Cooperation, Cheating, Collaboration, Plagiarism...where's the Boundary

Technology in education has created a lot of excitement and a lot of promise for needed changes.  It's also brought some headaches and challenges.  And none of those challenges is more vexing than the issue of cheating and plagiarism.  Technology seems to have blurred the boundary (if they ever were truly clear and distinct).  In a world of Google search and Copy & Paste, it can be very easy (and seductive) to "utilize" some ideas and phrasing from another.

Thinking about where these boundaries are was prompted by the work we're doing in the Tech Committee on developing a Digital Citizenship curriculum and a post from the Powerful Learning Practice blog.  Plagiarism vs. Collaboration explores this fuzzy area and provokes some interesting questions - like "is it cheating or is it our assessment methods haven't caught up?"  If you can look it up on Google, then what are we testing?

And that leads to some deeper thinking and questioning, like just what is cheating and why do students do it.  Do we combat cheating with rules and restrictions, or is it about how assessments are organized, their content, and what our expectations are.  A recent article in The Atlantic by a former teacher challenges some of our assumptions including the teacher's culpability.  The article also highlights research work by Assumption College education professor James Lang who explores some of these topics.

Cheating in school is most always thought of in relation to assessments of knowledge.  But what we don't seem to ask ourselves is how technology has changes our concept of what knowledge is and how it's demonstrated.  I thought this blog post from eSchoolNews explores a bit of this angle.

Why this is important for a technology discussion is that the specter of cheating and plagiarism is often one of the stumbling blocks teachers have when adopting new technologies in their classroom, especially going beyond sharing PDFs or PowerPoints online.  It's a serious issue and needs some serious attention.