Friday 11 January 2008

TurnItIn -Part 1

Am currently experimenting with the new 'turnitin' feature of bb. Hopefully this will make no sense whatsoever to most people, cuz this blog entry is for my course peoples only.

TurnItIn is the exciting new plagiarism checking device that universities up and down the country are either using, or thinking of using.

It has the capacity (IRRC) to compare YOUR essay to all sort of other writings, such as
*blackboard posts
*online journal articles
*the content of news websites
*pretty much the whole damned internets
*the books we might have used
*other peoples essays (at any university i think)

It searches for direct matches (outright nasty plagiarism) and similarities, like where you take a sentence straight out of a book and change a couple of words around.

This worries me greatly, as even if you *know* you haven't done this, there are only so many ways you can explain one thing (or not, if the word 'community' is considered...) and you are bound to at some point write something that's been written before. Again, that's something i'll be able to update you on once my essay has come back.

The check takes ages. I've heard it's based on how busy it currently is, but earlier I submitted my TPCD essay on it and I still don't know what it's doing. Hopefully I will know before work!! But anyway there's warning to anyone who thinks they will 'just quickly whack it through TurnItIn' before they post it off... i'd consider leaving it overnight.

Later on i'll post a bit more about my general worries, and what happens if you forget one of these: "

Exciting stuff!

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