Fostering Relationships in the Classroom

Read More

Trial By Fury: CHAT and Amanda Knox

In Douglas Preston's Trial By Fury, we see an example that's very close to the types of writing research I'm expecting you to do for your projects.  Although Preston doesn't directly reference Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, his work shows the interplay between social media genres such as websites and Wikipedia and the social factors surrounding the writing.  For our discussion, we want to look at the relationships he's found the ways in which he's organized these into a coherent narrative.

Read More

Avoiding Plagiarism through Good Research Practices

For today's discussion, our goal is to look at how effective research practices can help us avoid plagiarism and protect us from false accusations.

Topic 1: Research Practices
Here, we consider which research practices help avoid plagiarism. Think about how some of cases were accidental versus purposeful. And what about the case where no plagiarism occurred? How might an author defend his or her work against a false accusation? What documents would be needed to provide such a defense?

Topic 2: Why Plagiarism Hurts Scholarship
In this topic, we're going to look at how plagiarism hurts research as a whole. In what ways can plagiarized papers "cheapen" the work of others?

Topic 3: How Do We Identify Plagiarism?

This is a complex topic. I'm not looking for "right" or "final" answers here - instead, we're just bringing up the issues as a way to understand the difficult complexities here.

Read More