Week 5 -- ownership, authorship & copyright -- oh my!

How do issues such as authorship, copyright and open access impact your desire, ability and willingness to engage in produsage, both personally and professionally?

So, I love open access! Now, what about copyright?

I'm actually old school here, or as Charl suggests, a "digital immigrant."

I still recognize the works of others as their work and do not feel free to approximate the works of others as my own. Do I use the works of others? Sho-enuf-do! A good friend once suggested if you want "steal" from others, "steal from the best" and then say where you "stole it." Of course, his view of stealing is taking what you want AND acknowledging the source.

I stand on the shoulders of giants and freely acknowledge what I have freely received. This seems so simple to me.

However, it is increasingly a foreign concept to my student. Each term over the last three years of teaching graduate school, we have seen an increase in the incidence of plagiarism and a corresponding increase in recalcitrance. There is a decreasing willingness to check for plagiarism and to jump the hoops to report or call attention to it. Even with tools such as Turn-it-in or SafeAssign, instructors are loathe to deal with plagiarism.

There are a handful of us who tackle it consistently. One persistent reply from the students is that they have been "doing this all along and no one else had a problem with it." They also complain that they have been straight A students and have consistently used a cut-and-paste approach to research papers.

Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur. It wasn't until we started studying "produsage" that I began to suspect that I may be peering into the mindset of the "digital native." Information is free and readily available. Students may feel that it is their "task" to assemble information into new montage -- kind of like taking various puzzle pieces and reassembling to make a new picture. Is their work not a new creation? Are the individual pieces perceived as communal property -- free to the user to use as s/he pleases?

When dealing with students, they often wonder why it is such a "big deal." On paper, we have a strict code of academic integrity which they all affirm. In practice, they really don't understand. I'm not convinced that it's stealing in their mind. I think they honestly don't get it.

I'm thinking we need to approach this differently. We need to raise issues of authorship and ownership and copyright. We need to discuss access and freedom and academic honesty. We need to get into the mind of the digital native and understand music downloads, fresh mixes, and produsage.

Next: ownership