DISQUS

As the person who put the blogs at ukjournalism in place, this kind of thing fills me with dread. You know you are going to have one of those days when this is the first thing that comes across your desk.

Let me know the name of the blog Martin, and I will remove the post ASAP.

As Robin points out, it isn’t just students who do this kind of thing. The issue of copying of work is a perennial problem. The positive the web brings is that it’s traceable, findable and ultimately easily removed. Journalists (training or otherwise) should know better, but it seems that in all parts of the industry they don’t That doesn’t excuse the behaviour of the student though and I appreciate your frustration.

To suggest that we give individual blogs and no guidance is also unfair. We set a great deal of store in professional practice in the department and students do know better. So whilst I accept that it’s the responsibility of j-schools to educate students in this stuff you can never educate against individual action. What we can do is seek to solve the problem and educate the individual to the error they made. As Francois says, it all helps go to educating the community.

For educators, it’s an increasingly difficult balancing act – the ability to experience this stuff Vs. the reality of the mistakes they make. The ongoing debate about teaching students real world skills, giving them the experience of all this new technology just sets that in an often difficult context.