Plagiarism? Patchwriting?

I've continued to think about the plagiarism discussion we had at the end of the technology session last Wednesday. I forget who posed the original question about technology's role in both facilitating plagiarism and detecting it (Diane? Jean?), but it was a good one. The internet and electronic writing have certainly made the issue more opaque, and as a result I think we as writing teachers need to foreground it with our students more frequently (and in more varied ways) than we have in the past. And we have to do so in ways that respect the complexity of how we circulate and revise ideas & information, intellectual & artistic material, etc. (digital environments provide many good test cases for this). Collage, patchwriting, recycling, peer-to-peer file sharing, collaboration ... there are certainly a lot of interesting, ambivalent, and elusive terms and practices floating around these days. I think teachers and students would benefit from sometimes discussing plagiarism and originality in these terms, rather than soley in the context of academic crime and punishment. I guess what I'm saying is that it may be counterproductive, ultimately, if we too crudely distinguish between "originality" and "borrowing."

If you didn't catch it (and I may not have had the title entirely correct), here is a very interesting book recommendation for those of you who might be inclined to pursue the matter from a more theoretical angle: Rebecca Moore Howard's In the Shadows of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. The editorial description of the book goes like this: "Who's cheating whom in college writing instruction? This book argues that through binary privileging of the "real" author (the inspired, autonomous genius) over the transgressive writer (the collaborator or the plagiarist), composition pedagogy deprives students of important opportunities to join in scholarly discourse and assume authorial roles. From Plato's paradoxicaly dependence on and rejection of Homer, to Jerome McGann's dismissal of copyright as the "hand of the dead," Standing in the Shadow of Giants surveys changes and conflicts in Western theories of authorship. From this survey emerges an account of how and why plagiarism became important to academic culture; how and why current pedagogical representations of plagiarism contradict contemporary theory of authorship; why the natural, necessary textual strategy of patchwriting is mis-classified as academic dishonesty; and how teachers might craft pedagogy that authorizes student writing instead of criminalizing it."

By the way, here is another great resource for studying, discussing, and teaching plagiarism; it's part of the Washington State University website.