This past week, I worked with a couple of other members of the Writing Department at GVSU to prepare a position statement on plagiarism detection software. GVSU only recently acquired a subscription to Turnitin, and myself and the other teachers were concerned that teachers in other disciplines would be unware of the issues surrounding plagiarism detection services. The following is the full text of the statement which has been distributed on our campus.

Note: CCCC-IP has begun a resource page on plagiarism detection services.

Issues Raised by Use of Turnitin Plagiarism Detection Software

Overview

Recently, Grand Valley State University purchased a site license to plagiarism detection service Turnitin.com. Faculty members who use this service can require students to submit writing assignments electronically to Turnitin, which compares student texts against Turnitin’s database of Internet sites, academic journals index, and previously student submitted papers and prepares a report indicating where in the text plagiarism has been detected. Writing submitted to Turnitin is maintained in the database for comparison against future submissions by other students.

Scholars and teachers in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, as well as other academics, have discouraged the use of plagiarism detection services. We recommend that before using this service, faculty members consider several important issues raised by the use of Turnitin.

After just a couple of weeks at GVSU, I've decided that I don't like Novell Groupwise. Palm Desktop software seems a much more user friendly calendar and contact management program. So since I recently ditched my Treo phone in favor of Motorola V915, I have to find an alternative calendar and contact information. I had high hopes for the Motorola Phone Tools application so I could sync calendar and contact information, but it basically sucks unless you use MS Outlook. The desktop interface is just crappy, so bad that I can't believe that they sell it. It's really not worth anything more beyond using it to back up the phone contact list.

So it's back to Palm with a new Zire 22. Now I'm looking at how I can create the best syncing and access solution. Palm Desktop works great on the PC and iCalendar will sync with it via the Mac G5 in my office. What would round this out nicely is if I could get Google Calendar to sync with everything so that my calendar is available when I've forgotten to carry my Zire, and eventually, move toward syncing my phone.

It's possible to subscribe to a Google Calendar with iCal. CompanionLink for Google Calendar may be able to sync with my mobile phone and/or the Palm Desktop, but it costs money. And then there is GCalSync, an open source app that may let Google Calendar sync with my phone. Syncplicity is another potential option (when it's available). Anyone have any other application recommendations in this regard?

if:book has just posted about a new project: MediaCommons. From a theoretical standpoint, this is an exciting collection of ideas for a new scholarly community, and I wish if:book the best in building and promoting MediaCommons.

From a pragmatic standpoint, however, I would offer the following advice which I also discussed this weekend with the WPA during their yearly conference in regards to revising the existing WPA site and offering new services to members. The "If We Build It, They Will Come" strategy of web community development is laudable, but often doomed to failure. There are many projects around the web which are inspired by great ideas, yet they fail. Installing and configuring a content management system website is the easy part. Creating content for the site and building a community of people who use it is much harder. I feel it is typically better to limit the scope of a project early on and create a smaller community space in which the project can grow, then add more to serve the community's needs over time (more on this later).