Ensuring that students turn in original written work is a concern on many a campus these days and tackled in many diverse ways. One approach is to have students “pledge” their work to indicate that it is indeed original.
My reservations on “forcing” integrity on somebody aside, I have noticed, that in both my classes, where I ask students to blog rather than write a paper, at least thus far, the work has been original and I’ve had no reason to believe otherwise. And I wonder if there’s something inherent to blogging that somehow facilitates this?
I’m not sure that a first year student (I team teach a first year seminar class) necessarily factors in the notion that blogging implies writing for a larger audience, while blogging, so that may not be why this is happening.
However, I do think that the informal writing style that blogging lends itself to plays a role in that it allows them to think about and engage with the material and perhaps do more research because of that? Student in my class today mentioned that he did far more research and reading for his second blog post than he did for the first so he could improve. So there may be some validity to this theory of mine.
I’m not negating the benefits of making them write papers with appropriate bibliographic resources here, but trying to ascertain if the model in and of itself still works with this generation of students? Given that they are more likely to turn to Wikipedia or Google scholar, how do we leverage that intuitive behaviour to incorporate good information literacy skills? How do we make it less forced and more natural? And if we do so, and in the process also teach them to validate their information sources, would we induce better and more honest writing?
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