Recent releases

Monday February 06, 2012 Benoit Bolduc (AQPC) The 32nd AQPC Symposium - Cultivating Judgment: from Montaigne to Today The 32nd AQPC Symposium will be held from June 6 to 8, 2012 at the Palais des congrès in Gatineau, and will explore the theme of cultivating critical thinking. Benoit Bolduc, director general of the AQPC (Association québécoise de pédagogie collégiale) presents several aspects of the upcoming program in which IT will occupy an important place. The complete program of the symposium will be available at the end of March 2012.
Monday January 30, 2012 APOP Using APOP’s ICT Savvy APOP is now accepting project proposals from Anglophone sectors within the Quebec College Network. APOP can assist you in structuring your project, helping you to foresee every dimension that needs to be addressed, taking advantage of their 30 years of experience in the pedagogical application of ICT expertise.
Monday January 23, 2012 Maeve Muldowney (Dawson College) Fanny Kingsbury (AQPC) Norm Spatz (Profweb) Pédagogie Collégiale's IT English Secret Thanks to information technology, a wealth of English pedagogical information from the AQPC's Pédagogie collégiale is available to members of the Quebec College Network and to anyone else at a single click. With the launch of its English Editorial Board, the journal is hoping to become better known within the Anglophone community.

Columns

Monday November 02, 2009

The Internet, Plagiarism and the IT Skills of Our Students

Nicole Perreault French staff member, Réseau REPTIC

This column was written while attending the Colloque Génération C in Quebec City organized by CEFRIO and while preparing for a presentation on Electronic Plagiarism being given at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR).

How well do you know Generation C? This cohort, which is now between 13-25 years old, is in our classrooms. The letter C was used to designate these digital natives who learned to use a mouse before a pencil and who use the Internet to Create, Communicate and Collaborate. They spend more time on-line than watching television.

During the colloquium mentioned above, I heard members of this generation talk about the links between their Internet use, their personal lives, their professional careers and their academic achievements.

It was therefore surprising to learn that notwithstanding this intensive use of the Internet, which is on the average of twenty hours per week, students wanted to be guided by their teachers for the following activities:

mastering research tools,
acknowledging copyright,
verifying the integrity of sources and
learning of potential on-line dangers.

One student, who indicated that the Internet was a fixture in their private life, confessed to an ignorance of how to use it academically. Furthermore, a survey done by CEFRIO produced the statistic that 35% of this cohort felt that the majority of their teachers were not capable of advising them on effective use of the Internet (link in French). The current problems of electronic plagiarism, particularly of the copy-paste variety, are a natural outgrowth of this situation. Although difficult to fix a percentage of intentional copying over plagiarism in general, the need to promote awareness among students to combat plagiarism is obvious, and happily, an increasing number of colleges have risen to the challenge of making their students aware of the ethical consequences of their actions.

Furthermore, in order to aid teachers in instilling the respect implicit in citation of sources and copyright among their students, the college network has created three extremely useful resources:

• The IT Exit Profil and College Students: This document describes information research and presentation skills in detail including those relevant to citation of sources and respect of copyright in a context of distance communication and collaboration. English reference material is available. (Two C's of Generation C!).

• The InukTIC website: A free bilingual on-line resource with video capsules to promote the IT skills required for an IT Exit Profile among students. InukTIC has a research function which enables students to access resources targeting skills such as citing sources, creating a chart with Excel and creating a concept map. Furthermore, the structure of InukTIC is identical to the IT Exit Profile for college students which is a real advantage when integrating an IT exit profile into a given course or program.

• The IT Representative of your college: A person you can count on to understand the scope of the content in an IT Exit Profile and for guidance in discovering how to use InukTIC alone or within the context of creating an IT Exit Profile for the students in your program.

In conclusion, a study has indicated that students who have received training in research methodology and who have been made aware of the unethical nature and consequences of plagiarism are less inclined to plagiarize. Please use the space for comments below to share your own practices to discourage plagiarism among your students.