Wednesday 12 April 2006

Sitemeter Pedagogy

This is a public service announcement. The Brauer College student (I'm assuming it was a student) who this morning googled "3 businessmen who brought their own lunch", and then spent 38 minutes viewing fifteen pages at this blog, tread with caution. If you were thinking about plagiarising, ie passing off my words and ideas as your own work, DON'T. I can guarantee you'll be caught. Last October somebody from Methodist Ladies College in Melbourne tried to do the same thing with a different sculpture post -- this one -- and their teacher caught them BAD. I know this because the teacher found the bits the student had copied by googling the words. The thing is, children, if you know how to use a search engine, there's a pretty good chance your teacher knows how to as well!

The good news: you're welcome to use anything you read on my blog as long as it's properly documented in your assignment. (Be aware, though, that I do quite enjoy lying and making things up.) Here's what you need to do to keep it all above board:

As one distinguished, witty, adorable, and chilli-pepper-hot critic observes, "each man has a manbag." (1)


(1) "Three Businessmen Who Brought Their Own Lunch." by Lucy Tartan. http://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2006/02/statuary-friday-22.html. January 2006. Accessed 12 April 2006.





If you're still thinking about trying it on, just know this: I went to Brauer College myself in the 1980s, back when it was called Caramut Road Tech and rougher than a pinecone. (None of this blazer-wearing business back then, buddy.) Don't make me come down there & settle this the old school way.

18 comments:

Tim said...

I've been ripping off your posts in essays for ages. Admittedly none of the posts had anything to do with the subjects at hand, but they sure helped me pad things out.

Anonymous said...

Maybe this person has just had a world open to them, and will end up being you, after travelling the exact same route.

You don't need fifteen pages to steal. You need them to understand.

Then again, I allus was a wet li'll romantic.

- barista

lucy tartan said...

I'm trying to imagine how different it must be growing up in a place like warrnambool...but with the internet opening up vistas all over the place.

I know I've been plagiarised quite a few times as it happens. The telltale sign is when someone does a search for an exact phrase. I feel a rant like this is what I owe to the teacher who's trying to discourage plagiarism, given that I'm here adding to the Internet and exacerbating the problem.

Anonymous said...

Maybe you could direct them to Yahoo Answers?

(BTW, there are pics of the other side of that Britany sculpture around. It's pretty funny; most cow like.)

Anonymous said...

teaching the littluns how to properly cite the interwebs is indeed a public service.

I don't understand why people bother with plagarising when citation is so easy - and it shows that you did research!

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

I was once marking an essay when I got to a whole paragraph that looked oddly familiar. Yes, it was something I'd written myself. The student was quite surprised when I recognised it, too.

David Nichols said...

I don't know what's more worrying - when you recognise your writing in a student's work, or you only realise later that they've quoted you in some manner and you DIDN'T recognise your own words. Well, I suppose it doesn't have to be a competition, they can both be worrying.

Anonymous said...

Seems to be a bit of this going on around the traps of late. Makes me seethe. I spend minutes! writing my blog posts, surely some would-be little shite could do the same?

Anonymous said...

The Brauer College student (I'm assuming it was a student) who this morning googled "3 businessmen who brought their own lunch",...

Call me a stupid ignoramus ("You're a stupid ignoramus") but how do you know who/what's been trawling your site?

Just curious.

genevieve said...

it is supposed to be a bit of a problem with some bloggers -they don't indent their quotes apparently. Just spew it out hot off the trad press where they found it. Kinda incestuous really.

Lucy, you did this with humour and therefore it is a favour to all.

lucy tartan said...

Hadn't thought of that Genevieve. Yes bloggers are probably far worse plagiarists than poor harrassed students.

Anon, my blog has various silent counters & clickers installed which among other things log IP addresses. I think most blogs probably have similar. I don't usually look at IP addresses becasue mostly they're meaningless (to me) strings of numbers. I do take an interest in what search queries bring people here, though, and since my sculpture posts are the ones that get ripped off most regularly I usually look to see who's reading.

In case the idea of what I've just explained creeps you out, I should say that I have no idea how to link site statistical information back to particular individuals. The nearest it gets is when someone uses a computer in an education network where all the machines are clearly labelled with the domain name of the institution. So I can usually see when someone from say Columbia University has been here, but no more detail than that.

Anonymous said...

Oh, thank goodness. I thought I was going to get sprung for all my cyber-lurking.

Mel said...

I usually get depressing search terms like "pictures of really young skanks shitting". But I do sometimes get people searching for things like "essay on [insert name of book/movie]", or a phrase that's obviously just them entering their essay question into Google to see if someone else has already done their thinking for them.

I find it very amusing, because any authoritah on my blog comes from googling - just like they're doing!

But sometimes I remember a delicious turn of phrase I read on a blog but can't recall which one so I enter it into Google to check.

Anyway, forget about all this... because I have just discovered the RUSSIAN MOSCOW CATS THEATRE!

Zoe said...

Oh, mel, that is marvellous - circus catrobats!

Anonymous said...

I get tons of searches for phrases such as "Hotel Rwanda paper" or "21 Grams academic article," but I'm not sure that I've ever been plagiarized. I was half hoping that film reviewer at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, had plagiarized me because I could have made a little money (he had to pay $25 to the reviewer for every plagiarized review). Alas, no such luck.

To me, multiple page views suggest interest (when I was on the job market, for example, I would often have multiple page views from universities where I had applied). One long page view implies copying and pasting.

Anonymous said...

I usually get depressing search terms like "pictures of really young skanks shitting".

I got a ripper a few days ago: it was a search (not telling which search engine!!) for "film clips of female strippers performing non porn"... and, er, somehow they ended up on my doorstep. Um... er... (The only consolation? The "Jewish Film Archive Online" was a hit ahead of me... woo hoo!)

Now, time to goodle "pictures of really young skanks shitting"

-- Exxxcellent!

Chris

Oh, great... it brings me straight back to this page!!!!! Grrr, grrr!

Anonymous said...

Got a hit in the wee hours of this morning from Afghanistan. Someone Yahood "goole (sic) best naked teens on the world" (baffling, I know). A persistent bugger, I must say. When I tried the same search, my page wasn't in the top 120 hits. (The WIGGLES were, though, at 77.) No, I didn't look.

lucy tartan said...

Mel, Chris, thank you both for bringing a whole other dimension to my blog. Sterling work.