Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais
Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais
Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais
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eng<br />
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s<br />
One place where ingenious surveillance programs are now common is within<br />
contemporary education. As students begin to learn the various uses of digital information,<br />
they often face systems that immediately define them as suspects of a<br />
variety of crimes and misdeeds. At the very moment in which young minds are introduced<br />
to the rich resources of the world’s intellectual commons, they are warned<br />
that perhaps the most important aspect of their quest for knowledge is to desist from<br />
borrowing (stealing?) other peoples’ words and works. A prominent example of this<br />
message surrounds a computer program called Turnitin marketed by the iParadigms<br />
corporation. Within schools, universities or courses that have purchased Turnitin,<br />
all students are required to deliver their papers in digital form. The Turnitin program<br />
then scans each paper, comparing it to a collection of exiting student papers,<br />
as well to a vast <strong>da</strong>tabase of web pages and other information sources looking for<br />
evidence of plagiarism. At the conclusion of process each paper receives a “score.”<br />
The score is not for creativity, mastery of the subject matter or intellectual brilliance;<br />
no, not at all. Turnitin scores each paper for the amount that has been “plagiarized”<br />
from outside sources 1 .<br />
The Turnitin program, which might also be called “TurnThemIn” or “TurnThe-<br />
LittleBastardsIn,” is now used in many thousands of classes worldwide and has been<br />
adopted by whole higher learning institutions. The iPardigm web page exclaims,<br />
“Find Out What More Than A Half A Million Educators Know! Turnitin Works to<br />
Find and Prevent Plagiarism.” The pe<strong>da</strong>gogical assumption of the program is that<br />
much of what students are doing is theft and ought to be punished — a powerful<br />
message delivered to a generation of young minds. Along with other plagiarism<br />
scanners — Viper, EssayRater, Plagiarism-Finder etc. — Turnitin casts a <strong>da</strong>rk shadow<br />
over the creativity and spirit of inquiry upon which an open society depends.<br />
It is true that, these <strong>da</strong>ys, most university professors find instances of obvious<br />
plagiarism, the copying of materials from web pages and the like. In my experience<br />
as a teacher, however, these abuses are fairly rare, easily detected, easily prevented,<br />
easily corrected 2 . What is pernicious about products like Turnitin is that they judge<br />
1. http://turnitin.com/static/index.html.<br />
2. Instances of plagiarism are usually noticeable in an abrupt change of style in a student’s written<br />
work. Suddenly, the prose sounds like a polished law review article, for example. This is what educators<br />
often call a “teachable moment.” One asks the student to come in an office visit, presents them with<br />
the evidence and asks for an explanation. From that point on a conversation can ensue, one having to<br />
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