Teacher Struggles: Plagiarism in the 21st Century

At first blush, it's almost incomprehensible to anyone who went to school before the ascension of the modern internet, but blatant plagiarism is rampant in the twenty-first century classroom.  On assignments large and small, students are very comfortable directly copying the writing of others with no acknowledgement or attribution.  When the more ambiguous territory of giving credit for others original ideas, the idea of plagiarism is almost unimaginable to this generation of students - at least in my anecdotal experience.

We as teachers could be doing more, and are learning to do more to create lessons that help students understand the necessity of giving credit where its due and the value of going through the process of constructing one's own thoughts and ideas rather than adopting someone else's, wholesale.  If there are any younger readers on this post, let me make it clear for you WHAT the adult generation views as plagiarism, and WHY you shouldn't do it:

The WHAT: According to the Random House Dictionary via Dictionary.com (see the attribution there?), plagiarism is "an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author."

There are two key elements to this - first, you're using someone else's ideas.  This can manifest as a direct transplantation (i.e. you literally copy and paste text from another's work), or slightly modifying another's work by changing a few words or phrases, but preserving the essential meaning of the original work.  The first case is totally unequivocal.  The second case creates some gray area - it involves consideration of what sorts of information are "common knowledge" that everyone would take for granted - for instance, no one would claim you needed a citation if you wrote that Barack Obama was the president of the United States in your paper.  As a student, however, the guiding principle is simple - if you're taking words or ideas from a source, even if you're paraphrasing them into your own language without copying and pasting anything, you should attribute those ideas to the source in which you found them.  Otherwise, you've committed plagiarism.

The WHY: There are several reasons.

1. Honesty.  I could get into the utilitarian ramifications of dishonesty, how it impacts our interactions in society and how basic trust is an essential element to human civilization, but hopefully I don't have to.  Hopefully you can recognize on your own why being honest is something to be valued.
2. Understanding. There may be nuances or elements from the original text which you omit or fail to represent.  Anyone interested in engaging with your work needs to know where to look if they want to get deeper into the subject areas about which you're writing.
3. Process.  This particularly important for students, who often focus too much on the necessity of the product that they're asked to produce.  "What's the point in trying to analyze Beowulf?  Everyone's already pulled out the relevant insights out of it."  Breaking News: Your teacher doesn't want you to analyze Beowulf because he/she expects you to break new intellectual ground.  He/she is asking you to do it because he/she wants you to practice going through a particular thought process.  The biggest victim of any academic plagiarism is the student who commits it, because the student is robbing him/herself of the opportunity to think and learn.  When you make the decision to plagiarize, pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for choosing the path of persistent ignorance.

Now, onto the broader cultural exploration - why is plagiarism taken less seriously now?  I think there's an obvious connection to the internet, and I think there are several facets to this connection.  The first is the wide availability of information, which has a double-effect: first it creates the sense that the student will never be able to make a genuinely meaningful contribution because there is already such a proliferation of intellectual activity documented on the internet (see point #3) above), and second it creates a tremendous temptation.  Plagiarism is so much easier than it used to be.  On some niche websites, it's basically an industry.

The other aspect is more complex, because it has to do with appropriation and repurposing of others' work in the creative commons - the so-called remix culture.  I think there are genuinely wonderful things that happen when the flow of ideas is uninhibited and creative combination is encouraged.  But I don't know how to decouple this from the sense that the provenance of ideas is unimportant.