Week 2 Review: Exhibit 1 - Plagiarism by Doug Peterson
,We have all experienced the lecture on directly copying your neighbors homework or plagiarizing on your essay. I'm sure that when I begin my teaching career I will emphasize the importance of doing your own work to my students. In the adult world, however, this subject expands into the commercial world. In his blog, Doug off the Record, Doug Peterson discusses the theft of Richard Byrne's hard work on his blog Free Technology for Teachers. This isn't an area that I had really thought of as being a problem with theft but the points they bring up show how hard work can be easily punished through the theft of their own creativity.
Doug comes back to two main points on why this was understandably upsetting for Richard throughout his post. It is both intellectually and financially a problem. Intellectually, Richard writes his own blog and comes up with all of his own original content. This is what helps build his success as not only a blogger, but also as a speaker. The financial side may not affect many of us, such as Doug and myself, as neither of us receive any compensation by selling advertising through our blogs/websites. Richard, however, does. He also advertises his own courses that he offers.
Doug shows the picture to the left on his original post. It shows how similar the two are and how Richard has been stolen from. I learned a lot about security and different sites that bloggers frequently use to get information and then protect it. He did mention that there are maybe a couple upsides to this for Richard. It spreads his work to new audiences and hopefully, readers will recognize where it came from originally and will go to his site instead. Richard also has a message on the bottom of each post which says it was originally posted on his blog and that other's don't have permission to use it. Doug's post had been recently updated to add that the hosting company had taken down the offending blogger's page. This will hopefully put a stop to this person's copying, but that doesn't mean that others won't step up to take their place or aren't already using other blogs for their own gain. People seem to think that using someone else's work is easier than doing their own, a problem that dates back to elementary school when you peek at your neighbors math facts. I suppose this is just another sign that as teachers we should work hard to instill not just the lecture to not cheat, but the moral values that motivate students and adults alike to develop their own work into something they can be proud of.
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