Ages ago I used to give training in using search engines for plagiarism
detection. One factor that is overlooked is the skill and experience
embedded in the lecturer at spotting those "key phrases" on which to
match. And the lack of skill and experience (particularly 10 years ago,
when I was doing this training, with students as well as staff, I might
add; web searches are "research" when you remember to cite!) with the
IT is what makes manual searches very time consuming for the majority
of lecturers.
People who know me, will be reassured that I have a driving analogy for
this too! Automatic gear boxes are convenient, make driving accessible
for disabled people, but can deskill the driver and are never as
efficient as an experienced human brain doing the gear changes. You
also cannot bump start an automatic car, although I can't quite get
that to be significant to the analogy. Sorry.
Anyway, TurnitinUK is an automatic gear box. It is also restricted by
what it has searched in the past, where a LIVE google search brings up
what another automatic service - the web spider that gathers up page
descriptions - has been looking at recently. There is the rub!
TurnitinUK has a longer memory, and a google search in two weeks might
not bring up the same material as two weeks ago.
I think that as we add more work to the database, there may be more of
a detection by previous copies, rather than web pages. This is a
service that google cannot provide. Maybe a bit of both is what is
best?
Mike
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