Camelot

An amusing uTube video forwarded by John Herbert:

Camelot

But it and the millions of other videos like it raise an important pedagogical point: In her fabulous paper, "Conflicting Cultures: Promoting Academic Integrity to the Millennial Generation" Selinda A. Berg (University of Western Ontario) makes the telling point that the millennial generation is surrounded by examples (like the above) of the creative mashup -- people take images and sounds from various other peoples' original works, and creates something new. Although these mashups clearly violate the originators copyright, they are considered (by the millennial generation) as original compositions. So then these same kids come to campus and are told that their original compositions -- consisting of paragraphs put together from 15 different articles and books -- is plagiarism and they're going to face this or that draconian punishment. Berg asks how academia can simply ignore that these students are not entering university blank slates ready for the professoriate to write on, but fully acculturated adults -- whose culture says that mashups are the norm and admirable?