eLearning Cafe´

Copying and pasting stuff online is so easy. I know you’ve had students copy and paste and patch together entire papers, entirely plagiarized with no citations. But today I ran into an interesting thing that publishers must be starting to do to curtail this practice (though I have no idea how effective it is).

I was writing a blog post for another blog I write and wanted to insert a quote from an article from the Time magazine site. When I pasted it into my page I was surprised to find an additional line that I did not copy. It was the link to the page from which I just copied and it said:

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/25/the-myth-of-practice-makes-perfect/#ixzz1vyNfXOCi

It appeared out of nowhere. I did not intentionally copy this line. It does not appear on the page. It just came with the passage that I did intentionally copy. I don’t know if this is becoming a more popular addition at other sites, but it is the first time it’s every happened to me. And I liked it. I was going to include a link back to the full article anyway and this saved me the time and effort of going back to the site to copy the link.



Will students be reminded to cite when they get this kind of unexpected text? That remains to be seen, but it is a reminder. And I’m going to explore a little more to find out how to get this kind of thing to work in web pages that I produce. I’ll let you know what I find, but until then...

Have you run into this at any other website recently? I’d love to know who else is using this technique.