That’s how it feels to try and teach copyright issues to my students, most of the time. Many of them who came from other countries reported having zero awareness that copyright law even existed, for most of them it was like re-training them to understand the importance of avoiding plagiarism. In some cases, especially for the students from China (and I will be interested to hear about Meghan has to say about this), they had been told that the only thing that mattered was the right answer, and where it came didn’t really matter. Like I said, head -> wall.
However it’s come to my attention recently that I’m no copyright saint, either. Although I strive to follow a set of rules similar to UBC’s ‘Fair Dealings’ policies, I know I’ve fudged that ‘10% allowance’ when using resources once or twice, especially when I needed to use a textbook that didn’t have enough copies for every student. I also love finding sources, whether visual or text, to incorporate into my courses, but I haven’t always been the best at citing them – this is something I’ve become more aware of recently and plan on being much more disciplined around, to be a better model for my students. Even though teaching them how to cite an online image can be a test of one’s saintliness, I need to make it clear to them the importance of abiding property laws.
For a very long time I didn’t heed my parents’ warnings about the internet ‘never forgetting’, and considered it a fairly anonymous place. In recent years I’ve been learning just how misguided that is, although thankfully not because of any personal experiences or run-ins with the law. It hit home in a big way one day when my Principal told me she was screening some of the teachers she had interviewed online, seeking them out on Facebook and other social sites. Now my digital footprint is almost entirely ‘professional’, or mundane enough that it wouldn’t prove incriminating. It feels like more than ever my students are creating vastly connected worlds online, many with the illusion of anonymity or impermanence, but just as my parents said years ago about Facebook can be said now about Snapchat – the internet never forgets.
The Digital Tattoo site is something I could see using to try and increase conversation with my classes in the future, to open up discussions about copyright and the possibilities and pitfalls of using the internet. As of yet I haven’t had the opportunity to take on this endeavour with students born in Canada, where they will have (hopefully) heard the narrative around academic integrity throughout their schooling – but perhaps some of my classmates will have experience in how this tends to go! Thankfully there are plenty of online resources available now, including Plagiarism.org, TurnItIn.com’s free resources (including this excellent run-down of the 10 most commons forms of plagiarism), and plenty of articles about people caught in the act. I would like to think that with discussion, teaching of skills, and peer-and-self checks (along with high standards kept by me) students will learn how to avoid the common errors around plagiarism – and hopefully even understand the moral implications of it, too. Perhaps it’s a maturity issue, perhaps we all assume we’ll never be the one to get caught – but whatever it is, it’s going to be worth integrating into our teaching more than ever.
End note: At my parent’s home last year I picked up this copy of the Walrus, that featured an article about what it called the ‘plagiarism epidemic’ in Canada’s universities. I don’t have enough confidence to recite it, and it looks like you have to buy the issue to read it, but if any of you come across it, it was a good read!