Blog Post #13

With the vast amount of resources that can be found through the internet, many students these days fail to cite their sources of information. What is plagiarism? How can you avoid plagiarism? How do you think the concept of plagiarism change in Project Based Learning?

1. Begin by exploring the website plagiarism.org
2. Read Avoiding Plagiarism, Is It Plagiarism Yet?, and Self-Plagiarism: Ethical Shortcut or Moral Scourge?
3. Watch the video 10 Types of Plagiarism
4. Summarize what you have found in these websites, paying close attention to quoting, citing, and paraphrasing sources and avoiding plagiarism. Now answer the question: How do you think plagiarism will apply to Project Based Learning?

Answer the question in a post that adheres to the standards found in the ACCRS and in Writing A Quality Blog Post

Example of Blog Post #13:

According the plagiarism.org, plagiarism is"

• to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
• to use (another's production) without crediting the source
• to commit literary theft
• to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward." Ideas are intellectual property; therefore, according to the U.S. government, they can be stolen. Ideas fall under copyright law protection. Even using images, videos, and music without credits to the owners is a form of plagiarism. According to Avoiding Plagiarism, giving credit to a source is necessary for three things: to serve your reader, to respect your sources, and to support your work. The tricky part is that plagiarizing can be a very ambiguous situation, so it is important to know the different form that plagiarism can occur in. According to plagiarism.org and 10 Types of Plagiarism, these types are:

Also according to plagiarism.org, "a 'citation' is the way you tell your readers that certain material in your work came from another source. It also gives your readers the information necessary to find that source again, including:

• information about the author
• the title of the work
• the name and location of the company that published your copy of the source
• the date your copy was published
• the page numbers of the material you are borrowing"

Citations should be used anytime you present ideas that are not your own. They are also a moral necessity. Not only do you give credit where credit is required, but the originality of your own ideas is also emphasized. There are many citation styles, including Chicago, MLA, and APA. All of the standards for these citation styles can be found online, but it is typically the instructor who will assign the style for the assignment. The key difference between paraphrasing and quoting is the need for quotation marks. Direct quotes require quote marks, whereas paraphrases take the ideas of an original source and mold them into your own words, requiring only a source. 

According to Avoiding Plagiarism, plagiarism is not the only misuse of a source. Sources can be misquoted, used out of context, overused, and relied too heavily upon. This makes plagiarism nonetheless serious. According to Self-Plagiarism: Ethical Shortcut or Moral Scourge?,  one paradoxical form of plagiarism is Self-Plagiarism. When a student uses a paper or assignment for more than one class, it can be considered plagiarism unless the student has permission from both teachers. This is wrong. 

Lastly, according to Is It Plagiarism Yet?, when considering plagiarism, one must consider whether something is "common knowledge." When debating whether your reader might already know something that would be common knowledge, it is always best to be safe. If the idea is questionably not common knowledge, it is always best to cite it!

I believe that plagiarism and PBL will be a very complicated situation. PBL promotes research, using the ideas of others, and turning those ideas into your own. That sounds like it should call for traditional avoidance of plagiarism, but we saw with Mrs. Kathy's videos earlier in the semester that this might be changing. The internet is an obvious source of information. Things are becoming public and common knowledge much more easily than they once did. If people are concerned with self-plagiarism, I know that there will be continued talk of plagiarism and Project Based Learning in the future.