Plagiarism and Student Culture

There is a description of a new book, My Word! Plagiarism and Student Culture, written by anthropologist Susan Blum. Here are some teasers about the culture generating plagiarism:

“In terms of explaining student culture, Blum uses many of the student interviews to show how education has become to many students more an issue of credentialing and getting ahead than of any more idealistic love of learning.”

“Then there is the student concept — or lack thereof — of intellectual property. She notes the way students routinely ignore messages from colleges and threats of legal action to share music online, in violation of business standards of copyright. As with plagiarism, she notes, the student generation has embraced an entirely different concept of ownership, and students who would never shoplift feel no hesitation about downloading music they haven’t purchased.”

“But faculty members do have a role in promoting academic integrity, she writes. In her conclusion, she describes the importance of talking frequently with students about the value of higher education and learning (aside from professional advancement), and the need for classes to regularly consider the nature of originality, of appropriate citation, of doing one’s own work and so forth. But in those discussions, she writes that professors need to move beyond their views of these issues. For example, professors should talk with their students about why they tend to value books (and read books) less than their professors did.”

You can read the story at http://insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/03/myword.