutral.

With all this in mind, why then are we surprised that our digital native students have no qualms about collaborating on homework in the halls before school, about texting their friends about a test's content or format or about using information from outside sources without proper citation? In the context of their digital world (and, yes, they do have an entire world that exists outside of school), plagiarism and unauthorized collaboration aren't exactly crimes against humanity.

The challenge facing the next generation of educational leadership is this: we must help our students understand the difference between filesharing and academic dishonesty, between creating playlists from borrowed files and from creating papers from borrowed material. We can't always be the morality police so we may not be able to stop illegal downloading and filesharing. What we can do, though, is help students understand that in the academic world there is a certain standard of academic integrity expected of all who contribute to the content universe, be that in the form of a dissertation at research university or a freshman research paper in World History class. What we can do is give educate our students regarding the proper use and citation of sources and hold them accountable when they fail to meet the standards. How? Let me offer what we have done on our campus.

Using information from plagiarism.org, from a plagiarism guide I developed at another school and from a plagiarism guide developed by our English Department, our English faculty spent several days at the beginning of school teaching our students not only about plagiarism but also about the correct way to write, to paraphrase, to cite, etc. To engage our students, our English faculty used presentations on our Promethean Activboards throughout the process. At the conclusion of our instructional time, the faculty assessed the students' knowledge of plagiarism with an exam on the Activboard using a classroom set of Activotes. After students successfully completed the assessments, students and parents signed contracts acknowledging their training in the correct way to write and cite as well as their agreement to meet our expectations. By the end of the second week of school, our more than 500 students had successfully completed training on the subject of plagiarism. We will repeat the process at the beginning of each new school year with every student in the high school. As students write and submit their papers throughout the year, we require them to submit their papers through Turnitin.com, an anti-plagiarism site we use as a teaching tool to help students write and cite correctly.

Have we changed the world? Maybe not, but I believe we have changed our campus.

Keeping Up with Digital Natives

In my next several posts I will focus entirely on digital natives and how we can meet their needs in the classroom.

Keeping Up with Digital Natives - Part I

If you haven’t noticed yet, our classrooms are filled with digital natives and it’s time to try to keep up with them. Marc Prensky coined the term digital native to describe a person born into an all-digital world. If you are reading this right now, chances are you belong to a category of people known as digital immigrants, or those who were not born into an all-digital world but have adapted to the digital world to some degree. If you think you are a digital native but have been falsely accused of being a digital immigrant, I challenge you to take this quiz and answer the questions truthfully. The more I watch digital natives in my home and in my school, the more I am compelled to believe the direction current research is headed. The research seems to indicate that the cognitive processes of digital natives somehow differ from those of even my generation and especially from those of past generations.

Perhaps the greatest effort to study digital natives is taking place with the Digital Natives project, a joint venture between the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen. In fact, among the other publications generated by the project, the project has just published a book, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. My copy, by the way, should be en route to my office now and I will share my thoughts on the book as soon as I get into it.

If Prensky and the Digital Natives project team are right, and I tend to believe they are, educators face a daunting task. The challenge will be multi-faceted. We must first learn more about the way digital natives think and process information. Next we must convince the educational world that analog education won’t be effective with digital learners. Finally, we must seek new, creative strategies to use technology to engage our students.

Think about our kids for a moment. They share pictures and music digitally. They send short emails, messages on Facebook and MySpace, they IM and they text. They crave stimulation from audio and video sources. They create social networks consisting of dozens, hundreds and even thousands of contacts. They make acquaintances online. They shop online. They can do more with their phones than most adults can do with a computer, a digital camera and a video recorder. These are who our kids are and there’s no going back. Why should we expect our kids’ education to look like ours, much less like our parents’ or grandparents’?

In the next few posts I will

• discuss a number of practical ideas for reaching digital natives
• provide some anecdotal evidence that supports what Prensky and others are saying
• challenge you to never look at our kids the same again

Modeling Reading for Our Students

One of the four things we are emphasizing on our campus this year is reading. One of the many ways we, as adults, will emphasize reading this year is by modeling reading throughout the year. We have placed a large bulletin board with the title "What We're Reading" in a hallway with maximum exposure to our student population. On that board, managed by our National Honor Society, every teacher and administrator name is listed along with what each is reading. As the titles change periodically (we update titles on the 1st and 15th of each month), the color of the paper used changes, too.

This has achieved a number of things for us. First, it has shown our students that the adults on campus are reading, some voraciously. Second, it has celebrated our readers. Third, it has given our students an insight into who our teachers are outside the classroom; this is helpful when building relationships with our students. Fourth, it has given our students a chance to see some titles they might be interested in reading.

Students haven't been the only ones affected by this small addition to our hallways. A number of teachers have mentioned that they might not have picked up a book this year if it weren't for the bulletin board. Also, a few teachers accidentally got left off the board initially and they went to the NHS rather upset because they wanted their names and titles included, too. There have been numerous conversations already this year between teachers about the things they are reading, a dialogue that may not have been present in years past.

There is a quantifiable feeling of excitement and enthusiasm when it comes to reading and it seems to be contagious. At the request of some students, we have started a similar board for students with their names, photos and titles they are reading (titles that are not included on required reading lists for classes).

Granting Students the Freedom of Expression: Worth the Risk

A few years ago, a former school of mine took a group of bright kids and created a debate team. Within a matter of only a few years, the debaters earned spots in the national tournament year after year. We had created a team of talented and relentless debaters. We had also created a monster. We soon discovered that teaching kids to think critically and to express themselves articulately came with a price. Our debaters took on all comers, including our teachers. When the teachers complained about how the debaters were carrying on in class discussions, we faced a dilemma. After all, the debaters were doing exactly what they had been trained to do (and they were doing it well). We gave the students a voice then, when the voice got louder than we anticipated, we wanted them to be quiet. Something about that didn’t seem quite right.

Fast forward to 2008…

Today we’re encouraging kids to write and express themselves with class blogs. As we encourage kids to express themselves, we need to consider a few important points. First, we may create blogging monsters who write well but who occasionally write something we don’t want to read. Can we handle this? If not, perhaps we shouldn’t run the risk of giving kids a voice, that is, a digital voice. I believe, however, the risk is well worth the potential reward.
Second, if and when we do encounter students expressing themselves in a way that makes us uncomfortable, we have limited means to control what they say or have said. For some, this news may be very unsettling. For others, though, this may be good news.

Remember, the Supreme Court said in Tinker that students do not "shed their constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." This means that public schools cannot censor what students say on blogs unless the blog entries/comments fall into the category of “material disruption.” Independent schools have a little more power to censor what students say, especially with conduct clauses in contracts and handbooks, acceptable use policies, etc.

Things change a little if the blog in question is a school-hosted or school-sponsored blog. If this is the case, the school, either public or independent, has more authority to censor based on the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood ruling, which initially dealt with a school newspaper. In the case of a school publication, or in our case a school-hosted or school-sponsored blog, a school can censor because what is said in the blog could be perceived by the public as officially supported or endorsed by the school. However, if the blog is one where students rather than the administration control content, the blog may be viewed as a public forum thereby making it more difficult for a school to control what students say.

I would encourage you not to be scared away from class or school blogs by what some students might say or do if given a forum in which to express themselves. Rather, embrace the challenge of teaching students how to make worthwhile and valuable contributions to class discussions, to carry on meaningful conversations in the community at large, and to disagree without being disagreeable.

For more information on student bloggers and their rights, see EFF.

Focusing on Relationships

I recently led my faculty in a wonderful and moving exercise. During our first faculty meeting of the year, I emphasized the importance of building relationships with students. I proposed the single most effective way to teach and influence high school students and to impact their lives is by building relationships with them. To illustrate my point, I asked each member of the faculty to answer two questions in writing:
1. Which teacher made the greatest impact on your life?
2. Why was this teacher so significant in your life?

After several minutes, I collected the answers and discovered a treasure trove of nostalgic, personal stories about teachers who will be forever remembered by their former students, many of whom became educators because of the teachers about whom they wrote. I expected two or three sentences per answer. What I received, though, were thoughtful and personal half-page and full-page stories of teachers who, in years gone by, touched the lives of my faculty. What follows are actual excerpts from the faculty responses:

• “noticed my emotional dilemma… pulled me aside and focused on me”
• “treated us as special individuals”
• “taught with such a passion”
• “cared about our lives outside of school”
• “forced me to be honest with myself… to develop an awareness of myself”
• “I always felt safe [in … class]”
• “gave me confidence”
• “did not care about anything other than the students he was teaching”
• “hugged every student every day”
• “took an interest in me”
• “like a father figure after my dad died”

After reading several excerpts and several entire responses aloud, one thing became perfectly clear to everyone. Not one teacher was remembered for being the smartest, most intelligent, most proficient in a skill or for being an expert in his or her discipline. Rather, the teachers remembered as having the greatest impact on the lives of my faculty were those who cared about, loved, showed interest in, encouraged and believed in students. The teachers who made the greatest impact on my faculty did so by connecting with their students, by building authentic relationships.

If you want to drive home the point that a campus can be transformed by a faculty striving to build relationships with students, start with this simple but effective exercise.

The next generation of educational leaders must never forget this: all the technology in the world, all the policies and procedures on record, all the curriculum ever mapped and all the lesson plans ever written will fail to impact students until a positive relationship exists between teacher and student.