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Originality, Imitaton And Plagiarism: Teaching Writing In The Digital Age: Book Review, Ruth Walker

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

At one stage in the anthology Originality, imitation and plagiarism: Teaching writing in the digital age, it is pointed out that students 'worry' about plagiarism in the same way that they worry about engaging in file-sharing or illegally downloading software. That is - they don't. The attendant risks of getting caught or becoming vulnerable to a computer virus are recognised as the potential bad outcomes, but have become steadily normalised. This analogy, with its viral undertones, nicely expresses the quandary at the heart of a discussion of students' writing in the digital age, where the expanded possibilities of online research …