Ethics, plagiarism, and the problem of the digital divide:

A. As any experienced teacher knows one of the downsides of the World Wide Web is the easy availability of papers for student plagiarism. Several good sites are available that offer help in educating students about what constitutes plagiarism and help to teachers in identifying plagiarism. Among the best sites for accomplishing both these ends are the following:

H-Teach Discussion Network: The archives contain good discussions of plagiarism, technology, and education. Although the site is directed towards college teachers of history, much of this will apply to the secondary level as well: http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~teach/

Cyber-Plagiarism: Prevention and Detection, from Penn State's Educational Technology Services: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/cyberplag/

For a print discussion of this problem, see "Papers, Profits, and Pedagogy: Plagiarism in the Age of the Internet, by Kate Masur in the American Historical Association's journal, Perspectives, May 2001, pp. 7-10.

B. A moral problem, but one of a different order, is that of the "digital divide." A variety of reports on this subject have been published in the educational press since 1995. Plugging "digital divide" into any search engine will yield a variety of government and private reports on the many ways in which access and interest to technology divide along race, gender, class, regional, and other lines.

Recently, some commentators have expressed their belief that the problem has been created by the federal government and its commerce departments based on the assumption that every American child needs to be computer literate. Some scholars question this assumption. In the Winter 2001 issue of the Harvard Educational Review,

Jennifer Light in "Rethinking the Digital Divide" compares computer technology to the cable technology of the seventies, critiquing the promises made by government experts and business people for the extent to which these two technologies would transform education.

For background information on the digital divide, search back issues of Education Week (http://www.edweek.org) and The Chronicle of Higher Education. PBS also did a show on this subject, which can be reviewed at http://www.pbs.org/digitaldivide.

Finally, take a look at government documents on this subject, both those of the National Technology and Information Association called "Falling through the Net" at:

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/digitaldivide/index.html

and the reports at the National Center for Education Statistics:

http://nces.ed.gov/