abstract - Högskolan Kristianstad

Lars-Erik Nilsson
Anders Eklöf
Torgny Ottosson
Tema Lärande och lärandemiljöer
Kristianstad University, Sweden
Lars-Erik.Nilsson@komp.hkr.se
Copy- and-paste-plagiarism: Technology as a blind alley or
a road to better learning?
Paper presented at the 33rd congress of the Nordic Educational Research Association
(NERA) in Oslo, Norway, 10th to 12th of March
ABSTRACT
TITLE Copy and paste plagiarism: Technology as a blind alley or a road to better learning?
Authors Nilsson, Lars-Erik, Eklöf, Anders, Ottosson, Torgny
The menu commands copy and paste are often constituted as a threat to learning.
Several authors argue that there is a close connection between copying and pasting
on the one hand and cheating and plagiarism on the other. The ease with which
students can transport information with the help of digital technology is seen as seductive. Copy-and-paste-plagiarism (McCabe) is a metaphor used to establish a
connection between cheating and the practice of copying and pasting. Other studies
suggest that copy and paste can be detrimental to learning. Students may be cheated
out of skills. Alexandersson and Limberg use the metaphor transport and transform
to illustrate how students copy and paste to transport facts and transform the factual
information to slightly different text supporting surface learning rather than cheating. Nilsson drawing on Goffman suggests that copying can be seen as a choice between acting as animator, author or principal. In work with factual texts the students must position themselves as principals to create “their own texts”. It is the
purpose of this paper to illustrate how copy and paste can be constituted to support
creative and critical writing. In this paper we suggest that tools like Encarta Researcher afford ways of working that can enhance student learning and can better
be understood through the metaphor Transport-Reflect-Transform. Rather than positioning students that copy and paste as cheaters we argue that they can be positioned as learners who use these functions productively.
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Artifacts are considered to play an important role in human learning. Search engines, desk top
searchers, word processors, semantic organisers, dynamic modelling tools and similar applications have become popular aids in human activities. As humans we learn to master how such
tools are used in different activities. This is true also for young people. When it comes to
modern information and communication technology a large portion of children and youth
arrive in the school system with experiences of how to use a cell-phone, a search engine and a
peer to peer system to communicate and exchange information. These experiences should
however not be confused with experiences of how these artefacts are used in other activities
or in the way these activities are carried out in formal school environments
In a socio cultural perspective artefacts are considered to be central because they change
our relations to the surrounding world (Säljö, 2002). Their affordances open up for changes in
the way we go about our everyday as well as our professional activities. They also open up for
changes in the way we learn both in and outside of school. Few of these artefacts however
have been designed with the specific aim to support students’ efforts to gather information as
part of educational activities and represent that information as their own. That artefacts
change the way we learn is hardly surprising. What is interesting is how learning changes and
what that may mean to us. This is our concern in this paper. Tikhomirow (1982) stresses that
the arrival of computerised technology has opened up a new area of research. He argues that
the “cases of greatest interest are not those in which the computer takes over the solution of
some problems solved earlier by humans (no matter how) but those in which a problem is
solved jointly” (p. 275). Our interest focuses on how students solve problems with the help of
modern information and communication technology. In few practices such human aids have
been met with more ambiguity than in the discourse on student research practices. This area
involves such processes as problem formulation, information searching and seeking, data collection, data analysis, synthesising and presenting findings to mention a few major activities.
On the one hand the promise of technology is being presented. It is argued that students never
before have had such access to information, such aids for finding and critically analysing data
and for presenting their findings. On the other hand the perils of technology are being presented. Never before, it is argued, have students confronted such information over load and
been tempted just to copy and paste materials into what is supposed to be their own work.
In this paper we will discuss the impact of technology on student learning as it has been
presented in research on students “own research” (swed. egen forskning) or “own work”
(swed. eget arbete). We will discuss two different ways of conceptualising how students use
technology. In the first perspective students are positioned as cheaters and their use of technology is seen as an ethical problem. In the second perspective students are positioned as
learners and their use of technology is seen as a pedagogical problem. We will also discuss
the need for research into how different software may influence the way students conceptualise the use of technology in their “own research”.
Student research activities and modern artefacts
The relationship between student reasoning and their use of tools for searching, seeking and
handling information has become an important area of research. While a considerable part of
that research has been carried out at a time when computers and modern information and
communication technology has been available a minor part of that research has been specifically interested in the impact of technology on reasoning about learning and on learning practices.
Several studies have been made on students’ information searching behavior and how they
handle information. There have also been quite many Swedish research reviews in this field:
Östlund (2000), Hektor (2000), Tydén et al. (2000), Pedersen (2000), Limberg et al. (2002),
and Alexandersson & Limberg (2004) to mention but a few. These reviews show that stu-
2
dents’ information searching behavior is becoming a fairly well researched field. They also
show that the focus in research has been on other issues than on how the affordances built into
artifacts influence search processes and the handling of information. The majority of these
studies have been general investigations of information behavior focusing on the net and digital media.
In the report ”Sökslump och Textflytt” (Search haphazard and Text transfer [our translation]) Alexandersson and Limberg (2004) emphasize the strong connection between the formulation of the task and how students build and manage their searches. They make a connection between school culture and student information behavior. This connection is also emphasized by Eklöf (2003) in his study on student reasoning on critical thinking and methods for
conducting critical source evaluations. Several other studies stress the importance of looking
at how tasks are constructed and how this may influence student reasoning and actions (Limberg, 1998; Stigmar, 2002; Jacobsson , 2001; Nilsson, 2002).
Alexandersson and Limberg (2004) further stress the need for creating scaffolds in education to make it possible for students to conduct searches and make critical evaluations. They
do however show only a minor interest in the use of modern digital artifacts as scaffolds. Such
artifacts are instead seen as possible causes of problems. Stigmar (2002) stresses the need for
the students to have meta cognitive training. For Stigmar such training is an important factor
influencing student learning. Stigmar however does not make an explicit connection between
meta cognitive training and the use of digital artifacts.
Research on student information strategies indicates a need to study the work of students
and their understanding of information behavior from the aspect of the way they make sense
of content. A striking finding in studies on students’ information behavior is that students
show a strong emphasis on searching for and finding facts. Students conceive of the search
process as a separate and isolated part of the process in making their own sense out of others’
material. In her dissertation, Limberg (1998) shows the strong connection between process
thinking where critical evaluation is an integrated part of the search process and the results the
students achieve. How do they use and value the information they find related to how the understand their assignments? The kind of artifacts we will discuss in this paper can provide
scaffolds to direct the students towards a more content oriented approach. Limberg claims that
most students seem to be oriented towards searching at a specific time (information searching), not on searching as an iterative process that continues over time (information seeking)
(Alexandersson & Limberg, 2004, p. 12). A majority of the studies that investigate students’
information strategies seem on the other hand to be focused on the first issue.
Several studies are concerned with how students use the results of their searches. NilsErik Nilsson (2002) in a study shows that 50 out of 60 analyzed student texts could be considered to be reproductive. He categorizes students according to reproductive techniques and
uses “the copyist”, “the sampler”, “the recreator”, “the referent” and “the interview referent”
as metaphors to conceptualize different ways of writing. The copyist stands for the least
elaborate way of handling information and the interview referent as the most. He also makes a
distinction between reproductive techniques from creative techniques. The storyteller and the
examiner are students who use creative techniques. The distinction between reproductive and
creative techniques argued by Nilsson is based on whether the students are trying to say something in “their own voice” or merely act as the voice of someone else. He suggests that only
when students receive tasks that force them to be communicative about their own assessment
of the content, the accuracy and the implications of what is said will be of importance to them.
Nilsson treats his categories as a taxonomy and argues that students may have to pass through
the categories successively. Limberg (1998) reports that the most common way for students to
find information on the net is to search until they find an answer to their search question.
There were only a few students in her study that continued their search until they had an un-
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derstanding of the subject. Biased information instead turned out to be an unwanted complication for most of the students.
This tendency to search for the right answer is something that several researchers have
emphasized (Limberg & Alexandersson, 2004; Andersson-Lantz, 2003; Bergman, 1999; Wallace & Kuppeman, 1997).
Kuhlthau (1993) reports on another aspect that may explain student behavior when working with information. In her studies she discusses the importance of the emotional aspects of a
search process. She divides the process into six different stages and finds that the basic feelings in two of these stages are insecurity and anxiety. We argue that if you add the complexity
of critical thinking and evaluation of sources to the already demanding task of information
searching, or even more in seeking, you will increase the students’ stress to an even higher
level. If this happens when the task is formulated in such a way that the student’s own voice
in relation to the content is the least important, and critical evaluation is not made part of the
task, a stress relieving step for the students’ may be to skip these extra challenges. Even in the
light of this aspect the kind of artifacts we want to discuss can be stress relievers. If forced to
concentrate and reflect on content matters instead of collecting numerous sources the students
probably will faster enter a stage where they feel that they can overlook and understand the
content. The will of course be forced to use fewer sources, but will have a more qualitative
approach to their sources.
Two perspectives on student reasoning and use of technology
Research on how students find, manage and use information indicates that student information
behavior constitutes a dilemma for teachers. Students show differences in their reasoning
about what they are supposed to do as well as in their skills at performing different tasks.
These problems can be said to precede the implementation of new technology in that they
exist when students find their information in books or newspapers. Nevertheless they seem to
become intimately linked to these artifacts in students’ and teachers’ reasoning as reported in
research. Cheating is considered to be one problem afforded by technology as much as by
pedagogy or student ethics. There seems to be an agreement among researchers that cheating
is an increasing problem in education. Modern information and communication technology
has not necessarily replaced “old fashioned” methods of cheating like crib notes and replaced
them with notes hidden in a PDA or sent by SMS. It is suggested that they have added a new
dimension. The Internet not only makes it possible to cheat in various ways, it also simplifies
for students to do so (Austin & Brown, 1999; Auer & Krupar, 2001; Carnie, 2001). The presence of commercial Term Paper Mills like A1 Term Paper and free sites for student papers
like SchoolSucks.com or the Swedish MVGplus.com provide fast access to works done by
others that can be downloaded and handed in by students as their own work. Not only students
who download other students’ papers are positioned as cheaters. Students who fail to cite correctly, who paraphrase too closely or fail to appear as original enough can also be positioned
that way. The affordances of technology make it easy for students to retrieve information using search bots, databases, and CDrom-based encyclopedias, and if they are knowledgeable
about the risks rearrange the text, otherwise submit it as patchwork or an exact copy. These
affordances make it easy for students to cut and paste information using word processors
(Austin & Brown, 1999), turning their work into for what Hinchliffe has used the metaphor
cut- and paste-plagiarism. These ways of dealing with information we argue (Nilsson, Eklöf
& Ottosson, 2004) do not stop at writing. They lend themselves equally well to rendering
other forms of representations in audio, video or graphic formats.
This said we want to argue that students could as easily be positioned as learners when
they use modern information and communication technology. Alexandersson and Limberg
(2004) conclude that:
4
The question of how to create a text originating in texts written by others is far
reaching and complicated. To make a text your own, to understand a text and to
create some kind of meaning around it does not necessarily mean to reformulate
every word. Obviously writing in itself is an important part of the students’ research. (p.99, our translation)
Alexandersson and Limberg argue that more attention needs to be paid to students’ use of
information in their own writing. Nilsson (2002) also emphasizes the importance of the writing process in connection with how the students relate to and handle the content in the text
they are using. One of the most influential parts in the students’ information behavior seems
to be the documented fact orientation that steers them towards copy and paste and the relationship between fact orientation and the tasks. As long as they see their assignments first of
all as school tasks, it is not important for them to be critical or analytical. This will only be
important if they see this as an integral part of the task (Eklöf & Nilsson, 2004; Eklöf, 2003).
Lantz-Andersson (2003) discusses what she calls structuring resources which influence the
students’ search and information behavior. She singles out four categories classifying operational factors connected to the factual search process, the choice of tools and the use of images. The students’ understanding of the task, their communication with the teacher and their
own motivation are other structural factors that she singles out. Karlsson (2004) states that in
work with artifacts (e.g., ICT) it is the teachers’ responsibility to offer a context that creates
possibilities for students to create meaning in order for significant learning to occur.
Whereas there are studies on students “own work” and “own research” that position students as unethical, as cheaters, as copycats or as copy-and-paste-plagiarists, a substantial part
of research treats this problem as a question of learning how to work with information, construct meaning and manage to produce texts that are the students’ own. Several studies raise
issues of how artifacts support “the cheater” while other studies raise issues about how they
can support “the learner”. In this discourse technology is sometimes seen as the root of evil. It
supports surface searches, surface reading and surface transformation of texts. In such a perspective technology is often treated as something that determines how students and teachers
use new technology. From a socio cultural perspective how teachers and students make sense
of technology in practice is an important issue. One issue of interest to us is how teachers and
students make sense of programs/artifacts and the affordances which are built into them. Another issue of importance is what affordances that can be important to support a deep approach to information behavior.
Transport and Transform or Transport-Analyse-Transform
Alexandersson and Limberg (2004) use an interesting metaphor to describe how students deal
with information. Their metaphor Transport and Transform visualizes a process where students concentrate on downloading information and transporting “facts” transforming this into
a final product. In this metaphor the teachers’ activity and the students’ activity is focused on
the final product rather than on the content itself. The teachers’ interaction with the students
during the transformation part of the process is mainly focused on the language aspect of the
product using questions like “is this really your own words” or “could this be formulated another way”. After having transformed the wording of the texts the students focus on decorating it, often using pictures that have limited connection to the meaning of the content. Students do not work with pictures as if they were carriers of meaning. Text produced in this
manner would easily pass for plagiarized material. What seems interesting is that the teachers
are partly active in producing them and not only through the way the assignments are formulated but through the ritualized ways of working. This is also what is suggested by Eklöf
(2003).
5
Figure 1 Alexanderssons and Limbergs Transport and Transform metaphor
It is suggested that this way of working with texts and pictures may be connected to the affordances of technology. In an attempt to find out how teachers' make sense of artefacts that can
be used in students' "own research" we worked out a demonstration of software based on a
development of Alexandersson and Limberg's metaphor. We called it transport-analyzetransform. We argued that transport and transform are necessary steps in working with information. The problem is not what is there but what is missing in the interaction between the
teacher, student, text and artefact.
Figure 2 Nilsson, Eklöf and Ottossons Transport - Analyze - Transform metaphor
The transport conceptualizes student work in transporting and transforming texts as a process
intersected by the teacher and the artifact. What Alexandersson and Limberg show is that
prompts for analysis of and reflection on content, signs, graphs, pictures and other representations are missing. These are scaffolds that need to be provided by the teacher acting in the
zone of proximal development. Rather then testing the effects of artifacts that can support
prompting of reflection we decided to pilot a study on how teachers make sense of different
artifacts that can support a focus on the content. We deliberately chose software that could
also be used to just reproduce others’ texts or deform these in ways that would make it virtually impossible to find the original. Before the teacher training session with senior high school
teachers we produced three texts in Swedish. To produce them we used four applications:
SweSum, Encarta Researcher, Open Mind, an OCR-program and a scanner. The topic of the
day was information retrieval and source criticism. We first presented research on students’
work with information, and then produced the texts for discussion in focus groups. Afterwards
we presented in a full group discussion how these texts had been produced. The texts and
software were used to facilitate the discussion.
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Three examples of software posing threats and promises (promises and threats)
Several authors have engaged in research and discussions on artifacts’ affordances for learning. Such research illustrates both promises and threats. In the following we will present and
discuss three examples of software we have presented to teachers to see their reactions.
Swesum
Automatic text summarization is a technique having several applications. It is used to summarize texts in search machines to present short summaries of web-pages. It is used to summarize and push out news to cell-phones. It is also used to summarize large texts. Such a tool is
implemented in for instance Microsoft Word under tools. Different tools and techniques for
text summarization are under construction both within academic institutions and commercial
software companies. One indication of the interest in these techniques are that several conferences are held annually on the subject. One example is the “Document understanding conference” within Nist (National institute of standards and technology).
Below you find a screen shot of a Swedish text summarizer called SweSum. Swesum was
developed as a project at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology by Martin Hassel and
Hercules Dalianis and can do summarizations in different languages although some features
are available only in Swedish.
Figure 3 Summarizing texts with SweSum
Texts are pasted directly into the form or linked directly from the local computer. Keywords
are selected and entered into the keyword section highlighting these in the summary process.
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A choice is made about whether the genre should be report or newspaper text and the appropriate language is selected.
The general idea is to summarize one text but nothing prevents summarization of many
texts.
To illustrate how Swesum works we chose a text from one text from the Term Paper site
Digital Term Papers, a second text from Wikipedia, a third text from MSN Encarta about Hitler’s Early Childhood and finally a chronological account from History Place. We set the parameters so that Swesum would generate a report in English, 30 percent of the original texts
long using eight keywords, child, boy, beat, artistic, please, stern, wedlock and school. These
four texts are thus summarized and reduced to 30 percent of the original when we press the
summarize button.
Here we present an excerpt from text generated by Swesum:
Then as he grew up, he became stern and demanding, like his father. Hitler was
born to Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl and was the fourth child of his father's third
marriage" (Stein 2). Hitler did well in the monastery school and also took part in the
boys' choir (Joakims). "As a young boy Hitler idolized the priests and for two years
seriously considered becoming a priest himself" (Patrons). His father would beat the
children and occasionally Adolf's mother Klara as well (Marrin). Hitler tried to
please his father, but never could. "His father would slap him and beat him with a
cane, dog whip, or belt. Hitler had great fear of his father and hated even to come
home.
In Hitler's teen years, he discovered he had great artistic skills. Adolf, he said,
must go to the technical school in Linz and become a civil servant like himself"
(Marrin). Alois Hitler also had an illegitimate son, Alois junior, and a daughter,
Angela, with his second wife. In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler describes his father as
an irascible tyrant, however there is little indication Alois Hitler treated his son
more strictly than was usual for that time and place.
As can be seen the result is a readable English text with some errors. The text could have
been written by a student but is in fact generated by SweSum. Before the teacher training session with senior high school teachers we produced texts in Swedish using a similar procedure
feeding Swedish texts into Swesum and the other software. To make them less searchable on
the net we also scanned in texts from text books using optical character recognition. The texts
were cleaned from major syntactic errors, a few every day concepts were added and unlike in
the text above we removed all references to the originals. There were three texts, one biology
text about mosses, one economy text about textile industry and one general text about nuclear
power. We distributed the texts as student papers and asked teachers to discuss and grade
them. The teachers discussed in mixed groups covering different subject areas. The reactions
were somewhat surprising. The texts were accepted as student texts and as texts written within
the proper subject discourse. The question of cheating was not the immediate focus of attention. Other issues became targets of concern. The texts were considered to concentrate too
much on facts and contribute too little of a student perspective. There were also discussions
about whether these kinds of assignments amounting to summarizations should be considered
meaningful in the age of computers and the Internet. There was a clash between language
teachers who considered summarization to be an important skill to train and social science
teachers who argued that it was better for the students to download texts and comment on
them. When the question of cheating came up it was as an aspect that needed to be defined
and not in relation to the texts.
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As we revealed the origin of the texts there were some laughs and suggestions that it
would be hard to catch students who wanted to cheat if they used such methods. There were
also teachers who objected and said that why not teach the students to use these programmes
and put more teacher time into how they can treat the texts by analysing them and putting
them into perspective.
Encarta Researcher
Studies on how students distribute their time in a search process show that searching for
and collecting information is what students devote most of their time to (Lantz-Andersson,
2003; Alexandersson & Limberg, 2004). They spend so much time collecting hopefully relevant information that there is little time for reflection and analysis of the content of the information. Because of that they have a problem working their way from relevant to pertinent
information (Kuhlthau, 1993). It can be argued that students need help to shift their attention
from devoting time to hoard information instaed spending it on evaluating and analyzing the
contents of their searches. Present applications in the form of search bots are designed to facilitate searching for information. Summarizers as Swesum help with summaries with little
involvement from the student. Student interventions in the text occur outside of the summarizer. We argue that there is a need in applications to provide help to students to organize and
analyze information. The Encarta Researcher provides tools that not only helps students to
find, collect, and organize information so they can write reports. We argue that the built in
features in these kinds of applications also provide prompts that steer the students towards
analysis and reflection and the teachers both in their roles as tutor and supervisor. The effect
of such prompts when designed as questions inside texts has been considered to be without
effect in studies on deep and surface approaches to reading. We suggest it would be worth
while to
Figure 4 Compiling texts with Encarta Researcher
9
conduct studies into such effects on student information behavior and the way students and
teachers make sense of such prompts when they are embedded into artifacts of the kind represented by Encarta Researcher.
When you have installed Encarta Researcher you get an extra toolbar connected to your browser. When it is activated it inserts an extra field to the left of the browser window.
In this window the user can create a project. In the example above the project is called cheating. For searches the users use their browser and the kind of search engines they are used to.
Encarta Researcher helps organize information that is found. When users come across information they want to use, they highlight it and then click on the “add to Researcher” button.
The program now puts a kind of bookmark in the program field. It also makes a copy of the
content in a specified file. This is not a new feature. It can be found in other software. When
the user double clicks on the new bookmark Encarta Researcher will open the saved section in
a special edit mode allowing the user to edit and add comments in the form of thoughts, analytical commentaries, references to other texts and similar things. It is also possible for the
user to rewrite the text leaving parts as quotes. It has a built in feature for referencing adding
citations both as running footnotes and as a reference section making it easy both for the student to add correct citations and for the teacher to find the original material.
Figure 5 Editing text with Encarta Researcher
The screen dump shows how the note field appears after double clicking. In the note field the
user is now free to alter and write comments, questions or remarks. If used in this way, stressing that it is not gathering lots of information that is the purpose of research, with a strong
emphasis from the teacher that this is the proper way to deal with information that has been
collected, we argue such applications can help students move one step further. This will of
10
course have an influence on the amount of information that
the students will use, but this is a minor problem, as it can
be a quality boost in how the students use the information
When the users finally have found the information they
want to use, they can let the program generate the report,
either as an HTML page or as a Word document. The program then puts together all information from the websites
and own notations and creates a Word document for the
user to possibly continue writing in. It also handles the reference question by putting a bibliography at the end of the
document.
As argued by Alexandersson and Limberg (2004) and
Nilsson (2003), the question of how to create an original
Figure 6 Selecting what to include
text from other peoples’ text is complicated. Nilsson’s disin the report in Encarta Researcher sertation is called “Skriv med egna ord” (in translation
Write in your own words). What is eviBibliography
dent is that this can be interpreted as an
"Avoiding Second Hand Thinking."
encouragement to substitute words and
http://www.fno.org/feb02/secondhand.html (03/05/05
reformulate rather than reflect on the
17:52:52)
content. Alexandersson and Limberg
"ICT research papers."
http://www.worc.ac.uk/departs/educat/fox/ICTresonlin
(2004, p. 99) argue that creating texts
e.htm (03/05/05 17:57:21)
based on downloaded information often
"May, 1998, From Now On."
amounts to reformulation and that this
http://www.fno.org/may98/cov98may.html (03/05/05
may imply a need to look at how stu17:53:23)
dents write texts. We would also sug"N t t ki
dN t
ki "
Figure 7 Bibliography generated in Encarta Researcher
gest that using the artifact to support
structure and sampling opens an opportunity for teachers to highlight the edit mode as a space
for students’ own original thoughts.
When we presented Encarta Researcher to the teachers who had discussed our constructed
texts, we were not faced with objections or fear that students would use the software to copy
and paste. Much to our surprise we were presented with thoughts and suggestions about how
the tools could be used to improve the way students structure their texts. One teacher said that
“to be able to compose a text this way takes a lot of skill”. Another teacher said that these
kinds of tools may “make it necessary for us to change focus and concentrate on how students
reflect on collected texts instead of how they summarize them”. The general feeling seemed to
be that this type of applications can be helpful, together with teacher instructions, in shifting
student attention from the collection of information towards the analytical parts of the research process. It also gives the teacher a means to follow the students’ process in making
sense of their texts. As the researcher file is separately stored on the computer it is made possible for the teachers as well to access the database and follow the process.
Mind mapping programs, modeling and conceptual mapping
What software that support modeling and conceptual mapping may bring to education has
been the focus of several research reports (Jonassen, 1996, 2000; Jonassen and Land 2000).
Little has been done on how such software can be used to enhance students’ structuring and
understanding of information. We have found nothing when searching for research on how to
use these programs to support writing. Does software for conceptual mapping and modeling
offer (afford) students ways of working, that can constitute a shift in focus from searching for
and gathering information to analyzing and reflecting on it and for writing down personal
comments? There are some similarities between this kind of programs and the researcher. The
11
block in the map refers to different web sites concerning cheating. They work as hyperlinks so
it becomes possible to directly access the different sites. The notation field that is connected
to the highlighted block gives the student an opportunity to comment on and relate to the content of the site. It is possible for students to set up dependant variables and explore what concepts are related to them. They can tie documents they find directly to their concepts and write
in the notepad section how they think these document provide information that is relevant.
They can use different signs to provide instant commentaries on different concepts they try to
explore, such as “dead end”, “follow up this idea”, “what does this mean?” and so on. It is
suggested that students often get stuck during the collection of information and devote more
time to this process than other parts of their “research” (Lantz-Andersson 2003; Alexandersson & Limberg, 2004). Using this kind of tool may help the student to move forward in the
process, and not get stuck in mere information collection. As mentioned earlier, it also gives
the teacher an opportunity closer to follow the students’ process, and gives the teacher more
background in the facilitation of the students’ work. This kind of use of a mind mapping program could provide a useful development of the programs’ possibilities that would enhance
students’ writing. The necessary background is awareness among the teachers of the implications of research of the kind mentioned earlier and how they relate to the kind of methods
afforded by the program and why this use is beneficial for the students
Figur 8 Describing and linking concepts in Open Mind
As in the case of the other programs we presented a way of working with models and concept mapping to teachers. In this case the teachers thought that “the software could be a nice
tool to shift students’ focus to deeper treatment of information”.
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Conclusion
Working from the metaphor transport-analyse-transform we constructed a series of demonstrations of three types of software that we showed to teachers. Teachers who discussed these
artefacts and how they could be used did not stress the possibility to use such software to
cheat and compose reports using other writers’ texts. Texts generated by SweSum were generally considered to be too focused on facts and devoid of student reflections. The possibility
to use software like Encarta Researcher and software for conceptual mapping were thought to
provide support for turning student focus away from merely transforming texts towards analysing and reflecting on them. Teachers see the learner before the cheater and regard problems
with text copying as a problem in dealing with information rather than as an ethical problem.
Software presented according to the metaphor of transport-analyse-transform seems to be regarded as a means to support such a process.
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References
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Appendix
The full generated text from Swesum
Then as he grew up, he became stern and demanding, like his father. Hitler was born to Alois
Hitler and Klara Pölzl and was the fourth child of his father's third marriage" (Stein 2). Hitler
did well in the monastery school and also took part in the boys' choir (Joakims). "As a young
boy Hitler idolized the priests and for two years seriously considered becoming a priest himself" (Patrons). His father would beat the children and occasionally Adolf's mother Klara as
well (Marrin). Hitler tried to please his father, but never could. "His father would slap him
and beat him with a cane, dog whip, or belt. Hitler had great fear of his father and hated even
to come home.
In Hitler's teen years, he discovered he had great artistic skills. Adolf, he said, must go to the
technical school in Linz and become a civil servant like himself" (Marrin). Alois Hitler also
had an illegitimate son, Alois junior, and a daughter, Angela, with his second wife. In Mein
Kampf Adolf Hitler describes his father as an irascible tyrant, however there is little indication Alois Hitler treated his son more strictly than was usual for that time and place.
Alois Hitler was born out of wedlock and until he was 40 used his mother's surname
Schicklgruber. Later, Adolf Hitler was accused by his political enemies of not rightfully being
a Hitler, but a Schicklgruber. Young Adolf was reportedly a good pupil at the various elementary schools he attended, however in sixth grade (1900/01) his first year of high school (Realschule) in Linz, he failed completely and had to repeat.
Hitler later explained this as a kind of rebellion against his father Alois, who wanted the boy
to follow him in a career as a customs official, although Adolf wanted to become a painter.
After Hitler's father died on January 3, 1903 at age 65, his schoolwork didn't improve and at
age 16 Hitler left school without graduating
Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, in 1889, the fourth child of Klara
and Alois Hitler. Hitler began school in 1900, and his grades were above average. It was decided that he would attend Realschule, a secondary school that prepared students for further
study and emphasized modern languages and technical subjects. However, Hitler and his father strongly differed about career plans. His father wanted him to enter the civil service; Hitler insisted on becoming an artist. He spent much time playing and dreaming, did poorly in
his studies, and left school entirely in 1905 after the equivalent of the ninth grade.
Adolf Hitler would never know for sure just who his grandfather was. By 1875 he achieved
the rank of Senior Assistant Inspector, a big accomplishment for the former poor farm boy
with little formal education. This is important because it is hard to imagine tens of thousands
of Germans shouting "Heil Schicklgruber!" instead of "Heil Hitler!"
In 1885, after numerous affairs and two other marriages ended, the widowed Alois Hitler, 48,
married the pregnant Klara Pölzl, 24, the granddaughter of uncle Hiedler. Klara Pölzl eventually gave birth to two boys and a girl, all of whom died. On April 20, 1889, her fourth child,
Adolf, was born healthy and was baptized a Roman Catholic.
In May of 1895 at age six, young Adolf Hitler entered first grade in the public school in the
village of Fischlham near Linz, Austria.
Lexikon: Engelska
Ord före 2005
Ord efter 599
Sammanfattningsgrad: 29%
Typ av text: tidningstext
Nyckelord: school child boy beat stern please wedlock artistic
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