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The words we post belong to us as individuals. That is, each person on this list owns the copyright to his or her words. So a student cannot use our words and claim them as original to the student. That would be plagiarism.
On the other hand, the student can freely do either of two things:
1. Quote individuals with attribution (name, date, place--TECHWR-L, in other words).
2. Read a whole bunch of stuff and summarize in the student's own words, in which case it might be appropriate to list the names of contributors to the discussion or it might be appropriate simply to cite TECHWR-L and the dates, depending on how the information was presented. (For example, if a student were to analyze a randomly selected thousand posts and categorize them in tabular fashion, there would be no reason to list the individuals.)
Both of those are entirely ethical and legitimate forms of research, IMHO.
Dick
kcronin -at- daleen -dot- com wrote:
>
>
>But to what extent can/should they use such archival information? Can they
>quote us? Our opinions have been made public by the fact that we've posted
>them here. Is it therefore acceptable for a student to write something
>like, "One writer, a Keith Cronin from Layoff City, Florida, remarked that
>'Information Mapping is utterly fabulous,'" even though I did not say this
>to the actual student doing the research? (If this is the case I shudder
>to think of what might be done with some of my sig lines.....)
>
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