I overheard two teachers talking, the other day, about this "great" new(-ish) website, turnitin.com. Ya have students upload their papers to the site, and it checks them for plagiarism. "Our school has a reputation to uphold," one of said teachers added.
Hhhhhhh... Forgive me, but turnitin.com is not great.
Writing is hard. It would be convenient if writing could be made easy with step-one-step-two-step-three, but it can't. And students, if they are to become ("better") writers, need to struggle with the messy process that writing is. They need to write A LOT. They need teachers who support them in that struggle with constructive feedback and creative assignments that invite them to write every which way, in all kinds of contexts, with all kinds of purposes, real audiences, etc. They need to feel welcome to take risks as writers (and as thinkers, readers, speakers, web-designers). Writing, being creative, that shit is scary. it's intimidating. A good writing teacher will help students feel confident, not suspect. A good writing teacher will help students to engage, to feel as though they have a stake in good writing. A good writing teacher, will roll up her/his sleeves and get so involved in the writing process with the students that s/he would know each student's writing process and style well enough to render turnitin.com useless.
3 comments:
I have mixed feelings about turnitin.com. I believe that the website was originally designed for college professors, especially those with really large classes who don't have the time or manpower to get used to their students' writing styles. And in all honesty, there are way too many 18-25-year-olds who are ripping off the Internet and copy-pasting articles and essays other people wrote for credit who fing know better.
The problem is when teachers take it too far and every accidentally uncredited citation or poorly documented paragraph becomes OMG PLAGIARISM and they want to give the student a failing grade rather than instruct them in what they did wrong and help them to not make the same mistakes again.
I never felt compelled to plagiarize because my teachers worked with me to make sure that my writing was awesometastic.
SHA-BAM
well yeah, i guess if it stayed used by college professors with massive classes ONLY, i would have less of a problem with it (but not no problem). i don't know, it's just a little too preemptive-striking for me
awesometastic: NICE WORD.
shabam: also SWEET.
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