I miss that part of the internet. Now, with google searches, it seems I am more likely to be pushed to commercial sites, trying to sell me something. It’s getting harder to find blogs.
Btw, if you’re still looking for nice summaries of citation protocols (MLA, Chicago, and APA), then Purdue’s Online Writing Lab is pretty much the best around:
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html
Guy
There’s this idea in academe, decidedly unpopular on the flob, that one should know what they are talking about and have done the background reading.
Hey, now, that one rings a bell! I think I used that one. But I forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me!
I’m confused. Could you name some specific instance(s) of that?
We were putting all assignments we turned in digitally back when digital submission first became a thing in ~2005 to turn it in. com or something like that. Basically, there’s almost two decades of being able to run a paper through a site that checks against other similar wording/phrasing. I’m sure it’s become significantly better considering what Google translate was back then. If I were a professor in Taiwan, I would demand the university use such a program. Maybe not, since my university had an honor code and we never used a program to check for plagiarism. You get caught “not following the honor code” at the school I went to and you can more or less kiss your entire degree good bye (auto fail on the class and a hearing with the honor council). I’ve said this before on this site: such a process doesn’t work in Taiwan where academic integrity is a fuzzy grey area where lots of excuses get made.
In academe, literature review. On the flob, the CRT thread comes to mind.
I’m afraid to enter that thread. 
I tried the Hunter Biden thread, and I was like, “Whoa, lemme just ease on back outta here.” Maybe I was mistaken, but it looked like something fierce might be brewing in there.
On a serious note, I myself am not qualified to speak or write about Critical Race Theory. I haven’t even done cereal-box-level reading about it.
I was taking an online class a couple years ago and the weekly assignment was to respond to a forum style thread about one of the (usually two or three) questions the professor would post, then later respond to at least two of the other posts. There were two students that were obviously plagiarizing, so after a few weeks I sent the professor a quick email asking why they were allowed to continue like that. His response (summarized) was that the school had one of these types of programs to check, but nothing had been flagged. It took me twenty minutes to write a response copying their three or four most recent responses and link to the exact website where it was plagiarized from. They weren’t immediately failed out of the class, but it was obvious in their sporadic later posts that they had been given notice of some kind.
This school also had an honor code but obviously not a very strict one. The professor should have noticed yet relied too much (I suppose) on believing the program would catch plagiarism. Or he just didn’t care.
I suppose my point is that it’s fairly easy for anybody paying attention to catch plagiarism today, but schools/teachers seem not to want to for whatever reason.
As a prof, I can say it’s not fun being a cop. We will do it if needed for the sake of fairness, but really we just want to teach and we want students to do well with their work.
Guy
It’s more work, easier to turn a blind eye. Can justify to themselves by saying it isn’t their fault, someone else should have taught the students better or that the students shouldn’t be there. Either way, why make someone else’s problem your problem ?
Students might cry foul, international student money might go somewhere else
Some will, some won’t
In my view, it’s better to be fair than let scam artists rule the class.
Guy
In that case, just skip to the bottom and start posting. You’ll fit right in 
That’s one view. I don’t like people wasting my time with copied work, I’d rather just give the lowest possible grade
I absolutely get this idea of wanting “students to do well with their work,” but when students are obviously cheating then they are not. As their professor you’re the one person with the responsibility to make sure they are not cheating (which plagiarizing is) in your class.
Y’all are making me wonder if I’ll ever dare be an educator of adults.
At least with children I can think about “why” they did something and use it as a teaching moment for both of us to discuss how something like cheating has effects on ourselves and others. Or don’t even frame it as “cheating” since they genuinely don’t know what that means in the academic paper sense yet.
I can, no matter how much I’d really like to scream at a kid, say “I see that what you wrote here was copied directly from this website. You know, when we copy the work of others, we always make sure we give them credit by writing down the author’s name and the name of the book or website. That way, when we look at it and think “wow, I’d like to know more!”, we know exactly where to look!”. And with a ten year old, who genuinely is trying to understand what is right/wrong in our society, this is a perfectly acceptable way to show them that you always reference others when copying their work. I can then give suggestions about how to reword or paraphrase to make the work their own. It doesn’t need to become a thing about “stealing” and “breaking the law”. The problem is, when you have learners who are legally adults, they should know that stealing is illegal and wrong. And if they don’t, it becomes the job of the professor to explain that to them. And I would find it condescending as heck if someone talked to another adult in the example of how one could talk to a child that I gave above. So you’re basically hopeless if you’re an adult who “doesn’t know any better”
Interpersonal skills become very important
I much prefer it to teaching children. For example, there is always the option of telling them to get out of your classroom. I’ve never needed to exercise it, but nice to know that i could!
This leads me to another thought I had reading above about how many politicians have been caught in this type of thing:
Maybe these are adults who do know that plagiarizing is wrong yet choose to do it anyway because it’s easier and they don’t get punished. There is an idea that a decent percentage of politicians fall somewhere on the psychopathy spectrum. Maybe there’s a correlation between people who are willing to plagiarize and people who succeed in politics for such a reason. 
I do wonder how many people think copying somebody else’s words is fine because “I agree with this point and this person already articulated it in such an elegant manner.” People retweet and repost stuff all the time, maybe they really aren’t learning that in an academic environment this counts as plagiarism and is wrong.
A lot has been written on the cultural aspect here, e.g. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D3836%26context%3Ddlr&ved=2ahUKEwja1q2yk_H4AhVQ-WEKHUECCUcQFnoECCIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw32sCfIxHG1Mnx1Qme4TIj2
You turned your classmates in?
I thought only military academy cadets had to do that, and they still don’t want to.