Ryan Kennedy
Examines the application of the World Wide Web in class education and research and the ways in which the Internet has enabled cheating and given educators ways to fight plagiarism.
Internet-based information has had a profound effect on the way people can now educate themselves from a pool of seemingly endless content. It is estimated by the NEC Research Institute that there are more then 1.4 billion pages on the Internet with 25 new pages being added every second (Dyrli 1). With so much available content, the application of the World Wide Web in class education and research has now become common practice in schools and universities. As a result, the Internet has succeeded in its purposes of bringing together information from one part of the World to another.
But like most great advancements in modern technology, the Internet's purposes have become altered and used for other nefarious acts. One of these problems, seemingly perpetuated by the Internet, has been the noticeable increase in plagiarism and academic dishonesty in the realm of education. Plagiarism is nothing new to the academic community, but over the past ten years, the Internet has opened up new ways for students to digitally copy information from web-based sources, some of which that actually encourage plagiarism. The Internet has created new opportunities for students to become better cheaters and as a result created new challenges for educators. In looking at this problem, I would like to examine how the Internet has made cheating more accessible to students, and in turn how educators are using the Internet itself to fight plagiarism.
However, before examining this problem, one must realize that plagiarism does not begin and end with the Internet. The groundwork for plagiarism was laid long before the world was wired together. To better understand how plagiarism became such an accepted practice and why