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Yesterday, the Times Higher had an article called Wikipedia should be 'better integrated' into teaching , based largely on a study carried out in Australia, but largely ignoring a lot of the work being done by the Wikipedia Education community in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in Ireland. Last November I wrote about the EduWiki 2014 event which was exactly on this topic. While integrating Wikipedia into teaching isn't widespread, there are a number of people who are doing this, and have been for a number of years. Our first Wikimedia event at NUIG was in November 2014, when we organised an Editathon on Vicipéid (the Irish language wikipedia) and Wikipedia . This involved MA students taking Irish translation modules, with a view to providing authentic translation opportunities. The event was very successful, and you can see Oliver Moran from Wikimedia Community Ireland talking about it in the video below. video platform video management video solutions video player Follow...

At the 6th International Integrity and Plagiarism conference last month there was an interesting juxtaposition of talks, some technology-related, but most not. In particular, the keynote sessions provided an array of ideas that I intend to follow up on. Teddi Fishman (left) in conversation with Samatha Grant On the last day of the conference, the programme opened with a keynote from Samantha Grant, a filmmaker based in San Francisco, who has made the feature length documentary A Fragile Trust , based on the serial plagiarist Jayson Blair, a journalist at the New York Times. The case, when it was discovered in 2003, was such a scandal that it brought down 2 NYT editors. The documentary features interviews with Blair, as well as with other journalists and editors who were caught up in the story. During her keynote, Samantha played a number of clips from the film, which gave a great insight into the approach she has taken, and raises plenty of questions about ethics in journalism. I now a...

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...