Student Blogging and Plagiarism

In the Beach, Anson, Breuch, and Swiss book, Engaging Students in Digital Writing (draft copy, 2008, pp. 5-6), the authors quote Gunther Kress:

If I am thinking of composing a text, I can take the resources for that from anywhere--usually described and misunderstood as cut and paste, and not as real writing or composition.

My worry here is that this IS what some students do, and they don't see a problem with it. They cut-and-paste text from the web into their own documents, without any attribution phrases or citations (from a particular documentation system), and are then shocked when I fail the paper for plagiarism.

I am beginning to understand, now, in this class on digital writing, why and how they can think this way. With YouTube and social-networking sites, this is how things are done, and they don't think anything of it. A video--or anything else--is linked to quickly and then passed on. The original creators might even be pleased that their work is being passed on to a wider audience and may not worry about correct attribution.

But here comes, then, discussions of specific discourse (or other) communities, and specific conventions observed by different communities. Academia values attribution and citation. Knowledge is created, disseminated, and built on. But previous work is acknowledged.

Web 2.0, or the Read/Write Web, does not seem to value this acknowledgement, or seems to value it in a different way. We are not only "consumers" of the web; we are now also "producers." And with this instantaneous "switch" in role, from reader to writer, we seem to immediately respond and/or create, and attribution can get lost.