Upon the curation of resources related to plagiarism, cheating, and original composition, I found an article by Stuart Wrigley that introduced the idea of “de-plagiarism”. At first, I believed de-plagiarism to be just another way of expressing how to not plagiarize, but Wrigley is actually speaking to an act/process that most people (I would wager) have engaged in or continue to do so.

The purpose of my resource is to demonstrate the concept of de-plagiarism to any audience in the education domain as it relates to the outcome of Academic Integrity:

  • Instructors and students will be able to utilize and draw from the appropriate resources (accessed from a variety of platforms: ie. videos, articles, blogs) to develop their own unique ideas and conclusions.
  • The educator will prepare students to include any citations or references in their work.
  • The educator will prepare assignments that include tasks that allow students to respond in original ways.

What is de-plagiarism?

If a writer were to rip text (copy/paste) from a source and present it in their own composition as original work, then we would say that they have plagiarized; they misrepresented someone else’s work as their own. To detect such an act, we would have to require some mechanism of detection. In our age of digital education, these mechanisms are tools such as plagiarism checkers (I describe them in my curation post).

If a writer were to rip text from a source and then alter the non-conceptual language to an extent where it could not be detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checkers, Wrigley would call this de-plagiarism. The difference between de-plagiarism and paraphrasing is in the procedure of writing: When paraphrasing, a writer composes blocks of text expressing their understanding of a concept. When a writer is de-plagiarising, they are not composing a stream of thought, they are just reverse engineering a block of pre-written text. I demonstrate this in my vide-resource.

Wrigley’s article raised two questions for me in defining this act:

  1. As educators, are we comfortable with de-plagiarism taking place?
  2. Are educators responsible for enabling de-plagiarism by telling students to “put things in their own words”?

I scored my resource against UC: Berkely’s guide on evaluating sources, the same guide I used for the resources I curated.

  1. Authority – The author is identified in the resource and their point of view is that their concept should be an important consideration when understanding plagiarism.
  2. Purpose – The source was created to demonstrate the fallibility of plagiarism checkers, but also to demonstrate that manipulation of text does not constitute composition. The resource is meant to address any audience familiar with plagiarism in the education field.
  3. Publication & format – The resource was published on an open education blog in the form of a video. Note, it is hosted on youtube due to the size limitations of the blog site.
  4. Relevance – The resource is relevant to the outcome of Academic Integrity (above), primarily in the goals of giving students the opportunities and spaces to develop unique ideas.
  5. Date of publication – The resource was created in July 2020.
  6. Documentation – The resource includes a reference list of all websites/blogs/articles featured in the video portion.

Moving forwards, I will be determining if this resource is successful in video format, or if it should be converted to a lesson/unit, akin to Gonzales’ approach to avoiding plagiarism.