Teaching honest communication to kids

(image copied from Delvin's article)

Doesn't seem like society has forgotten that stealing is wrong? Most people with internet access steal music, which is arguably trivial but still an indication of the acceptance of piracy. However, when considering your child's education, it is important to explain the inappropriateness of stealing ideas in the form of plagiarism.

As society's reliance on the internet increases, there seems to be an increase in the ambiguity of what is plagiarism when doing schoolwork. According to the New York Times, "despite all of the plagiarism alarms sounded, it is getting less not more clear to students what is stealing and what isn't when it comes to the written word on the web" (Delvin). Students are reading information online through search engines, wikis and blogs, and treating the information as their own rather than knowledge worthy as citation. There appears to be a considerable amount of obliviousness when students plagiarize in student work.

There are also those students who consciously plagiarize, but doesn't see it as a big deal. While it is alarming that students are losing a grasp of what cheating is, "the scarier finding is that the number of students who believe copying from the Internet to be considered "serious cheating" is going down -- 29 percent consider it serious business in recent surveys compared with 34 percent in earlier surveys" (Delvin). Our students are simply not respecting the idea of original ideas and work. While this is not new (my alma mater created the strict honor code in response to cheating in the 19th century), it is getting worse because of the everlasting resource of the internet.

As adults (especially parents), we should teach children at a young age what plagiarism is and why it is important to avoid it. Videos such as the one hyper-linked below provide a thorough lesson on what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. But, we should also discuss virtue and integrity, and teach our kids to value honesty. Students should be taught that when we submit academic work, we are communicating to the teacher and anyone else who reads our work what our knowledge of the topic is at that moment. As we teach our kids how to communicate, we should be sure to teach them that honestly communicating their knowledge is very important.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EqPkMN5S3g

Always,
Dwight

Delvin, Dory (2010), "Have the talk with your kids...about plagiarism and the web" Shine from Yahoo.com retrieved May 23, 2011 from<http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/have-the-talk-with-your-kids-about-plagiarism-and-the-web-2215361>