Update
These days I'm reflecting a lot on my ESL/EFL career. Much of my job was trying to teach internationals the difference between using common expressions and plagiarizing. The hardest part of this, for them, was in what was called the lit review. "Joe Smith (2000) argued that red blood cells outnumbered white ones in these conditions"....how many ways can you say this? I argued that if you actually read or knew the thing you were talking about, and someone else's lit review wasn't right in front of you while you wrote, then your report would be your own no matter how you said it. And it would be revealed to be your by not having a number of other similar sentences lifted from the same lit review appearing in your report.
While I was at SIUC its president was accused of plagiarizing large amounts of his dissertation before he graduated from that university. It is documented here deep in the bowels of the blog, but the essence of it was something like this: He was guilty; he was heading for the world of politics and eager to get out of his college experience, i.e. simply in a big hurry and not counting on needing academic validation later; and, somewhat surprised that, after a political career spanning decades, he'd come back around to his very own university, though at a tumultuous time, and be asked to lead furious faculty out of a blistering union dispute. The fact that he'd actually plagiarized ruined his career - he could never lead faculty after that. And ironically, I thought, the topic of his dissertation was gifted education.
Fast forward to today: AI is writing dissertations. Nobody can argue about whether AI was used or not, they don't have the tools to argue. AI could have been used in the construction, the revision, the drafting, the research, the constructing of the bibliography; it may not even be a big deal that AI was used. But where's the line? Perhaps the modern world is figuring out how to get what you need out of AI since we can all clearly see that it's a waste of very hard work to slog through something a computer can do for you.
Some writers are militant Luddites about the situation and some, in academia, are no doubt the same. We worked for decades to get the skills to collate information and write about it, why should we let some computer come along and take our jobs? I myself am much more neutral about it. We'll lose our jobs anyway. These things come along and take over and there's not much anyone can do.
By the way I want to introduce my new ESL site where I will try to consolidate my work. It is not, in the end, important that I publish every single thing on Amazon. More important that I know where it is, so that those looking for it can find it. Mostly it's just me, looking for it.
While I was at SIUC its president was accused of plagiarizing large amounts of his dissertation before he graduated from that university. It is documented here deep in the bowels of the blog, but the essence of it was something like this: He was guilty; he was heading for the world of politics and eager to get out of his college experience, i.e. simply in a big hurry and not counting on needing academic validation later; and, somewhat surprised that, after a political career spanning decades, he'd come back around to his very own university, though at a tumultuous time, and be asked to lead furious faculty out of a blistering union dispute. The fact that he'd actually plagiarized ruined his career - he could never lead faculty after that. And ironically, I thought, the topic of his dissertation was gifted education.
Fast forward to today: AI is writing dissertations. Nobody can argue about whether AI was used or not, they don't have the tools to argue. AI could have been used in the construction, the revision, the drafting, the research, the constructing of the bibliography; it may not even be a big deal that AI was used. But where's the line? Perhaps the modern world is figuring out how to get what you need out of AI since we can all clearly see that it's a waste of very hard work to slog through something a computer can do for you.
Some writers are militant Luddites about the situation and some, in academia, are no doubt the same. We worked for decades to get the skills to collate information and write about it, why should we let some computer come along and take our jobs? I myself am much more neutral about it. We'll lose our jobs anyway. These things come along and take over and there's not much anyone can do.
By the way I want to introduce my new ESL site where I will try to consolidate my work. It is not, in the end, important that I publish every single thing on Amazon. More important that I know where it is, so that those looking for it can find it. Mostly it's just me, looking for it.
posted by tom @ 9:57 AM
0 Comments
This weblog is about my efforts, sometimes futile, to teach about plagiarism to international students. Deeper in the blog is a documented story (if the newspaper articles still are there) about how a really nice guy made a mistake...however, that's water under the bridge. My classes have always been full of nice people who made mistakes.
