A comment for Re: Policing the Web

"Watching over us. An all seeing eye perhaps?"
by Susie Mallett 2010

I received an email notification from Google Alerts, email telling me that Andrew Sutton had left a comment on posting “Re. Policing the Web”:

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2011/03/re-policing-web.html

It is fortunate that I have the comment as it was included in the notification from Google Alerts, it is nowhere to be found on my blog. Has Google perhaps been policing the web?

Thank you for the comment Andrew, no I did not delete it. Here it is with a posting of its own:

“What to do about this? I have no idea. It all seems an invitable outcome of the democtatisation of publishing, a process that I applaud, out into populations, professional and lay, that have no necessary apparatus criticus.

And from time totime (not just within Conductive Education) I have come across the most outrageeous examples of plagiarism – committed (yes, I do regard this as a crime) by those whose position suggests that they should and do know better.

What to do here, I still have no idea. Since I drew attention recently to my uncertainty and concern on what to de here, I have been told (by a conductor) of another outrageous theft of intellectual property in the sector. Thee are possible more.

I share Jimmy Wales' optimism that technology should in future make it harder to get away with arrant plagiarism unnoticed. But as he himself points out, something else is needed:

'...the deeper networks coming together online. These are networks of people who know each other over a period of years, and not just online but in face-to-face meetings; networks of people who spend an enormous amount of time, as at Wikipedia, discussing, debating, learning, and passionately working to get things right.' :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/01/plagiarism-education-web-wiki-follies

In CE we are not there yet but maybe we are on the way."

I agree Andrew, and I also share Jimmy Wales' optimism that technology will make plagiarism more difficult, but I am not at all sure that we are very far on the way to this:

"debating, learning, and passionately working to get things right".

We shall see.