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Social Media Encourages Plagiarism in Classroom?

Discussion in 'US – Staffroom' started by michael_c_yarbrough, Dec 1, 2017.

  1. michael_c_yarbrough

    michael_c_yarbrough New commenter

    Recently I found a controversial article about Social Media impact on educational process.
    What do you think about it? How to deal with this problem or it's not a problem?
    My students always take their smartphones and tablets in classroom, and of course they use social media, playing games and searching something on web. I'm understand that it's the digital era, but how to find the right decision to pay students attention on subjects and prevent cheating.
  2. elder_cat

    elder_cat Established commenter

    Even if social media doesn't 'encourage' plagiarism, it certainly enables it.

    Whether or not a student plagiarises, is a simple matter of choice, weighed against the percieved consequences, and as long as the benefits outweigh the consequences the temptation to do it will be there.

    Taken from the source you quoted above:

    Teach your students the difference between copying, citing, quoting, and plagiarism. In many instances, students plagiarize without malintent, but instead because they want to use the words of someone who “put it better.”

    I spent time with my student groups running through all of the rights and wrongs of plagiarism and how to avoid it, yet still some plagiarised.

    For some it was because they did not have the necessary language ability to express themsleves as well as they wanted to. Others struggled with the ability to paraphrase, again due to a lack of language ability. This is especially true if the topic they're being asked to address is technical in nature.

    For others it was simply a question of time. They didn't want to spend the time it took to paraphrase, and cite their sources correctly, and were simply confused about the plethora of different ways of citing different types of works.

    The best way I found to attempt to address it, was to ensure that if ever the work submitted seemed to be better than what I had anticpated, I then backed it up with a verbal assessment, to satisfy myself that they did actually understand what they had written in a proper context.

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