Have been busy with my conference paper (on information literacy for upcoming Teaching & Learning Conference) and new IL workshops that I'm planning in conjunction with teachers. All quite exciting, and good actually that both are around the same time - opportunity for research-based practice!

I was looking up exercises and examples on plagiarism for some of the sessions today, and by chance came across this NYTimes article about textbooks.

Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
Published: July 13, 2006

Tho' the focus of the article is not plagiarism but the dodgy world of multiple editions and virtual ghostwriting of textbooks--which is related to plagiarism, tho' they do not put it under the plagiarism issue. I suppose they consider it more related to ghostwriting rather than academic honesty.

However, there are assertions of why certain things are not plagiarism that don't hold water. By most university standards, if this was not the commercial publishing world (which is also bound by rules - see Harvard undergrad author scandal, and in fact, for the American history books here they pulled copies of offending title as well from the shelves), "unintentional" copying is NOT an excuse. It's still plagiarism whether you intended to copy or not.