La poesía no pertenece a quien la escribe sino a quien la necesita.
I would like to use this blog entry to comment on the articles by Block and Pecorari and to muse a little bit on Autumn’s question.
Out of these two readings, my attention was mainly drawn to the idea that cases of plagiarism may be a window for educating our students rather than for incriminating them. I guess that is what I mean last class when I said ‘there’s much more to plagiarism than penalizing’. However, I have to affirm that when Pecorari says (p. 241) ‘…when plagiarism is unintentional, a productive response is to educate about, rather than punish…’, I do not agree entirely. I think plagiarism is an opportunity for reflection even when it is intentional. I really do not see the point in ruining a student’s reputation and career prospect for a mistake of this kind. Obviously, if it is a repeated action, there is no point in reflecting about it, but if it is the first time, I would rather sit down and discuss with the student the reasons why he/she did it. I believe this would be a very good chance to help the student understand the implications of borrowing other’s flow of argumentation and the ideology behind it. I believe the student and I as a teacher can gain much more from that than from just starting some sort of disciplinary procedure.
In relation to Autumn’s question, I believe that these issues can actually be brought in the L2 classroom. Actually, bringing these issues up in the classroom would be a fantastic idea. Not only because it would help students grasp the concept of plagiarism as understood in ‘Western cultures’, but also because it would provide room to discuss the tenets of the capitalistic worldview. And, after all, learning a language is much more than figuring out how to put pieces of a system together. Understanding and getting to know the cultures behind the language is probably the most exciting part. Therefore, the significance of individuality, the right to accumulate capital (even if this is tangible or not), the desire to compete and outshine others (dear American classmates: please forgive me if this is too biased and oversimplified) are all issues that can help students from other cultures understand not only the language but the dominant ideology of countries like the US. I believe that this approach is more sensitive than just telling our students ‘do this because that’s how they do it’.
Finally, in relation with Block’s article and his elaboration on the effect of the internet over the ownership of texts, I must say that, although I do not know much about how this is changing and where this is going, I think IT IS changing in a way. Here, Autumn’s question from her last blog entry, about the possibility of adopting more ‘Eastern views’ (whatever that might mean) comes into play. We have been hearing for a while about the advocators of freeware, people who give up their property rights in order to share their work with thousands of users. Although one might debate the purpose behind this, it is clear that the concept of ownership is being revisited. Also, a project like Wikipedia, which was predicted to be a failure by many people when it was created, has become an unprecedented success. Many said nobody would give up their time to share their knowledge for free, and time has clearly proved them wrong. Additionally, even though many people question the validity of such a project, studies have been conducted to compare its reliability in comparison to prestigious sources such as the Encyclopedia Britannica showing the there are no significant differences in this respect. However, I do not intend to claim that this happening because of the influence of China, or any Eastern cultures. I prefer to say that the collaborative era is bringing about changes in what is understood by owning a text. And these changes seem not to have an origin in the core of capitalism (this is probably too naïve on my part). It seems to me that what is becoming important is not the ‘ideas’ you own, but what you do with those ideas.
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