Blog #9: Plagiarism

The presentation last week about copyright and fair use laws in education last week was very enlightening for me. If I am being honest, I knew in the back of my mind that those things existed, but I never cared enough to put the time into actually learning how to work around those laws without overstepping at all. I remember being younger and in class, discussing what movie we could watch for our end-of-year movie day and the teacher turning down some of our suggestions for various reasons. Now I understand that she was being mindful of the copyright laws surrounding those movies. If I develop my own materials, I do not mind sharing them with others at all, and if I did feel that there was potential to sell them, I may go ahead and get them copyrighted and do so. When students are creating various things, I will be careful to teach how to use resources respectfully and mindfully so as not to accidentally step over any lines with copyright.

Something that stood out to me is that plagiarism can be penalized whether it was intentional or accidental. It is important to be careful and attentive to where your information is coming from that you choose to share as well as to check with various available resources like Grammarly or with tutors to be sure you are not accidentally presenting someone else's work as your own. I also thought it was interesting that the word "plagiarism" comes from Latin, meaning "to kidnap". Kidnapping is definitely taken as a much more serious crime than plagiarism is, but I can see how they can be seen in the same way. I appreciated too that there was a list provided of things that do not need to be cited like common knowledge and folklore/myths. Many of those types of things come from unknown places since everybody just knows them so that is a relief!