Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

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