In a two-part mixed methods study, internet-based plagiarism amongst Norwegian upper secondary students was measured and related to performance level and knowledge of source use. Subsequently, interviews were conducted to explore these students' views on internet access and plagiarism during essay writing. The quantitative part of the study showed that 75% of the 67 students in the study plagiarised from the online sources and that plagiarism accounted for 25% of the total amount of text. Students with a higher grade in written Norwegian plagiarised less than those with a lower grade. Further, students more familiar with the correct use of sources did not plagiarise as much as students with less awareness. In the qualitative part of the study, individual interviews with 29 of the students indicated that the students wanted to spend as little time and effort as possible on the task and a great majority of the students wanted internet access whether they judged this an obstacle to their learning or not. They also preferred to have free access to internet content regardless of its relevance to the essay, and plagiarism was chosen as a writing strategy regardless of whether or not it was acknowledged to be a moral problem. More proficient writers explained their use of the internet in a more sophisticated way than less proficient writers. With these findings in mind, the different potential consequences of internet access for proficient and less proficient writers are discussed. Finally, some suggestions for further research are put forward.
From a learning perspective, social semiotics researchers tend to focus on the liberation latent in the multimedia options available through the new media. It is true that digital media democratise the possibilities open to the general public of a more varied and comprehensive text production than ever before, both in and outside school. Participating in this text production naturally implies a richer potential for learning. But digital technology also allows us to opt out of, and thus avoid, semiotic work. With this as the starting point, the present article sets out to highlight the pedagogical benefits associated with the written mode, precisely in an age when the digital media are making multimodal forms of expression increasingly available to us all.
In recent years, plagiarism has been on the increase across the Western world. This article identifies Internet access as a contributory cause of this trend and addresses the implications of readily available Internet sources for the teaching and assessment of writing in schools. The basis for the article is a previous study showing a wide incidence of plagiarism in the Internet-based writing of students in three classes at upper secondary school level in Norway. I relate the students' choices to writing as a cognitive process and as a cultural practice. My basic assumption is that the students' writing is work. It is this work we have in mind when we relate writing to learning and when we assess students' skills on the basis of their written texts. Access to the Internet changes the premises for this work because writing can be replaced by 'pseudowriting'. 'Pseudo-writing' is a work reducing writing practice, which neither excludes nor coincides with what we traditionally associate with plagiarism in schools. The main point in this article is that when students have access to the Internet during essay writing, the result is unavoidably a product of both writing and pseudo-writing. Internet access thus leads to greater uncertainty about the role writing plays in student learning and makes it more difficult to take written assignments into account in assessing students' school results and effort.
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