Frances Bell

Re: citing things in forums - I think that our practice is (inevitably) changing here. I have noticed that several well-known bloggers have increased the use of images in their blogs and tend to use CC Some rights reserved images (or their own) and give an informal citation to show the source.
I agree with you that we are fuzzy about self-plagiarism - I am happy with fuzzy actually. At one end of the scale, there is 'theft of an article' (probably Josep's example) and at the other end of the scale there is an accidental missing citation, and an awful lot of fuzzy in between - yet when many educators talk about plagiarism they seem to assume it is clear cut and 'beyond the pale'.
The point that I was trying to make was that I think as educators we should look at our practice, seeing how it develops as the context changes (the privacy of the classroom giving way to the publicness of the Internet). That might help good scholarship be seen as something that student learn over time rather than the deficit approach of 'plagiarism' where I have heard some academics lump all 'plagiarism ' together and treat it as some sort of evidence of the moral decline of youth.

It's not just students who need to watch what they do. In marking a student essay a few years ago, I came across a few sentences (about virtual identity) that I thought might be from elsewhere. When I googled for an exact phrase, I came back with just 2 hits. The first was the original source, Judith Donath's PhD thesis, and the second was a paper by an academic from, yes, an Ethics Conference. It wasn't a serious case of plagiarism (for student or academic) but rather sloppy scholarship. It has made me quite cautious though, and I am now much more careful about citing in slideshows, etc.
What do we think about practice in this space? (who mentioned the cat photos ?)

Where's my ipod gone?

Thanks to ergyth at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ergyth/348260801/

Is this the forum you are looking for? http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=55

Hi William,
I am a great believer in distraction. When feeling the ennui that you describe is not necessarily a good time to think about the future or even too much about yourself. Physical activity, fun (various examples already given) are great distractions, especially if their focus is on giving to others or just enjoying being with them.
Failing that, take up knitting and then you can blog about it. I even managed to link knitting to the Internet in an idle hour.