Thoughts on Turnitin’s database

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I was reviewing some originality reports generated by Turnitin for some first year undergraduate work today and it struck me that their database  has grown to such an extent that I no longer trust it. I thought that this would never be the case. I assumed that as the database of harvested web pages and student papers grew, the accuraacy of detection would increase. Bigger is better, right? I didn’t think about noise though. There is some filtering in the Turnitin system, but increasingly it seems it isn’t good enough.

An example, one student has a list of 6 different sources all matching to small parts of student essays deposited as ‘reference material’ on courseworkinfo.com and related websites all owned byt he same company, and in likelihood sharing the same database. Do I believe that this student copied from this site? I’m not sure. Do I believe that each of the essays on the site may have originally been copied from wikipedia? more likely. Do I believe that all content on wikipedia is original? Not really.

Recycling and repurposing of text online is becoming so ubquituous that the noise is casuing a problem in the interpretation of originality reports. They used to save us time in investigating cases of plagiarism, now I’m not so sure.

I usually hate mindmaps

Since Alan has suddenly decided that he actually likes lists, I’ve decided to throw off my ‘bulleted-list-kindagirl‘ persona and attempt to use a mindmap for something useful.

I’m writing a review, looking at ‘dealing with plagiarism in the internet age‘. I’ve gathered my sources, read the majority of them and inwardly digested and cogitated. I needed a way to get my thoughts down quickly and organise them into a structure, so I used a good old fashioned pencil and paper and drew myself a mindmap.  It just sort of happened that way. It occurred to me (having been playing with google wave and wondering what on earth it was for) that it would be great to have a way to organise my papers within this mindmap structure. So, I redrew the mindmap on mindmeister and started going through the papers I had, adding them into the relevant sections of the map. I added notes to each citation to remind me why I’d put it there and what evidence or opinions I wanted to draw from the paper into the review.

This exercise has highlighted places that I need to do some more research and some papers have influenced the structure and content of the mindmap, but it’s getting there and has really helped me to begin to synthesize my thoughts.

Now, what would be really cool is a google wave robot that would crawl my mindmap, pull the citations and link them straight to the Citeulike bookmarks I’ve been keeping for this project and then direct to the DOIs (I’d have like IGOR to come and suggest/ pull up my citations as I was adding them too!) then when I pulled off the outline plan from mindmeister, I’d have an almost rewritten review complete with citations and live links to the references. Readers of the review would then have a clickable resource and a link to the Citeulike bookmarks to share and use.

Aargh! Turnitin fail

I’ve had my head against a brick wall today with several technical problems. The main one being that in some of our blackboard courses, Turnitin is not functioning, you can’t view old assignments, modify them or create new assignments. It turns out that this is because we were at the bleeding edge of using turnitin and we’ve been expired!

It’s rather tortuous but can be fixed by Turnitin, so if this has happened to you, get your admin person to contact iParadigms.

Way back in the mists of time (well it was 2004), we at University of Leicester installed an early version of the plug-in that connected Blackboard and Turnitin (version 1.something, I think). When a Turnitin Assignment is created on a Blackboard course using this plug-in, a corresponding class is created in Turnitin. This class is the container for the individual assignments and is a related to the stand alone version of Turnitin which operates like a mini VLE. This class container is never seen by the Blackboard user (instructor nor student), as they operate at the assignment level. the Blackboard module is their ’class’ equivalent.  The old plug-in set expiration dates on these classes, and having been around long enough, our Blackboard courses that first tried the Turnitin integrated system back in 2004/5 have now expired and so cannot use Turnitin in any shape or form. This is also a consequence of us recycling our Blackboard courses, keeping the content the same but refreshing the student cohort each year.

The good news is that this can be fixed by the Turnitin support staff in the States, who can renew the classes and set them to never expire, but it’s not something your institutional admin can sort out. the bad news is that until they fix it, these Blackbaord courses can’t use Turnitin and term starts on Monday. Fingers crossed for a quick response from the States!

Update: Monday 28 Sept. No it’s worse than that – response from TII is: ‘iParadigms have told us that all classes that are created have a maximum duration of 5 years. after this point they will expire and will not be able to be extended.’ This is a major problem for anyone that recycles their blackboard courses year on year and uses TII integration. All your courses will have a 5 year life span and then they will have to be re-made to reset the expiration date.  If this affects your institution please raise a support ticket to TII to ask them to rethink this policy. Emailing directly to requktii@turnitin.com. If this does not work, you can use the form at https://submit.ac.uk/help/helpdesk.asp

Plagiarism strikes again

The 3rd international plagiarism conference in Newcastle was OK. I am trying to summon up more enthusiasm than that, but can’t quite manage it. I enjoyed it, met some great people, it was well organised and so on (apart from the horrible lack of sockets for my poor eeepc!!) but I wasn’t as inspired as I have been at previous conferences. This could be because the field hasn’t moved on much since last time but I suspect it was mostly to do with web 2.0 discussions.

There were several speakers who tried to address the issue, Jamie O’Connell from Acumen PI (thestudentroom.co.uk) showed the Micheal Wesch video on hypertext, which admittedly, not everyone had seen, then actually mentioned that communication was changing (yes!) and ‘lots of people’ were using twitter (hurray!!). However, when I shouted out and asked him for his twitter ID, he said it was MrBeaver.

The message about online identity management still has a long way to go then….. Jamie, this stuff isn’t just for you young funky people – I thought that was the point of the presentation?!

Gerry McKiernan, Iowa State university, gave a great presentation about disruptive technologies (re-mix, re-use, re-new), including lots of stuff from horizon 2008, but just as he was getting going, he stopped short of what for me is the real message – will we care about plagiarism when web 2 really takes over? Who should we attribute in the traditional way when 10 people have collaboratively authored a document online? How will students who work collaboratively be assessed individually?

it’s fine to talk about web 2, but I still feel that it is an experiential technology, and I am not sure that either presenter demonstrated that they were under the skin of these things. Garry Allen was closer in many ways. He admitted to finally getting a facebook account when he realised that RMIT Melbourne’s internet traffic bill had doubled in the last academic year and the largest proportion of that traffic was going to facebook. He recognised that experience was key to understanding.