Read more of Mark Taylor’s thoughts on Generation NeXt

Internet makes it easier to plagiarize

Things have changed a lot since I was on campus.

When I was an undergraduate, there was a limited amount of information available. They kept most of it in a building called the library.

If you were a liberal arts major, like me, classes tested your ability to go there, pull out bits of that information and reorganize it in an age-tested form: the term paper.

You rifled through the dusty stacks and assiduously noted where every word came from. A missed footnote risked being branded a plagiarist.

Libraries are still good places to work on term papers, but it has more to do with the quiet than it does with the books.

Any student who walks into the library with a laptop and a wireless card has more information at his fingertips than the building had 25 years ago.

Which is a major headache for Greg Heiser, University of Oklahoma assistant provost and the guy who oversees academic integrity cases.

When the Internet native generation got to college, the number of plagiarism cases on his desk spiked. He dealt with 108 cases last year.

''I see no evidence that we're living in some sort of degenerate time when kids are less honest than they used to be,'' Heiser said. ''The Internet just makes it easier to just copy material.''

Who owns an idea?: Mark Taylor is a former academic who makes his living telling academics how to deal with the Generation NeXt.

He's a popular lecturer on campuses around the nation.

He says the new generation has different ideas about intellectual property.

They grew up with Napster and expect free downloads. Copyrights be damned.

They see Puff Daddy tossing a rap lyric on top of ''Every Breath You Take,'' and calling it his own.

''Whose song is it really?'' Taylor asks. ''What makes it mine?''

A professor who assigns term papers today better be ready to look at more than the finished product, he says. Outlines, preliminary research notes and drafts may be necessary to prove original effort.

But the real solution may be reconsidering the term paper assignment in the first place.

If the information is out there for the easy grabbing, the old ritual of research, analysis and repetition with citation may be out of date, Taylor said.

He encourages professors to consider new models of research and analysis: Assign students to come up with answers to specific questions and then react personally in a fashion that can't be copied electronically.

New ideas: Kids prefer cheese over fried green spinach.

Years after I learned it, that's still rattling around in my brain.

It isn't just a peculiar serving suggestion for mothers of finicky eaters. It's a mnemonic device.

Remember it and you can remember biology's taxonomic ranks: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and spinach.

Oops, species.

When I was a kid, it was judged important for me to repeat on command the taxonomic ranks of biology. Now, of course, any child can pop it up on the Internet in a second. Why memorize it?

So, today knowledge isn't storage. It's access. And that may note the end to the dusty old term paper.

Wayne Greene 581-8308
wayne.greene@tulsaworld.com