Sheryl asks in a comment to my Cloud post, "do you think this forum, as it operates now, will be able to maintain its openness, or do you think that, over time, with increasing use and numbers of users, that copyright issues/conflicts will inevitably arise?" I think it's a great question. Copyright for me has always been a matter of balancing the rights of the producer with providing open access to ideas and I suspect that tension will remain with us. I'm excited about the current openness and wonder what new creative heights we might encounter if we openly shared ideas rather than closely guarding them as property. I'm reading a book "Wikinomics" and the author's primary assertion is that businesses today must move away from closely guarding their ideas to openness in order to compete.
I've been thinking about "mash-ups" which are multimedia remixes of content from a variety of sources but in a potentially novel way. In a sense my squidoo lenses are mashups because I have brought together content to provide a lens on a particular topic. Was the traditional term paper also a mashup of sorts (just without the multimedia bells and whistles)? Haven't we always built on the ideas of others? What distinguishes a good term paper from plagiarism? I would say that the author used a variety of sources, recognized those sources with proper attribution, developed a relationship with those ideas adding original thought or experiences, and composed a work that was readable. Those same criteria work for Web 2.0; we just have an explosion in access to ideas and to multiple media.
I sometimes wonder how we are changing our own evolution.
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I've been thinking about these concepts for a while. For me, what distinguishes our use of the web versus the way resources have been used for the traditional term paper clearly has to do with: 1. the vast number and variety of resources, users, and "content peddlers" (my term) available on the web and 2. the question of the verifiability of professionally credentialed, reliable web resources versus the proven (in other cases, perhaps assumed) professional reliability (by virtue of having been published)of authors of print resources used for traditional research.
I think my statement (while kinda wordy when I reread it!) is somewhat simplistic --- we all know and teach our students about using professionally-based and academic web resources, but I think that the sheer number and variety of all these amazing sites can be overly tempting to the less disciplined researcher. And this is one of the many reasons why our roles as teachers, librarians and info specialists are so important.
Wikinomics sounds good. I think we can apply that openness and collaboration, especially to the research paper.
The traditional paper really frustrates me. When I watch kids "research" in high school, I see the amount of cut and paste, wikipedia reliance and cloudy thinking that go into their papers on topics that teachers have been recycling for decades. Joyce Valenza said the other day that she had an "awakening" that all pathfinders should be wikis. I would really like to retrain teachers to rethink the high school research paper as collaborative wikis, with kids working in teams to create sites that might actually help others beyond the school walls. I think it might lead to better writing for a real audience, make students better miners of information, and encourage them to write in a language that will better suit them in the future.
The purpose of the research paper is to learn something about the subject and we have a new way to express that learning. Open borrowing from other knowledge bases, crediting the original, is better than cut and paste plagiarism. We would better serve them to teach them how to select reliable web sites and piece them together in a new and original way.
Now, how can we get rid of that "Ernest Hemingway" assignment?
Hi Sue,
How was ALA?
You know that I was in DC the same week you were. Didn't you think it was devastatingly hot all week? Yes, I know DC was built on a swamp! Of course, we did a lot of walking, so that increased my discomfort with the heat and humidity.
I'm trying to play catch-up with my "things" postings, and I know that I don't have nearly the projects/commitments that you are shouldering this summer!
Have a happy 4th of July. I will be in touch.
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