Turn It In

When I was in high school, Turnitin was used in the same way Blackboard is used to deliver assignments at a specified time and to check for plagiarism of said assignments. In hindsight, the original premise of Turnitin acted as an educational cloud that created a plagiarism database off of the voluntary submission of students and educators - in others, what existed as the former Turnitin.com's extensive "plagiarism checking database" was the written work of thousands of students spanning many different topics. It was an intelligent and skillful business plan, but what existed as "cloud" content has changed in the past few years, and with that the premise of Turnitin.com's [for free] plagiarism database had come to an end. The new Turnitin.com is a portal for the company's new plagiarism products that do what the original website did, but for a price and a new "Terms of Use Agreement" that make educators, students, and users in general aware that the written work submitted become property of the parent company, iParadigms.

What does this mean for computer-mediated technology? For students and educators, a tool like Turnitin.com's many product offerings, is a unique way to collect, rate, review assignments, as well as to provide formative tools to complete work in a many different languages. The new Turnitin.com has been divided amongst new products such as WriteCheck, which is the retail version of the former website. iThenticate for publishers and researchers, which is a more sophisticated and user-generated "cloud" content, because the work that is tested for plagiarism is published writing available in libraries, articles, and journals. And TurnitinAdmissions.com which is utilized by admission councils in higher education to check for plagiarism amongst essays, statements and application responses. From the initial creation off the imaginative minds of students' work, and educators looking for a centralized [but free] hub to organize assignments arose the original Turnitin.com, but with legal issues stemming from students uploading their own same work [but maybe for different reasons] and/or copyright legalities of "cloud" databasing emerged a new network of Turnitin.com plagiarism applications.