Category Archives: tools

Teaching involves many things that fall outside the classroom. To celebrate the academic new year, here are two reminders that there’s always room to improve, even on the most mundane tasks.

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Turnitin, the plagiarism detection service, has apparently been offering students a paid service that helps to evade its own filters. In the process of investigating whether it’s specific enough to be dangerous (hint: yes), the author of that article also makes the interesting point that Turnitin’s database is itself quite limited, in particular with regard to copyrighted works such as newspaper articles. (Newspapers and professional writers can, after all, afford to mount a major legal offensive… unlike students) The database of matchable content is central to the effectiveness of their service, so it’s understandable that the company is a bit cagey about exactly what books and periodicals aren’t in their collection of “90,000″ such items. (I will point out that 90,000 items is nowhere near comprehensive: for comparison, the University of Michigan’s library contains some 10 million items, and in 2008 was estimated to be growing at 177,000 items per year. If we limit ourselves to digital books offered readily for sale, there are 950,000 items in the amazon kindle store at present)

If you have a very specific source (or group of sources) that you want to compare a paper to, and if you have those sources in digital form on your computer, then open source tools like wcopyfind might be a viable alternative (or complement to) database-based for-pay services like turnitin. No automated tool will relieve instructors of the need to talk to their students about plagiarism and have a solid policy in place… but while I’m not crazy about automated plagiarism detection services, the sad truth is that some form of due diligence is always going to be necessary when grading.

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On the lighter side, this post on syllabus design may be of interest. Although the final result goes a bit overboard with graphical effects, there’s little doubt that the standard layout of course syllabi is far from ideal, and finding key information is often a game of hide-and-seek. What I like about the final layout shown is that key information is easy to find: what doesn’t fit on the front page is highlighted and set apart from long paragraphs, and/or clearly pointed to with a table of contents. There’s plenty of literature on usability in print and web design that would apply equally well to printed/PDF handouts, and for a document as frequently referenced as the syllabus, the extra investment of time and energy might be worthwhile.