Howard’s “understanding internet plagiarism” was not what I expected and I’m happy about that. Statements like “a wholesale use of the service implicitly brands all of our students as potential cheaters, as redial subjects who must prove their worth” and “the biggest threat posed by Internet plagiarism is the widespread hysteria that it precipitates” really resonated with my current views on plagiarism. When professors begin to ask whether students today are less “moral” I sometimes wonder if they are not also lazy. There are ways to make assignments and exams that can help prevent plagiarism or at least catch it easily while grading. And though students can easily pay to have a custom assignment done online I’m not sure if this is something we should be spending out time worried about. If they don’t want to learn the material – they don’t want to learn the material, and there are other larger underlying issues.
Howard’s example of the Washington Post and Kurtz’s “Bush Gets Battered” story where links to other sources are sprinkled through the text, resonated with a research study I’m working on this semester where I examine the credibility (with a focus on the visual and technical) of blog sites. One of the blogs I analyzed recently did not have any text written by the author but just posted weekly links to other interesting stories. At first I thought this was ridiculous, how could he even call this a blog and why present it in this format (it is also REALLY ugly with a horrible banner and bad name.. I think it was “tommunications”, like his name is Tom)? But after clicking on a few of the links, they were SO helpful that I ended up spending more time with the information provided in that blog then most others (kind of weird though since most of his links were on wonderfully designed websites and blogs, he needs to read those). 
Still, other sites can provide so much information, with a 50 person blogroll, 50 ways to book mark a post, 100 favorite links that pop up with a “snapshot” every time you pass over them, etc., that it is overwhelming. Really the key to not cause frustration or dissatisfaction seems to be having the information easily accessible if readers wish but not throw it in their face once they enter the page regardless of their desire for exposure.
The plagiarism topic makes me uncomfortable in general (though I appreciated the distinction made between copyright and plagiarism since I wasn’t positive) because like Howard writes “comparison is grounded in a sense of writing as inherently moral activity and in a concomitant equation of morality and disease” (p.5). People with quite good intentions can easily be labeled negatively because of a misunderstanding or sometimes even questioning the parameters of copyright. I myself worry, with writing never-ending literature reviews, that maybe the way I’m phrasing something is too close to the primary source.
Furthermore, some of the potentially problematic assignments that Rife discusses in the article on the “fair use doctrine” seem to relate to many of the new assignments we’ve proposed in class and I think an analysis of the fair use doctrine prior to proposing the assignment is a great suggestion. Maybe I will copy and paste the 4 steps here?…
