Online dissertation writing services abound. Or you can simply download a term paper , or spend $20/page for a custom paper from the Internet. Some Internet essay providers even use the word, "cheat" in their business name. Even sneak peaks at the GMAT and the SAT are for sale. It should come as no surprise that YouTube has videos showing students how to cheat with a Coke bottle. Or that cell phones with cameras can be used to cheat on an exam.
It shouldn't be surprising that cheating is on the increase in schools, as well as the Internet sites that provide plagiarism services. Students aren't the only problem, sometimes faculty members fail to monitor academic dishonesty.
Dr. Howard Gardner, better known for his "multiple intelligences" theory, is now focusing on the deleterious effects of not doing good work in our jobs. In conversations he had with people working in various fields, he found that everyone
... knows the difference between what is ethical and what is not, but the disturbing thing is how many people said they cannot afford to do the right or honest thing if they want to get ahead in their careers. He says there is a tension between the people they want to be and the people they think they need to be to succeed.The results of these conversations have been compiled into a "Good Work" project. More reactionary responses to rampant plagiarism include a plethora of software teachers can use to find key phrases in a student's research paper that are linked to known plagiarized material. The most popular software are listed below.
Keepin' it Current
Back in the day, "newspaper clipping" services would hire people to read through hundreds of publications, looking for specific research topic, and compile lists of summaries of these articles for other researchers to access when they were looking for current materials associated with an ongoing research project. Today, the Internet offers so much information that it is impossible for anyone to stay on top of all of the postings uploaded every day. So electronic versions of "clipping projects" have come online in the past few years to help Internet users sift through all of the webpages of interest.Most newspapers offer a summary of the daily articles on the first or second page of the publication. RSS ("really simple syndication") feeds do the same thing online. For example, the Department of Education has an RSS feed that summarizes current agency events and announcements. Many newspapers offer educational RSS feeds as well. When RSS feeds first started coming out, people needed a software program called an "aggregator" to translate the feeds into readable articles. Today, most Web browsers have aggregators as an add-on applications, so you can read them the same way you would for a web page.
So many RSS feeds exist now, that it can take the whole day just to read through the summaries. Enter one of the best educational technology innovations in 2008, where RSS feeds are "mashed up," or sifted through for keywords that the user is interested in finding in articles. Let's look at my Yahoo pipe as an example of a mashup.
