Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Since I was having such miserable results with SafeAssign, I finally posted a question to one of our college's listserves about the status of Turnitin. Within a day, Turnitin was again offered as a content link within Blackboard - yeah! Now we have a choice -- go with Turnitin, which has a wonderful database collection so that my students can check the status of their quotations and paraphrases, or go with SafeAssign, which has a miserable database and fails to come up with any matches. Now, if students could just elect to have their paper matched against other Internet and electronic database sources instead of also having their paper copied into Turnitin's own database, we'd have the whole intellectual property situation solved and more students and teachers could use the product without feeling that rights are being violated. For me, the benefits of Turnitin -- for both teacher and student -- still outweigh the potential intellectual property rights issue; it will be nice to see what finally happens with the lawsuits so we can move on.