Plagiarism - in the web world

Found someone plagiarising text for a school-assigned website. When I googled, the student's text was found on at least five other sites. The student used someone else's text word-for-word, but so had others outside the school environment!

We know about peer-to-peer with music and movies, we wink at image re-use, and cut-and-paste is leading to more and more plagiarism. Is intelligent, meaningful, and well-designed content, irrelevant of its sources, the way of the future?

In this new communicative space with its ease of reproduction, what rules are appropriate? And what is the relevance of a source when cropping and altering have been applied?

Keeping Up and Choices

Spent the day reviewing Stephen Downes emails, catching up.

There is so much, and developments are exploding possibilities.

I can't try everything; I have to chose what to play with. Stay with a limited JotSpot, or shift to Drupal? Be serious about using Backpack to plan, or let it drift away? I have chosen to commit to Furl, and it's working for me. FLickr, to a limited degree too. I should start looking at the urls posted by others who have matching urls to what I've chosen - using the social web.

I need to learn more about trackback, and use the Creative Commons.

Never enough time!