Please copy me.
Some will claim that the injunction not to waste our time producing something
that's already been done is actually a way of encouraging us to do little more
than copy/paste. Others, however, claim that if Koheleth was right, the best we
can hope is to hone our copy/paste skills. David Wiley, at Utah State University
even gives an assignment of
this sort. He describes an assignment he gives his students:
The twist (there always is one) is that they were to
write as little of the paper as possible. You see, wholesale plagiarism is discouraged,
but weaving together a coherent piece from ten or fifteen different extant sources
is tough and an excellent chance to get some first hand experience with reuse.
But the difference between plagiarism and quoting is often little more than one
of context. Traditional academic writing, after all, contains only a very small
percentage of "original" thought, usually tagged on at the end of an
extensive review of the existing literature. Wiley's assignment hardly seems very
different from that.
Go to: Learning by teaching, or
Go to: Who's the boss, or
Go to: Inventing wheels in cyberspace.