In contrast to the extension of corporations' intellectual property rights are the diminishing rights that colleges extend to their students. The year 1998 illustrates those opposing trends, with passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the extension of copyright term, and the ascendancy of Turnitin.com. Student writing is now widely understood in terms of capital: the rights to intellectual property produced by students are held by the college and by the corporation to which the college donates that property. The entire field of anti-plagiarism activity has come to be understood in economic rather than educational terms.

Recent research has acknowledged the disproportionate number of L2 writers who are implicated in plagiarism cases (Yamada, 2003; Bloch, 2001; Evans & Youmans, 2000). L2 writing teachers, therefore, are challenged to find effective strategies for helping students understand the ethics of source-based writing in academic contexts, across the curriculum. In this presentation, the speakers will discuss potential reasons for the high number of L2 plagiarism cases and then present several strategies for helping L2 writers avoid plagiarism. Workshop attendees will receive handouts describing classroom strategies for helping students avoid plagiarism, and the presenters will also share examples of original writing assignments designed to assist students in developing an understanding of the conventions of citations in academic written English.

Most instructors suspect plagiarism when they detect stylistic shifts in students' writing. Such stylistic shifts are most easily detected in the writing of students with limited English facility. As a result, second-language writers are at a higher risk for accusations of plagiarism than are their native-English-speaking peers. This presentation explores how educators might best address the fact that an inevitable artifact of universalized plagiarism policies is discrimination against L2 speakers.

Research into undergraduates' use of sources raises significant pedagogical challenges in teaching students how to select, comprehend, and critically evaluate source texts. What may appear to be reasonably well-cited syntheses of source texts may, when closely analyzed, exhibit a shallow engagement with texts that are for the most part poorly selected. This presentation reports on this research, exploring connections between text engagement and plagiarism and describing pedagogy that may help students not just dress their writing neatly but also arrive at a full understanding of the sources used.

This presentation will report research that investigates the relative opacity or transparency of citations in the researched writing of 18 US undergraduate students. The research replicates some of the methods used by Pecorari as she studied UK international graduate students. The US study, which was not controlled for nationality or home language, reveals far less extensive word-for-word copying than Pecorari found. Rather than copying extended passages, the US students engaged in sentence-internal patchwriting. Their citations, however, were predominantly opaque, not indicating that the students were paraphrasing, copying, or patchwriting from the source and not revealing the extent of the information taken from the source. The students were, in other words, misusing source texts just as extensively as were Pecorari's--but in different ways. Plagiarism-detecting software would fail to reveal these students' problems with reading source texts critically and writing about them dialogically. The presentation will conclude by reflecting on the ways in which popular definitions and detection of plagiarism disadvantage international students, when native-English-speaking students are misusing sources just as extensively.

This presentation offers the results of a rhetorical analysis of the discourse of plagiarism in the blogosphere, as bloggers talk about the experience of being plagiarized. The analysis will focus on the tropes employed in this discourse and compare them with the tropes used in print publications to discuss plagiarism. What assumptions about plagiarism are shared in the blogosphere and in print? How do the assumptions diverge? What can the similarities tell us about the cultural work that plagiarism discourse accomplishes? What can the differences suggest for institutions' and organizations' plagiarism policies?

Instructors' best response to concerns about plagiarism is to teach students how to do their own writing and to design assignments that students want to do. This workshop will explore principles of assignment design that produce not just plagiarism-proof assignments but intellectually rich exercises in which students have a sense of investment and engagement.

A few short years ago, the research paper was a staple of college curricula. Instructors assigned papers; students conducted a library search for sources and read some of what they found; they wrote up a report of or argument from those sources; and they quoted from and cited the texts. Now, however, educators are reporting a reluctance to assign research papers, because of a perceived flood of internet plagiarism. What is needed in response to concerns about plagiarism is a renewed commitment to teaching research. Students need to learn how to find sources in the library and online; how to evaluate them; how to summarize, paraphrase, and quote from them; and how to cite their sources. If we are to have a literate populace capable of making informed decisions, educators today need to teach critical information literacy and ethical use of sources.

This workshop begins by describing an appropriate and useful protocol for contemporary research assignments: choosing a single topic for the entire class to research; collaborative exploration of that topic; and then students' choice of focused subtopics for individual research. Workshop participants explore possible applications and adaptations of this protocol for research assignments in their own classes.

Complicating educators' concerns about "internet plagiarism" is the problem of low levels of information literacy. With the advent of the internet, we are suddenly experiencing a culture-wide crisis in information literacy. Many students know how to find sources on the open internet but do not know how to evaluate them nor how to access the "hidden internet." Many instructors are adept at evaluating traditional print sources but are less certain about online sources; and they, too, often lack facility with research on the hidden internet. The result can be widespread plagiarism and widespread suspicion of students' online research. While taking into account the workload issues that instructors must manage, this workshop offers guidelines for instructors to develop their own online information literacy and to communicate it with--or collaboratively build it with--their students.

In the same year that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act were passed, Turnitin.com emerged as a commercially successful response to educators' concerns about students' plagiarism. These three phenomena characterize an era of culture-wide anxiety about the misappropriation of text. Typically, these concerns are expressed in ethical terms and are enacted in stricter, more rigorously enforced laws and regulations. In addition to these concerns about individual ethics, educators need to attend to the interaction of plagiarism and education: the ways in which acts of plagiarism undermine the learning that is supposed to result from education; and the ways in which incidents of plagiarism can point to curricular revisions that can result in better teaching.

Every writer struggles with the task of writing about sources that are difficult to comprehend. Typically, inexperienced writers "patchwrite" from these sources, borrowing language from the source--sometimes with source attribution, sometimes not. This workshop describes patchwriting not as a criminal act of academic dishonesty but as a sign of the writer's struggle with a challenging source text. We will explore methods for teaching students to write from sources, as well as methods for teachers to differentiate acts of academic dishonesty from sincere attempts to engage source texts.

Students need to know whether they can use visual sources created by others; how to cite them; and whether it is ethical to alter them. Students who create their own images and circulate them online need to consider whether to copyright their work or to assign a Creative Commons license to it. This workshop overviews these two sets of issues; offers pedagogical suggestions; and engages faculty in the creation and revision of assignments that draw students into responsible creation and appropriation of visual sources.

Textual standards vary from one culture to another. As English solidifies its role as the global language, its textual standards are becoming the norm. The problems that this creates for international students are important for U.S. faculty to understand. That understanding in turn suggests ways whereby faculty can adopt a developmental approach to all students' use of sources.

Much of what has traditionally been classified as "plagiarism" and thus as "academic dishonesty" is neither an immoral act nor a failure to cite sources correctly. Rather, patchwriting (copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes) represents a writer's attempt to understand a challenging source text and master its language. Pedagogy can help writers through the process, towards improved strategies for reading and writing about sources.