PLEs and plagiarism —
A Spanish magazine for human resource professionals just published this article (pdf), that has the endorsement of the Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Barcelona (IL3-UB), promoting the merits of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). They do not appear to be associated with the upcoming PLE2010 conference in Barcelona, which is organised by the civil society organisation CitiLab.
As I scanned the article, my eyes fell on the third page. The writers Ruth Martínez (educational consultant) and Oscar Dalmau (Director of Corporate Solutions, IL3-UB) mention “webtops” and “Google Write”. Suspiciously, I translated the Spanish. There is no doubt about it, they have merely edited the text straight from my 2006 article about PLEs. It obviously didn’t occur to them that some of my examples are out of date now. Or that I’d find them.
I have always published on a Creative Commons licence that requests attribution.
Look, I don’t care that individuals take anything I write and integrate it with their own work, build on it, elaborate it, critique it. I hope that the advance of PLEs will help make this happen more as we all mix our lifelong learning experiences together.
However, with this power comes an ethical responsibility. You don’t just take material and re-purpose it to your own private or institutional gain. You give credit where it’s due, whether you produce a derivative of the work or not.
To just take my words, shift them around a bit and then hide the theft through translation is contemptible. It’s plagiarism, and out of a university, it’s appalling. I expect an apology.
Published under a Creative Commons License
Maybe the links or the content have changed, but reading the Spanish and reading yours I am hard pressed to say that they simply copied what you wrote.
Posted by Stephen Downes 16 June 2010 01:53 am | link
I disagree, the text on page 3 is clearly lifted.
Posted by Ron Lubensky 16 June 2010 12:32 pm | link