Update on Research Methods class

I mentioned in an earlier note that my Research Methods class was focusing on "plagiarism, copyright, and intellectual property" this semester. Here's what has happened so far.

We had a holiday last week so the Research Methods class couldn't meet. In the mean time I noticed 2 news articles that showed up on CNN's website that related to plagiarism: one about a playwright accused of plagiarizing from a book and a magazine article, and another about a Harvard professor who admitted plagiarizing from another book. I also noticed that if you do a full-text search for "plagiarism" or "plagiaris*" in an online encyclopedia like the Columbia Encyclopedia at Bartleby.com or the encyclopedias in the Grolier collection, you'll often get a lot of results that relate to literary authors who were accused of plagiarism. Wonder what that means...

I'm assigning my students the second chapter of the new (6th) edition of the MLA Handbook. The chapter is about (surprise!) plagiarism. It's quite a hoot in places... Here are the questions the students are supposed to answer about the chapter.

1. Why do you think Gibaldi has this as the second chapter in the book?
   
2. What words seem to you to be the strongest (or "key") words in this chapter? In other words, which words stand out the most to you? Why?
   
3. Knowing that the author is writing with students like you as the audience, how do you think he wants to make you feel about plagiarism?
   
4. How do you feel after reading this chapter?
   
5. What questions do you have about plagiarism after reading this chapter?
   

If I get any really interesting responses, I'll post them.