Plagiarism. I have been thinking over some of the cases of plagiarism I've run into over the last few semesters. As a writing teacher of a certain type, I'm accustomed to creating assignments that ask students to address relationships between our readings, and these are not as likely to be subject to cheating via pre-existing papers. As a result, I grew complacent, perhaps, about plagiarism, and as I began to give more assignments based on the web, where students chose many of their own readings -- and cutting and pasting was so simple -- plagiarism returned as I had not seen it in a long time. So I've been thinking about it.

And I think that people sometimes take shortcuts, usually knowing better, but not knowing very well what they stand to gain by doing their work themselves. Most students haven't had the experience of building a body of knowledge in a community of trust; most don't know first-hand what professionalism feels like and what its rewards are for the individual and the community. Even though many students know better than to do what they are doing, they primarily know about punishment and wrong-doing; they don't know about the rewards of labor and delayed gratification. They may tend to assume that great and proud things are done by people of great talent, rather than by people who persist. In this they are wrong, and the shallowness of our culture has helped them make this misjudgment.

Yet blogging invites a fuller commitment to community, to working day by day, to making something slowly over time, to accumulation by labor rather than by inheritance or theft. Anyone who has written a few hundred posts knows this pretty well, I'd say -- I didn't really understand this aspect of blogging for some time, myself -- but we're back at the problem with the first few months of blogging. We need a catchy name for that time -- something that indicates the patience that one needs to endure the long quiet before things ignite. And perhaps most of all, we need a body of practices to support our students through that time, I'd say -- to grant them a sufficiently engaged audience until they manage to create their own. Then it will not be so tempting to cut and paste one's way through, and the real work will get done. [2 & P]

Home schoolers and blogging. I wonder if anyone can point me in the direction of one or two notable uses of blogging or wikis by home schoolers? [1 & P]