Welcome to Gully Brook Press

The website of freelance writer Gina
Giuliano

Please visit my site (by clicking the link) where you can read some of my short works, and view my virtual museum.

Monday/early Tuesday.
Well, I just wrote quite a bit - and when I posted & published I got an error message - said I was not logged in - and my text vanished. Bummer. Another one of those times when I had to re-learn something I already knew 100 times over (or should have known by now): Save often - except this time that will be "post and publish."

I made some updates to my Gully Brook Press website. Why not visit it? Most significant: I added a page for historic documents, both images and PDF files, on one room schools. I have shared some of the material with students, but I am calling this a virtual museum and I'm rather pleased with it.

My site has generated some email. Not from anyone who was unknown to me before, and I don't expect to get anything like that yet. Ah, the difficulties of getting a site to appear in a search engine! I am trying to get that to happen, but I have no idea if my efforts will work, or if I will have to pay something...I imagine dollar bills (actually digits, I guess, although the paper makes a better visual) getting sucked into the cable modem, and streaming into the wire and to the pole...so what else is new?

Anyway, one of those emails is encouraging me to write an entry about plagiarism. (Does this thing have a spell check? Don't want to take a risk and hunt it down at this point, so who cares?) What with the various scandals, some alleged, some not, in history writing: Ellis, Goodwin, McCullough (as it happens I am reading John Adams now), Ambrose, another scholar (whose name escapes me, he wrote on gun ownership, or the lack of it, in colonial times) and a local case for me, a professor at the university, this is receiving a lot of attention in academe. The Chronicle of Higher Education (it is a subscription website) has had some interesting articles on the subject lately.

There is some concern, perhaps overblown, that students regularly plagiarize from the Internet. I do know that students in the class I teach often fail to cite, or use inappropriate citations, but I have assumed this was due to a lack of understanding of the standard, rather than intentional cheating. Perhaps I am mistaken. The email had a link to a site, called www.turnitin.com, which is a service that scans student papers and catches instances of cheating. The tryout is free, but the actual service is a subscription. As an adjunct, I doubt I would get institutional support for www.turnitin.com, so I guess I will have to continue to rely on good old fashioned instincts. There were two cases when I am pretty certain the students downloaded their term papers from one of those mills that charge a fee, because Mr. Do Nada and Ms. Dee Minus do not tranform into Mr. Gene Yus and Ms. A. Plus in one assignment.

And, I must admit that the Internet does make it seem easy and maybe tempting too - here it is the middle of a last minute all-nighter and a big paper is due - just click, edit, copy, paste, and claim it. I suppose if popular and scholarly historians think it is OK to plagiarize, how can we expect students to demonstrate better ethics? On the other hand, why blame the web? I figure that students who wanted to plagiarize in the past found a way to do it too - they simply would have typed or handwritten their cheating from "scratch" by copying it from a dusty old library book, right? Maybe that took more time - meaning that then, the all-nighter had to be a day or two in advance of the deadline.

But, as a freelance writer who just established a publications website, I suppose it is something to consider. But I really don't like to, or the question that perhaps this power-to-the-people-publishing type of website of which blogger is an example could also be a source for the less than reputable?