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Americans Want Net Filters; Half of US Homes have Computers; and Plagiarism Revisited

19 October 2000

Survey Says...Americans Want Internet Filters in Schools
A few days ago, I cited an article on four congressmen who were ready to propose mandatory Internet filters for schools that take federal money for Internet development and access. The article noted that some conservative and liberal groups thought the bill was a bad plan, and were joining forces to lobby against its passage. But yesterday a study conducted by the Digital Media Forum found that of 1,900 people surveyed, "92 percent said pornography should be blocked on school computers, while 79 percent said filters should be used to bar hate speech." Naturally, the four congressmen were pleased and are now ready to redouble their efforts. Rebecca S. Weiner's full account can be found at the New York Times Online in Wednesday's 10/18/00 CyberTimes Education column at http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/18/technology/18EDUCATION.html.
Note: If you don't have a New York Times Online registration, you'll be asked to create one. It's free, quick, and they have a pretty good privacy policy.

Computers in Half of U.S. Homes, but Which Half?
A Commerce Department survey finds that the number of U.S. households with computers was at 51% in August, 2000, up from 42.1% in December, 1998. Still, while 51% of households have computers, only 41.5% have Internet access (though, to be fair, that's up 26.2% from a year earlier). The bigger story, though, is that the digital divide hasn't shrunk, "with Whites and people living in cities much more likely to have computers and Internet access than minorities and those living in rural areas." For more details, see Martin Crutsinger's AP report in the 10/17/00 Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20336-2000Oct16.html.

 

Note: Today's last two stories come under the rubric of "sometimes old news is still news to me."
 
Plagiarism and the WWW: A Service for Wary Teachers Only?
A recent question on a teacher discussion list (TechRhet@egroups.com) about services that detect student plagiarism of WWW-based writing led to recommendations of Plagiarism.org (http://plagiarism.org) among other services. The news on this is a few years old, but worth recalling. Salon ran a piece called "Busted: The Web's Plagiarism Police." The article's author, Andy Dehnhart, ran his own thesis through Plagiarism.org only to see it wrongly flagged as plagiarized. The problem, which Plagiarism.org's originator admits: "the service fails to properly differentiate between quoted materials and original writing." Like a grammar checker, the service cannot read, and doesn't really provide certainty, although the graphs and rhetoric Plagiarism.org uses when issuing its results sure do sound certain. Plagiarism.org is about as reliable as a grammar checker, and if you've read student writing that blindly followed a grammar checker's advice, you know that means. If you use Plagiarism.org or a similar service, beware of how it works, what its limits are, and remember that you still need to investigate further before rushing to judgment. To read Dehnhart's full account, originally published in June 1999, go to http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/06/14/plagiarism/index.html.

Plagiarism and the WWW: Here's Something Useful
Salon has an article that can help teachers address careful file management and downloading. In an essay on plagiarism and what it means, "Beg, Borrow, or . . .," Dwight Garner includes, via a link called "The New Plagiarism Flap," the story of how a book review in the San Francisco Chronicle managed to contain--*verbatim*--more than ten paragraphs from a review of the same book that had appeared in the Washington Post. It's a bizarre case of file downloading, an editor accessing a reporter's hard drive, and a final double-check by the reporter that didn't go beyond the first few unoffending graphs. The flap makes a useful cautionary tale, and the larger essay, "Beg, Borrow, or . . ." offers a way to talk about plagiarism that steps outside the usual "getting caught is academic death and damnation" mode. Garner's work can be found at http://www.salon.com/weekly/plagiarism960722.html.

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(Posted 10/19/00)