Re: [xmca] The Shadow Scholar - He writes your students' papers.

[Karen Heckert <heckertkrs@yahoo.com>]

I'd like to make two further observations:

I haven't read Engstrom's article, but I do want to stress this. You've got to 
know your students personally. First, if you know the student and how he/she 
normally writes, you will be able to catch any anomalies, like a paper obviously 
plagiarised or ghost-written. More importantly, you will be able to identify the 
type of student who is at risk and liable to resort to this sort of cheating. 
Most schools have remedial services that can help, but the student has to be 
aware and able to use them. Our elementary and secondary educational systems are 
so broken that we can expect many students to arrive in college without knowing 
how to write a lucid sentence. In many cases, the people who taught them English 
couldn't tell one tense from another either.

Secondly, how can we complain when "legal" plagiarism is rampant in university 
departments. How many times does the grad student do all the work of collecting 
the data, crunching the numbers, and writing the paper, only to have the 
"advising" professor put his name first when the paper is submitted for 
publication. Isn't this theft? Isn't this an invitation to cynicism? If the 
professor has advised or otherwise had some real input, then of course they 
should receive the recognition, but not as first author if they didn't do the 
great majority of the work.

So it isn't just the wayward students who are to blame. There's a whole culture 
of dishonesty out there, and it starts at the top.




________________________________
From: Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Mon, January 10, 2011 8:50:02 AM
Subject: Re: [xmca] FW: The Shadow Scholar - He writes your students' papers.

I don't want to take a position on this topic, but was curious about what
seems a contradiction between issues of "control and trust" in a manner
similar to Engstrom's article on the use of technology in middle schools and
putting computers in the hallway.  I wonder if the concepts  "control" and
"trust" are primary or basic constructs when discussing institutional
structures or containers.  I was wondering when reading Engstrom's article
if the terms control and trust were explanatory terms within  2nd person
actor narratives or if Engstrom abstracted these terms as explanatory 3rd
person narratives of what he observed in the middle school environment.  Do
others see a contradiction or tension in the discussion of plagarism or is
it a clear case of civic virtue?
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