Work continues with Citation Machine. There were a number of features that got left off of the new version, and I have certainly been hearing about the ones that were most sorely missed. Mainly, folks don’t like reading the instructions that I included, for formatting multiple authors. So for most of the sources, you can now click a plus symbol to add an author or a minus to subtract one in the template. In some of the sources, you just click two, three, four, or five to produce a template with that many author textboxes.
I get it. People aren’t using this because they want to read.
I’ve also run across a couple of blogs, people talking about Citation Machine, ..and apparently, some folks on a listserv are grumbling about my putting Google Ads on the tool. By the way, Google Ads work. I’ve calculated that if the the load on SOCM were to continue through the year, I could make just about as much money as I did my first year teaching. Of course, my first year teaching earned me less than $7000. The problem is that upgrading to a dedicated server is going to cost a lot of money, like a car payment — a really nice car, car payment. So Google Ads, stay 😉
But to be fair, it wasn’t really the Google Ads that bothered people. After all, schools can get Son of Citation Machine without the ads. The problem is that Google can detect the content on the page, and pick ads that are relevant to the content, and I had no idea that there were that many research paper mills out there. Yes, that’s the problem. Just about every five ads were places where students can pay five to twelve dollars a page to have the company write your essay for you.
OK, I’ve done some research and learned how we can block specific ads from our Google Ads box, and Brenda and I have been configuring our account to block the ads sites as we discover them. Plus I am working on a way to aggregate some news, movie, and music RSS feeds into Son of Citation Machine, so that there will be much more content for Google to select ads on.
But hey! I’m really beginning to second think this. The problem isn’t that the kids don’t know about paper mills, and hiding them doesn’t solve the problem. The problem is with students who think they might just get away with turning in a purchased paper. They should know, be told, that we know about the paper mills too, and that we know how to detect them, that we have ways of telling when a student wrote it and when someone else got payed to write it. Students don’t plagiarize because they’re smart. They plagiarize because they’re lazy. We’re not lazy. We’ll catch them. They need to hear that in their schools from their increasingly tech-savvy teachers.
I guess that the most interesting thing about all of this is that I’m picturing educated Chinese college students, sitting in their apartments, getting payed a nickle a page to write research papers for lazy U.S. students. It could happen!
Plugimi, “Su Typing.” Plugimi’s Photos. 26 Jun 2005. 7 May 2006
Interesting problem Dave. With tools that detect copied papers such as turnitin students should be clearly informed by teachers that laziness will be caught. In fact, last year I encouraged one of my students to test the turnitin software last year as a trial. He searched for a paper on the net and I fed it through the software (in front of the class) and the students got to see first hand how the software detected the plagiarised paper. We then had an amazing discussion over respecting IP and the satisfaction one reaches when they present work of their own.
There are some research sites, such as Essay Town, that actually maintain some ethical standards. EssayTown refuses to provide their model research documents to any customer who openly suggests that he or she intends to cheat. I emailed EssayTown to ask if I could type my name and turn in the model paper for a grade, and they responded, “Absolutely not. We provide reference material that facilitates learning-by-example. You must properly cite our company when writing your own, final document.”