C4T #3

Micheal Vaughn's "World Shaker" - 15 iPad Skills Every Teacher and Student Should Know

In Micheal's blog, he is showing educators and students 15 different apps that you can download to your iPad to help with educating and learning. He has shown us apps that create digital stories and eBooks, create videos and audio clips, help improve their reading skill, show how to use Whiteboards, take notes and create written content, create mind maps and digital profolios, share their content, help with homework, and do research on their iPads. For his blog I asked him to tell me of ways to communicate with other students for situations such as group work or questions on different problems they are having with the iPad.


Micheal Vaughn's "World Shaker" - Why we should stop criminalizing practices that are confused with plagiarism?

In Micheal's blog, he is informing us on the reasons why we should stop the decriminalize certain practices now described under the rubric of plagiarism. In his post he posted the titles to four book that he said is a must read for people grappling with these issues. The titles are:
1. “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” by Richard A. Posner, a federal judge, a law school lecturer, and a prolific author, who writes persuasively on issues of plagiarism and copyright infringement.
2. “The Anxiety of Influence,” by Harold Bloom, a legendary scholar and critic from Yale, who considers the patterns of influence that govern how one author learns from another.
3. “Stolen Words,” by Thomas Mallon, a novelist and practical scholar who delves into a long history of literary theft, practiced by some of the most honored authors in the canon of English and American literature.
4. “City Editor,” by Stanley Walker. An influential New York City editor in the 1930s, Walker includes a chapter on the questionable literary and journalistic standards of his day.

The main focus on this subject in the blog is 10 statements:

1. "The so-called act of “self-plagiarism” is not plagiarism." - This statement can be paraphrased as this, "All successful writers “re-purpose” their work for profit and influence, but they should always be forthright with potential publishers on whether the work is brand new or recycled."
2. "So called “patch writing” — as long as it credits sources — is not plagiarism."
3. "Inadequate paraphrasing of a credited source is not plagiarism."
4. "Use of a clever or apt phrase — up to the level of the sentence — is not plagiarism as long as you thought of it independently, even if you find that others have used it before."
5. "Literary allusions — even a mosaic of esoteric ones — are NOT plagiarism."
6. "Boilerplate descriptions of news, history, or background are not plagiarism."
7. "Ghost writing is not plagiarism."
8. "Writing for genres — such as the legal brief or the sermon — in which there is a long tradition of borrowing without attribution is not plagiarism."
9. "Copying from other writers in what are considered collaborative ventures –newsrooms, wire services, press releases, textbook authorship — is not plagiarism."
10. "Copying from or borrowing the general ideas and issues that are emerging as part of the zeitgeist is not plagiarism."

I believe that students in the high school and college level can use this to decipher what is plagiarism to their teachers and peers. They can refrain from plagiarism if they read and follow the main focus of this blog.