David Hawkes writes from Canada of an encounter with Stephen Downes:

Stephen is a philoso­pher who is deeply inter­ested in the free­dom of infor­ma­tion and the free­dom of learn­ing. He is also inter­ested in the notion of dig­i­tal rights expres­sion as opposed to dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment, by which we mean that it is more impor­tant to focus on the pur­pose of the dig­i­tal shar­ing than it is to focus on the profit motive asso­ci­ated with such endeav­ours. His take on pla­gia­rism is that peo­ple almost never present things that are totally orig­i­nal and that they are always using a vari­ety of sources to achieve an objec­tive, so what is really needed is a rede­f­i­n­i­tion of pla­gia­rism.

The notion of ‘expres­sion’ is an inter­est­ing one! That is, I take it, per­tain­ing to free­dom of mate­r­ial in a broader sense? Or did he speak of this in the con­text of acad­e­mia alone?

Increas­ingly, I am becom­ing aware of the accusative approach taken to the issue of pla­gia­rism — at a ter­tiary level it is par­tic­u­larly appar­ent. By this I mean that legit­i­mate col­lab­o­ra­tion is being sti­fled; dis­cus­sions are being cut short. This is of par­tic­u­lar con­cern as, whilst there is a clear need for such col­lab­o­ra­tion in higher edu­ca­tion, the spec­tre of ‘pla­gia­rism’ (that is, accu­sa­tions of such a thing) is dimin­ish­ing oth­er­wise quite-fruitful discussions.

At a sec­ondary level this is per­haps of lesser con­se­quence — Internet-based pla­gia­rism would be (I imag­ine) the great­est of sev­eral con­cerns in this field. In fact, from what I recall of school, things would do well to go in the other direc­tion. It is not that no effort has been made in this field — far from it. I think par­tic­u­larly of the tar­get­ted ini­tia­tives steered by Simon Break­s­pear, and recall some idea that col­lab­o­ra­tive efforts were to ben­e­fit a group of stu­dents col­lec­tively. There is, how­ever, so much more that can be done here. Per­haps iron­i­cally, elec­tronic col­lab­o­ra­tion (‘pla­gia­rism’) tools realise just that. Cre­at­ing a space in which stu­dents can actively engage with ideas (as opposed to pas­sive, top-down envi­ron­ments that offer no impe­tus to cre­ate con­tent) is para­mount to re-aligning ‘pla­gia­rism’ with pos­i­tive con­cep­tions. It is, for obvi­ous rea­sons, ludi­crous to sug­gest to a stu­dent that ideas should be attrib­uted to their peers in writ­ten work. Yet, for the pur­poses of edu­ca­tion (which is, by my reck­on­ing, dis­tinct from those of assess­ment!), a col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment that allows trac­ing the ori­gin of ideas in a local con­text is a great thing.

Per­haps that ‘ludi­crous’ idea of inter­nal attri­bu­tion should even be applied, as a way of instill­ing a habit of this kind.

There is so much that can be done here. It is pio­neer­ing, new ter­ri­tory; char­ac­terised by increas­ing engage­ment. “Expres­sion” is a great word for how we should envis­age re-use of dig­i­tal ‘property’ — growth of expres­sion and crit­i­cal capac­ity can only be a pos­i­tive thing.