writing

good plagiarists arenâ??t caught

The BBC ran a story on plagiarism a couple of days ago. The main point was to present the work of Professor Sally Brown. The results are not surprising but the interesting thing is that this has become an issue to report on the BBC website (or maybe it was a slow news day!). Sally Brown says that plagiarism is affecting all UK universities: â??The ones that say they havenâ??t got a problem have got their heads in the sand.â??

I have written about university plagiarism before â?? both when itâ??s students plagiarising and when itâ??s the researchers. The non-recognition of the problem is not only due to the google-generation. There are too many examples of scholars schooled in pre-google, and indeed pre-Internet, who have been caught cheating in this way.

Professor Brown also comments on the flaws of software based solutions against plagiarism: â??The good plagiarists arenâ??t caught.â?? Again this is not new but it is interesting that it needs to be said.

But is â??goodâ?? plagiarism really plagiarism? The amount of work it takes to personalise a text can really be greater than writing it. Editing other peoples work is not an easy process and it is most definitely a learning process which the university in one way claims to be interested in.

If plagiarism is when the student (lets ignore the professional plagiarists for now) hands in someone elseâ??s work and claims that it is his/her own â?? by these standards ripping off someoneâ??s name from an essay and adding ones own is plagiarism. But so is bad or inadequate use of references.

All too often we demand that our students think independently on issues where many superior minds have thought for a long time. If the student â??simplyâ?? collects the thoughts of others and references this process well it is considered a fair essay â?? it lacks the individual thought. If the references are badly done its plagiarism.

Maybe, just maybe, we should begin to reappraise this process. In the age of Internet and CIO (Chief Information Officers) is the goal independent thought? Or is the goal the ability to sift through the mass of information and then present it in a new and coherent way? By focusing on the independent thought we are (indirectly) promoting the urge to plagiarise since the student always will be able to find someone who has had their idea before themâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Island Summer

Its time for the annual summer move – We have rented a small cottage on the local island of Asperö (population 450 people) where we shall be for the next four weeks. The island is small (only about 1 square kilometre) but still manages to have a varied nature â?? including a nature trail through a leafy area, lots of swimming places and a small sweet-water lake.

Asperö (the scale is 500m)

The best thing about the island is that there are no cars only mopeds built for transport rather than speed.


the moped

this type of moped is called â??Flakmoppeâ?? in Swedish which literally translated means loading platform moped â?? sounds much better in Swedish. As you can imagine the pace is much more relaxed on the island. So I am looking forward to a long relaxing summer on the islandâ?¦ even if I do have some short trips (Barcelona & Amsterdam) and some writing (Military Violence, Free Software) planned the main idea is to have a relaxing holiday-time.

Posted on by mklang

Academic Publishing and Copyright

The Science Commons has released three “Author Addenda” which are amendments that authors can attach to the copyright transfer form agreements they receive from publishing companies. The purpose is to ensure that the authors retain enough rights to publish their works online.

Every Science Commons Addendum ensures the freedom to use scholarly articles in teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and professional activities. They differ in the following ways:

Want more information? Read the Background and FAQ.

Posted on by mklang

Note from my university

As some of you may know â?? I am concerned with plagiarism (some earlier posts on the subject). In one of these earlier posts I wrote about a situation where a supervisor had borrowed/stolen/plagiarised a student work and presented it as his/her own at the EMAC conference in Milan in 2005.

The plagiarist is a PhD â?? not a student. The conference submission was a five-page paper. There is something very wrong with the fact that a person with a PhD cannot write his/her own five-page conference paper (Actually I would call five pages an extended abstract).

What really annoyed me (besides the bad plagiarism and all it stands for) was the fact that:

The majority of the research ethics committee found that while it was wrong that the supervisor did not ask the students, it was too far to say that the supervisor had cheated. This position was motivated that by calling the supervisor actions plagiarism would effectively be damage scientific research. (from earlier post).

Thankfully today the local newspaper writes that the University Dean has sent the errand onwards and upwards to the research ethics group of the National Swedish Research Council. Maybe by going beyond the confines of the own organisation the message can be stated clearly that plagiarism by researchers is as unacceptable as we claim it is when students attempt it.

Posted on by mklang

ECIS day 1

Probably the best thing about today was the final panel I attended entitled Publishing high impact IS research in top journals: Tips and traps. The panelists were Kalle Lyytinen (Editor In Chief JAIS), Richard Baskerville (Editor EJIS), Juhani Iivari (SE, JAIS) and Dov Teâ??eni (SE, MISQ).

All the panelists gave a personal view of the roles of the editors, reviewers and authors in the life-cycle of a paper. Lots of useful and thoughtful tips such as “When is a theoretical development a theoretical development?” and some more basic (or obvious) such as: “never submit to a journal you haven’t read”

In addition to this I have presented my paper so now I can lean back and enjoy the conference…

Posted on by mklang

Will blog for cash (and even for free)

Actually I am sceptical to the idea of making money from blogging. In a previous post on the Blogburst I reported about the downsides of commercial feeds (they eat your broadband, usually you dont get more readers, and payment is virtually nil). Obviously there are the exceptions to the rule. In the same way as Madonna makes money from selling records is an exception from the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) who never will.

Dont get me wrong – I am not against money per se. I just dont believe that I will make money directly from my blog. Despite this, I found this news interesting.

Scoopt, the world’s first commercial citizen journalism photography agency, has just launched ScooptWords to help bloggers sell their content to newspapers and magazines. Within the Scoopt interface, you can easily add a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license to your blog right alongside a Scoopt commercial badge. Use the CC license to tell people how your work can be used non-commercially; use the ScooptWords badge to let editors know that your writing can be purchased for commercial use. There’s so much great blog content being created every day — it’ll be very exciting to see how it helps change the way newspapers and magazines are created.

(via Creative Commons)

The attempts to create commercial forms of citizen journalism are fascinating to watch. Again we see the new social uses of media threatening the established business models. Blogs will not kill print media but they will force print media news to adapt to a new reality.  As usual in situations such as these there will be commercial winners and losers.

Posted on by mklang

Writing Disruptive Technology

Finally done. I handed in my edited thesis to my supervisor today. The work spans 268 pages split up into 1769 paragraphs, 9953 lines. Which became 101 956 words. It includes 7 tables and 2 figures, not including the cartoon in the acknowledgements.

Since I have already survived two seminars on the work with revisions after each now my supervisor will read the work again and I will be able to make minor changes after his comments.

From the brilliant Jorge Cham – PhdComics

Then its summer – not a lot happens then. With any luck I will avoid reading my thesis. Just let it be until the begining of August. Then the work is off to the printers and upon its return a copy of the work is nailed to the university notice board along with information about the public defence which will be in September (one of the days: 25th, 26th or 27th still undecided…). If I pass & survive my defence then I am well and truely finished with this project.

The title of my thesis is “Disruptive Technology” and it has the subtitle “Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy” if you want to read the latest version download it here.

Posted on by mklang

Editing Hell

Editing my thesis is hell. Every time I pick it up to do some more work there is a physical feeling of lethargy which needs to be overcome. Thankfully a quote of Albert Camus keeps me on track. He wrote this in his personal notebook on September 30, 1937

It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again.

Albert Camus (1947) photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson

This was not written for others but I see it as a message to himself- a reminder that the work must be done. So ok – I am not Camus but I realise that when such a great writer needed to remind himself of the work that needed to be done…I feel comforted and begin again.

The thesis is now 101 815 words long. This is spread over 270 pages. An updated draft can be found online here.

Posted on by mklang

Read this book

The blurb on the back of the book is important since it has to interest the reader and at the same time be a factual discription – without being too long, complex or explanatory… So after a period of thought and procrastination this is what I have:

This work is on the democratic effects of attempts to regulate disruptive technology. By looking at the phenomenon of online civil disobedience, viruses, spyware, online games, software standards and Internet censorship this work shows the effects of regulation upon the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy.

Social interaction and organisation are, in part, shaped by the technology used. The social differences between the technology of snail-mail and the technology of e-mail are defined by features that the technology allows, and the limitations that constrain, the user modes of interaction. Therefore technological innovation and development over time affects the ways in which social interaction and communication are carried out. Certain forms of gradual technological innovation and development may be easily assimilated while other forms are more disruptive. This disruption can be seen in the way which new technologies affect the organisation of social interaction and are called, in this work: disruptive technology.

This work studies regulation as an attempt to come to terms with the disruptive effects of technology upon social interaction. This is done by focusing on the attempts to regulate the disruptive effects of Internet technology and the consequences of these regulatory attempts on the IT-based participatory democracy. In conclusion, this work will show that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy.

Would you read this book? If so you can download it here.

Posted on by mklang

What is an ending?

I tend to avoid memes but one of them I came across recently has started me thinking. The idea is to blog the last sentence of your thesis. Actually doing this is not a problem â?? even though I am not sure how interesting it is to read.

Discarding the technology entails a limited, regulated use but will fail to recognise the full potential of disruptive technologies as an agent of change within the participatory democracy.

The problem is: what is an ending? How should a thesis end? What is the purpose of the end? The purpose of the conclusion is to bring the work to an end and to (hopefully) provide an answer to the question which was posed somewhere in the beginning. But what is the meaning of the last sentence and what should it include?

Obviously I realise that there always must be a last sentence. But now that I have begun to think about the role of the final sentence it has begun to bug me. Now I will have to try to figure out what the role of these last words areâ?¦

Posted on by mklang