Finding a plagiarizing pedagogy for the digitally born student

McLuhan suggested that our nervous systems extend into the technological realms we create, and this idea survives and is emphasized in the digital pedagogies like those presented by Mary Hocks. The current student body, however, problematizes this pattern and pedagogy where the binary seems to no longer be one way—Man no longer just extends into the digital, but the digital extends back into us and becomes a major factor in the formation of identity.

Hocks notes, “writers now engage in what Porter calls ‘internetworked writing’—writing that involves the intertwining of production, interaction, and publication in the online classroom or professional workplace as advocating for one’s online audiences” (631). I don’t disagree that our writing is “internetworked” or that we now have a more advanced and faster way to share data and information (including images and other visual elements) than we ever have before, but I think these ideas need to go one step deeper and recognize that our students, and perhaps we too, have identities determined and embedded in these technologies. The Internet here is the material that affects our representations of ourselves; therefore, it more than likely affects our approach to teaching these technologies and how we choose to negotiate visual elements within documents and online environments.

There are a number of theoretical ways to deal with this issue, but one of the most prevalent and grounded examples occurs in composition classrooms through the practice of plagiarism (as suggested by Kenny Goldsmith) particularly as a result of the easy access to information, including visual elements, over the Internet. Showing students how to copy and paste, download, or take screen shots of images and then integrate those images into documents, allows us as teachers to address both the ways in which visual elements have rhetorical value, but also show that these images, like chunks of text, need both in-text and works-cited citations.

In many ways, this also shows that it would be of great value to teach students an ontological epistemological feminist approach to identity and then ask them to apply these theories to the visual texts they encounter in the academic and professional workplace. Students would benefit from examining the relationship between their ideological ideas of themselves and the material aspects of their existence and identity as shaped by the Internet. This kind of analysis would offer value that would extend beyond just examining “audience stance,” “transparency,” and “hybridity” (632). Additionally, an ontological-epistemological approach seems substantially more important than arbitrarily rating our students’ understanding of making good visual texts or admitting that they write within a different domain and environment than previous writers have as Lauer and Sanchez note.

By asking our students to dissect digital rhetoric, we are in part asking them to dissect a material element of who they are. Hocks claims, “Audiences can experience the pleasures of agency and an awareness of themselves as constructed identities in a heterogeneous medium. How that agency gets played out, however, depends on the purpose and situation for the text in relation to the audience’s need for linearity and other familiar forms” (633). In technical writing, we do always want to focus on the way that audience sees and interacts with the documents we create, but it is important not to overlook the fact that our students likely represent an expert audience already, where interaction with digital media is extremely commonplace in their lives.

The approach I’m suggesting allows us as teachers of technical writing to observe the value in Hock’s notion that “If we can teach students to critique the rhetorical and visual features of professional hypertexts-the audience stance …we can also teach them to design their own technological artifacts that use these strategies but are more speculative or activist in nature” (645) and offer an extension to this thought: by teaching students to analyze digital rhetorics and artifacts and their usage and borrowing thereof, we can encourage them to better understand their own roles and formation of their own identities in these mediums as well as their multiple audiences’.