The NP article, stated: “Gary Wheeler, a spokesman for the ministry, could not say how much the licence will cost the province, but said the deal was for three years with an option for two more.

“I think it’s important to understand this is something the school boards through [a procurement committee] asked us for,” he said. “We are not forcing this onto the boards.”

He added it is up to the school boards to decide whether plagiarism was a serious enough problem to implement Turnitin for high school students. How Turnitin will be used, and whether students can opt out, is a question left to the boards as well, he said.

A representative with the Toronto District School Board said she was not aware of the announcement, or of any requests for the software in the past.

“This is not a board policy. If it’s a provincial directive, then I guess we’ll be implementing it come September,” she said.”

Using a spokesperson, is cagey to say the least. Of course the spokesperson does not have the cost figures, and stating that Turnitin is being requested by the boards, is splitting hairs.

Here is the link of the OSPAC
http://www.osapac.org/cms/node/4

“The Ontario Software Acquisition Program Advisory Committee (OSAPAC) is made up of regional representatives of the school boards of Ontario. These representatives are elected biannually by the Regional Computer Advisory Committees. The Ontario Ministry of Education (EDU) also appoints a few school board members when required to ensure an equitable mix of representatives (gender, language etc.). The monies for the OSAPAC program are budgeted year to year.

Vendors should clearly understand the respective roles of OSAPAC and EDU in the priority setting, ranking, negotiating and contractual process. OSAPAC surveys the teachers and computer consultants to establish OSAPAC priorities for software licenses. EDU reviews these priorities to determine that they meet EDU curriculum criteria for the given year. OSAPAC members conduct all software reviews and ranking. EDU is not involved in this part of the process except to facilitate the delivery of software and to ensure that the ranking is carried out in a fair, effective and orderly process.

Once priorities are established in any given year, Requests for Qualification are posted on
http://www.merx.com. Qualified respondents to individual RFQs are then invited to submit pricing for the deliverables through a Request for Tender (RFT). If only one respondent qualifies, then EDU can negotiate directly for terms, conditions and price.”

I certainly would like to know the costs. And why the Toronto board, would not be aware of Turnitin coming down the pipeline.

Here is the link for the committee members for this year. http://www.osapac.org/cms/node/6

Do not have the committee members for 2009. But I do know that Turnitin, was on the agenda for 2009.

http://www.osapac.org/cms/sites/default/files/20091014MIN.pdf

Under the 2009-10 priorities, section 5

Turnitin has serious drawbacks.

“Turnitin.com is undeniably an effective deterrent to plagiarism, but it is the very issue of copyright infringement that has people questioning the legality of the site. What many people don’t understand is that works do not need to be registered to be copyrighted. Every literary work that is saved to a tangible medium (this includes paper, computer disk, etc.) is protected by federal copyright laws. Thus, the works submitted to Turnitin.com are copyrighted and the authors hold complete rights to the works.

What the Turnitin.com system does, however, is it stores the submitted paper on their servers. This is done without the student’s permission. Turnitin.com is operating under the pretense that teachers will force their students to submit to Turnitin.com. Thus, student papers are stored in iParadigm’s (the company that runs Turnitin.com) database. This in itself is a blatant violation of the 1976 Federal Copyright Act. Turnitin.com is duplicating copyrighted material without the consent of the student. The student is forced to submit to the site, so submissions are not considered voluntary. In addition, the site does not ask for permission to store the paper, instead, it is done automatically. “
http://articles.getacoder.com/turnitin_infringes_upon_student_rights_748214x1219636800.htm

What Turnitin does, it makes money by selling the essays, without the consent of the student writer.

One way of giving the finger to Turnitin, and others like it, is to publish the essay in the public domain.

“This post describes my objection and research in detail, but simply: I object to turnitin.com using their ownership of my intellectual property to attract business, and charging me for the privilege. To date, I have successfully negotiated college without having to use it, finding technical, political and social ways around it each time. I have submitted my papers to extra rigor, agreed to be suspended if I cheat, proposed alternate technical and non-technical systems, and generally tried to make it easy for my professors to let me keep my ethics (and my IP). This semester I have a great professor whose policy is that his students use turnitin.com. I have dropped classes for less.

This time I took it as a personal challenge–could I find to find away I can hold true to my convictions and give in to his policy?

Yes. This semester, I dedicate every piece of intellectual property I generate for this class to the public domain. In doing so, I not only give turnitin.com leave to make money off of my intellectual property–I give everyone in the world leave (as long as they cite me as the source, of course).”
http://feelingelephants.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/circumventing-turnitin-com-ethically-that-is/

There is also other drawbacks as well.  As described in the link, titled, “
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Turnitin.com
Anti-Plagiarism Software Not Foolproof or without Controversy

Read more at Suite101: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Turnitin.com: Anti-Plagiarism Software Not Foolproof or without Controversy http://teachingtechnology.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_advantages_and_disadvantages_of_turnitincom#ixzz0pse2lzC5

I really do think it is more work for the teachers. How about software, that will actually help students improved their writing. That would money better spent, than Turnitin.

A lot of plagiarism can be detected simply by using Google or another search engine. I was quite startled when the awards for Aboriginal students’ creative writing were announced:
http://www.wawataynews.ca/archive/all/2009/12/29/Young-NAN-writers-win-Bartleman-Creative-Writing-Award_18831
to see that one of the submissions was almost a word-for-word copy of a best-selling song by Taylor Swift:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/taylorswift/whitehorse.html
and that no one apparently picked up on this. To be fair to the student, many kids do not understand what adults mean by “plagiarism” and need to be taught how to paraphrase or restate ideas in their own words—this is not an easy skill to master, and elementary students have great difficulty with it.

Nevertheless it was quite a surprise to me that no one ran even a superficial check on the students’ submissions. Why should we think we need “Turnitin” when other search engines, free ones, are not being used when they could be?

In my opinion this is nothing but window-dressing by a gov’t giving the illusion it’s actually taking action, but by not making it mandatory for boards to do so will likely be filed under “nt” for “nice try”.

If we have so much cheating taking place with our public schools what does that say about all of the effort and money we’re spending on character development, building model citizens etc. Can we now determine that even in that the public system is failing its students?