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Earlier this week I was at the 6th International Integrity and Plagiarism Conference (#6iipc) at the Sage in Newcastle/Gateshead. As a pre-conference activity, the Turnitin International User Group took place, where we got an opportunity to hear about the product roadmap and plans for the future. In the light of the recent acquisition of iParadigms by Insight Venture Partners , I was certainly interested in how this will affect us users of the Turnitin suite of products. It seems the effect is that there will be increased investment in the product. This is a good thing, since apart from the iPad app (which I love) the products have not really been updated much in the last couple of years. Sure, students can now submit more file types, and rubrics can be imported from Excel, but the basic interface hasn't changed in a while. Enter the new, Next Generation Document Viewer (DV for short). From what we saw, this looks like it will be a very nice improvment on the current one. For a st...

The International Turnitin User Group meeting took place on Monday 16th July at the Sage in Gateshead, just before the start of the 5th International Plagiarism Conference. This was a great opportunity to meet with Turnitin representatives as well as other Turnitin users, to compare experiences and find out about the product roadmap. After a welcome from Will Murray (VP International), Christian Storm (CTO) gave an update on recent developments and current research in the Turnitin suite. It's clear that there has been a shift in focus from plagiarism detection towards supporting assessment and feedback, with a view to improving student outcomes. Turnitin aims to be the complete solution for improving student writing and the best-in-class solution for grading . It seems that the company has really been listening to its customers, and my impression is that future directions are very positive and exciting. Recent developments include voice based grading (which I haven't played wi...

This afternoon I am UK-bound again, this time to Newcastle, for the 5th International Plagiarism Conference . Having been to two previous events, I'm looking forward to catching up with some old friends and meeting some new ones. I will miss Jo Badge @jobadge , who has moved on to new challenges. Although not strictly learning technologies , I will post my thoughts on the conference, and will certainly be tweeting from the event - the hashtag is #5ipc. Day 1, Monday, incorporates the Turnitin User Group meeting, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the roadmap for this product. So, do follow me on twitter for updates. And if you are going to be at the conference, let me know so that we can meet up.   Tweet

Last Friday I gave a workshop on Using Turnitin to Deter Plagiarism for academic staff at St Angela's College, Sligo . St Angela's is a college of NUI Galway and occupies a beautiful site on the shore of Lake Gill, just outside Sligo, and it is always a pleasure to visit there. The workshop was aimed at teaching staff getting started with using Turnitin . As we went through the practicalities of setting up a Turnitin assignment in their VLE (moodle) and discussed strategies and options, I stressed a few points. These are the take-home messages that I think are key when starting to use Turnitin. 1. Focus on the teaching : the 12 people in the group were concerned teachers. The last thing they want or need to become is "plagiarism police", with a focus on plagiarism detection. Turnitin is best used as a teaching tool, so make sure that the strategy you use, and every option you choose, is based on improving the learning for your students.  2. Turnitin does not detect p...

Back in June I gave a presentation at the 4th International Plagiarism Conference on using Turnitin with large classes to support student writing. The full paper and the powerpoint presentation are now available on the conference website . The paper describes a pilot study in 2008-2009 involving 3 case studies with large undergraduate student groups, from 120 to 600 students, and addresses the use of Turnitin to support student writing and offer formative feedback, rather than focus purely on plagiarism detection. Using Turnitin with such large student groups (in 2009-2010 we successfully used it with a class of 950 students) really requires that Turnitin be integrated into the VLE, allowing the students self-submit their work. At NUI Galway, we are using Blackboard, which in turn is integrated with our student records system, thus reducing the administrative overload for staff. We found that Turnitin can be used to support academic staff in their teaching and assessment. Some of th...