Blog Post #3

Johnson-Eilola and Selber put plagiarism and remixing in a completely new context with their writing arguments on the way students are being taught to write and remix. The student is usually required to come up with their own work, in their own words, and if any idea, concept, or compilation of words is used from someone else’s work it has to be cited. Students are taught from a very young age that anything other than this technique is plagiarism. “What happens, however, if we tell students that their goal is not to create new, unique texts but to filter and remix other texts in ways that solve concrete problems or enact real social action? What if we expect and encourage them to copy other texts? Plagiarism, in these situations, becomes much less of an issue, for students are encouraged to make explicit their borrowings and appropriations. What counts, in this new context, is the ability of students to remix texts in ways that address specific issues, readers, and situations.” In this quote from the argument it is rephrasing the way students can learn about plagiarism. Students tend to try to come up with their own ideas and bypass others to make sure they can get the grade and not get in trouble for plagiarism. If students were given the opportunity to read ideas similar to their own and then transform or combine those ideas into their own remix it would make for a much better paper. If everything is a remix, than even the best writers took ideas from other sources and created their own masterpiece and ideas. The concept of plagiarism and originality obviously has to be drawn at some point in order to keep students from completely abusing the opportunity or stealing the original writer’s idea. Originality can simply be that a student should not copy any idea or words verbose, but instead take those words and combine your own thoughts and make something new. For example, a famous writer may say the pop culture of music is un-tasteful. Plagiarism would be saying “pop culture of music is un-tasteful” or “the new music of the era is un-tasteful or dissatisfying”. Originality, on the other hand, would take this idea and transform and combine it into a new and refreshing idea. For example, and original phrase pertaining to the above could be “the new music of the pop culture era, as the reader may agree, has taken on the taste of the younger generation, therefore making it very unappealing to the other generations that came before. Finally, nothing from the reading confused me. I found it to be very beneficial, and it gave me a better perspective on what a remix is and what plagiarism is.