Powerpoint on "Contract Cheating"

Interesting ppt from a recent conference, The New Challenges Of Contract Cheating by Thomas Lancaster and Robert Clarke (Birmingham City University). Contract cheating is putting up details about the assignment you want written for you, and people bid to do the work. The ppt explains the process and ways in which it might be detected. http://www.bcu.ac.uk/_media/docs/ContractCheatingSIG_220612_LancasterClarkeKeynote.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: Millennium sculpture and pontoon outside 02 dome on the Thames, from cable car, June 2012

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Plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach?

Magyar, A.E. (2012) "Plagiarism and attribution: an academic literacies approach?" Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, 4. "In many Higher Education courses in the UK the ability to write extended academic prose is central to assessment and therefore to student success. One aspect of academic writing which students struggle with is incorporating the work and ideas of others, using appropriate attribution conventions. This can lead them to fall foul of institutions’ plagiarism policies. Advice on plagiarism often consists of discussions around what is or is not plagiaristic behaviour while advice on attribution has tended to focus on referencing. This paper explores what an academic literacies approach to plagiarism might look like. It discusses and illustrates how an academic literacies approach was used in the design, analysis and application of a small-scale ethnographic research which set out to explore international postgraduate students' understandings of and questions about plagiarism across the disciplines in one UK university. The intention of the research was to use the findings in developing more culturally and context sensitive explanations of our attribution practices."
http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/ojs/index.php?journal=jldhe&page=index
Photo by Sheila Webber: cherry blossom, 2012

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High profile plagiarism example!

"Hungary President Schmitt quits in plagiarism scandal" as it says in the BBC story of 2nd April 2012 (he was found to have copied chunks of material in his PhD) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17586128. Thanks to my colleague Peter Willett for drawing this to my attention.

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Info Skills website at UEL #delila

Another report from the Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation (DELILA) project dissemination day in London, UK.
Ella Mitchell and Cathy Walsh (University of East London) gave an Introduction to InfoSkills. They talked about a resource they developed at their university, Info Skills: the website is at http://infoskills.uelconnect.org.uk/. An inspiration was UEL's Get that job website http://employability.uelconnect.org.uk/.
Info Skills is aimed at level one learners. The focus is information skills and academic integrity. To give an impact, they have included student voices, as videos, talking about why they thought it had been important to use the library or not plagiarise. Academics have also contributed. They used Captivate to create tutorials etc.
They were presenting at the DELILA seminar because the Info Skills website was open to everyone to use, and some individual resources are available (e.g. videos on Youtube, see http://www.youtube.com/user/UELconnect). Spinoff benefits have included that pre-entry students (in further education) and international students have found the site useful, so it aids transition into higher education. The initiative has fitted in with skills initiatives within the university, and the speakers also felt that the site could help "address the expectations gap for academic staff" (helping academics understand teh support that the students needed).
The website has four key sections "What information do you need", "What are the best tools and ways of searching" "How do you decide what to use" and "What are the rules on naming your sources". If you look at the website you can see they have used a good deal of carefully selected graphics (e.g. of other students), to draw people in.
One of the resources the speakers mentioned was an academic talking about using Wikipedia http://infoskills.uelconnect.org.uk/pages/videos/97/using_wikipedia.html
The speakers also talked about the planning and development process. They are aiming to improve the mobile aspect of the site (e.g. so quizzes work on phones).
Photo by Sheila Webber: A busy bee at the station this morning

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High profile plagiarism example

"German Defence Minister Guttenberg resigns over thesis": the headline says it all. My colleague Professor Peter Willett is going to be using this example with our Masters level research methods class, to show that plagiarism can be a time bomb even if you don't get detected at the time!
BBC. (2011) "German Defence Minister Guttenberg resigns over thesis." BBC News. 1st March http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12608083

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Goblin game

A plagiarism game from Lycoming College, USA, Goblin Threat, involves finding goblins and defeating them by answering plagiarism-related questions correctly. This is a nice idea that has been implemented well, so worth checking out. If you clear the goblins from all the rooms you get a certificate. My only little quibble would be that (as with most plagiarism quizzes) I think with a few of the questions the answer is not as black-and-white as is implied (it could also be to do with differences in national and institutional practices). http://www.lycoming.edu/library/instruction/plagiarismgame.html
I discovered this game because it was a Primo site of the month: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/about/sections/is/projpubs/primo/site/2010october.cfm. In this interview the game's creator explains how the game arose, how it was tested, and how it is used now, so it is also worth readng.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Winter branches, December 2010, photoshopped (neon glow)

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New issue of Journal of Information Literacy

Volume 4, Number 2 (2010) of the Journal of Information Literacy, open access at http://jil.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL
There are book reviews plus the articles:
- Susie Andretta: Looking at the evidence: reflections on the need for, and impact of, Information Literacy Education (ILE)
- Consolata Angello: The awareness and use of electronic information sources among livestock researchers in Tanzania
- Jeanne M. Brown, Carrie Gaxiola. Why would they try: motivation and motivating in low-stakes information skills testing.
- Elizabeth Gadd, Andrew Baldwin, Michael Norris: The citation behaviour of Civil Engineering students
- Stephanie Rosenblatt: They can find it but they don't know what to do with it: describing the use of scholarly literature by undergraduate students
- Jodi Tyron, Emily Elizabeth Frigo, Mary Kathleen O'Kelly: Using faculty focus groups to assess information literacy core competencies at a university level
- Ned Fielden, Mira Foster: Crossing the Rubricon: evaluating the Information Literacy instructor
- Daniel Beck: The role of Information Literacy in the provision of virtual reference services at the enquiry desk.
Photo by Sheila Webber: trees around St Mary's church, Hailsham, November 2010.

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Combatting cheating

A book that was published later last year and I missed reporting:
Davis, S., Drinan, P. and Gallant, T. (2009) Cheating in School: What We Know and What We Can Do. Wiley. ISBN: 978-1-4051-7804-4
("School" here covers secondary and tertiary education, not just what we would call "school" in the UK) It discusses why students cheat and short and longer term ways of deterring cheating. There is more information at: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405178043.html

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