Stardate 20011019.1026 (On Screen): A university professor is concerned that the electronic revolution in digital communication will lead to an all-new era of plagiarism. She's concerned that students will have unprecedented ability to locate and use essays written by other students, thus not writing their own. I think she's grasping at straws and fingering the wrong villain.
Plagiarism by students is nothing new; I remember seeing magazine ads when I was a kid where you could mail away for such essays. Like everything else, the internet simply makes it easier. But the root cause is not that the kids are dishonest, but rather that like all rational people they see no reason to expend effort on busy-work. The sad truth is that most of the essays assigned to kids in school are a pointless waste of time; the kids don't learn anything by writing them. Anyway, you don't become a good writer by practicing writing; you become a good writer by practicing thinking. In order to write well, you must formulate what you want to say. Once you've done that, the medium by which you express yourself is unimportant; it could be a drawing or written words in a row or a song or a dance or a speech. Equally, people learn when and only when they are interested in the subject. All subjects are inherently interesting and all kids are curious -- but schools are designed in such a way as to stifle that. (Ted Nelson once wryly commented that schools are in the business of making students hate subjects; the one they learn to hate last is the one they make their career.)
The point? You can't plagiarize if you're writing something for the first time. If no-one else has ever said what you're saying before you, then plagiarism is impossible because there's nothing to steal. Writers in the real world won't face that problem because they have a will to express themselves and something new to say. Students, on the other hand, will always have an incentive to plagiarize because the work is pointless (from the point of view of the kid) and the subject matter is stale and rehashed. It would be easy to prevent this by having the teacher come up with a new subject matter each year for each class to write about. (Nah, never work; that would require the teachers to be creative.) But more to the point, if you challenge the students and intrigue them, and make them think, so that they really want to express themselves and find themselves with something to say, they'll write. I didn't become an effective writer until I was past 30, because I had no message until then. (discussion in progress)
