Plagiarism is Good™ Revisited

So, a while back I said I’d write about my Plagiarism is Good™ idea.

I still haven’t had a chance to pull all my thoughts together, but thought this might be a good update.

I’m now beginning to think that the Plagiarism is Good™ idea is really a suite of tools/services and approaches to looking for use and reuse on the web, especially of open educational resources.

So if you accept the outcomes from this Ph.D. dissertation Patterns of Learning Object Reuse in the Connexions Repository…basically nobody is taking modules from Connexions, modifying them and then sharing them back out through the Connexions platform. One can ask about other types of reuse, especially for sites like MIT OCW. We have metrics of access (web hits, downloads), but those are only proxies to use. How might we get at use?

CutAndPaste Reuse Tracking Tool (CAPReTT™)

So the second tool (the first is plagiarism detection ala TurnItIn that shows where folks are taking whole sites) is what I’m calling a CutAndPaste Reuse Tracking Tool (CAPReTT™). I’ll be the first to say that I didnt’ come up with this idea myself, but rather I thing it’s an interesting tool to build and deploy for OERs*.

The tool is server-side: there’s a tracking server and also javascript that gets embedded in every page. When a user does a cut (and paste) from a webpage with the javascript, a ping is sent to the server to track what’s been cut (I think). And when the user pastes the text into rich text aware editors (a limited number of them are supported) you can get an attribution statement, link back to the source, and Creative Commons license (from data embedded in the document). If the user pastes into a non-supported location, a basic set of information is included with the paste. So in one fell swoop you get attribution and license propagation, as well as a record of what’s being copied.

It may be true that there’s more as-is use than reuse (I’ve been working under the notion of use as adoption and adaptation of these resources since 1997), I think there are more complex notions of reuse than just what was examined in the Ph.D. dissertation above.

*I read about the original tool on the Creative Commons blog post. The original tool is run by a company that will track what users cut and paste from your website. It’s pitched as a way of tracking what gets used and to make sure the original site is attributed. Hrm, that’s exactly what we want to do for educational purposes. If the company was a bit more forthcoming about what it might do with the data it’s collecting, or explaining its business model it might be more acceptable to a group like MIT OCW, or universities in general.