Plagiarism...whose problem is it anyway?

"Kids nowadays! They all just copy and paste! Why doesn't anyone talk about plagiarism?"
This is a problem at the 8-12 level (and probably K-7 as well). As the TL in my school, I have been asked to give workshops to classes on the evils of plagiarism (which I will happily do!). Rather than throw up our hands, we need to fine-tune our assignments so that students must come up with some original angle in order to meet the requirements of the course.

"How can you make it copy-paste-proof?" This is a constant refrain for me as I work with my colleagues. If an assignment asks Grade 8 students to research a country and report on its language, culture, government, history and economy, most students will simply cut and paste from Britannica.com. If, instead, students are asked to research the country in question, compare it to Canada and then make a case for "which country is the most desirable culturally speaking" or "if I were to move to this new country, would I be better or worse off than I am now. and why?", then the final project becomes a student's unique perspective that demonstrates his/her understanding of the research that was done for the course. And, the "answer" is not googlable. or copy-pastable!

Don't "Blink"!

I just finished reading "Blink!" by Malcolm Gladwell. Fascinating book. I was intrigued by the idea that snap decisions are not always bad decisions. As Gladwell says in the book, we've been taught that "haste makes waste" and "look before you leap", but we don't recognize our capacity for pulling together the many bits of crucial information at our disposal and deriving a competent and accurate assessment of the situation. In particular, I was interested in his remark that a two second clip of a teacher's performance can allow an observer to predict how "effective" the teacher will be rated by his/her students at the end of the semester. (Nalini Ambady) My connection to ID work is to wonder about the many steps we are asked to complete before we propose an instructional design solution. (learner analysis, structural analysis, etc.) Would a competent designer simply be able to "grok" the solution without explicitly going through all the preliminary steps? Hmmm.