Week 10 - Paper Tech

This week I learned all about the technologies associated with online collaborative documents and grading. I took the opportunity to play around a bit with the TurnItIn system (no waste of resources here - they only let you receive 1 report per 24 hour period). Just browsing through the reports gives a great perspective on the boundaries of plagiarism.

One of the most interesting notes came from the inclusion of the NPR blurb in a draft of the NPR company sketch. The blurb was straight from the MPR homepage, and it appeared dozens of other papers and articles. It seemed to be the standard block of information included in any paper that referenced the organization. I deleted it (though it may have made its way back into the paper). My thought was, "What can I say about this organization that others have not said? How can I structure this piece so that it tells the audience something new?" In this way, TurnItIn highlighted what I think is a common problem in paper writing. Without TurnItIn's demonstration that this paragraph has appeared nearly one hundred times before, it is very tempting to simply include the paragraph in the paper. After all, the paragraph is NPR's description of itself. Seeing the TurnItIn report, however, makes the paragraph seem a little trite and the report serves as a definite motivator to find something more original.

TurnItIn also calms the fears that the professor will have read a paper very similar to yours in the past - a paper that you never read, from a student whom you never met, but whose brain is wired exactly like your brain and whose paper is written along the same lines as your paper. Yes, this is probably a one-in-a-million chance, but students still worry about it. TurnItIn calms these fears, because it tells students instantly whether their papers are like other publications or papers in the database.

Google Docs is a nightmare. In a sweeping generalization - the world likes Microsoft Word. Any system that seeks to compete with Microsoft Word should offer the same functionality as Microsoft Word. Forcing users to play with CSS or HTML to create hanging indents is silly. I searched online and found that other users familiar with Word also had problems formatting their papers in Google Docs. If Google Docs turns off every student who needs to create a hanging indent, how do they intend to create a solid customer base? best of luck to them, but I'll be avoiding Google Docs in the future.