What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
The Internet poses a significant challenge to the focus that education has traditionally put on teaching students how to do "original" thinking. As the CEO of Carmun.com, a Web company that hopes to encourage peer to peer collaboration among students, I hear a lot of concerns about how kids will use Carmun as a crutch and won't do any more "original" work. Whether or not these concerns are legitimate, they are misdirected, given how Google, Wikipedia, and others have already put so much text on so many topics at people's digital fingertips.
When we talk to students, we talk about the schemes that people employ to plagiarize successfully. For example, you have a good chance of being able to pass off a Wikipedia article as your own work if you change all the adjectives and rearrange the order of the paragraphs. One of the responses of the education community has been to fight fire with fire. For example, educators now have recourse to Turnitin.com which compares student work with online sources to test for plagiarism. We now have a digital arms race that I doubt will succeed in putting the genie back into the bottle.
Instead, it seems to me that we need to change the game and question the premise that places a primacy on "original" thinking. Is there a way to move to "understanding" as the measure of what a student has learned? In other words, would it be okay for a student to hand in a pastiche of Wikipedia articles and other material from the Web so long as he: (i) acknowledged that he had done so; (ii) presented it in a logical way; (iii) could highlight key points; (iv) was aware of the deficiencies in the argument; (v) could point to major assumptions upon which the argument depended; etc.
As radical as this may sound, it is all around us already. In mathematics, most people never get to the point where they are expected to produce "original" work. We don't ask students for original proofs of the Pythagorean theorem -- we just ask them to understand it and be able to deploy in the appropriate context. In the sciences, Newton himself acknowledged that his own contribution depended on the work of others in that he stood on the "shoulders of giants." In the business world, we actually dismiss the importance of "original ideas" when we declare that it is all about "all execution."
It's not that originality isn't important. It is. But, it need not be the central way we judge student work. In fact, if Ecclesiastes is even partially right, people will always be more "unoriginal" than "original". Life is about knowing when to use a hammer and when to use a screwdriver - not creating new ones from scratch.
It seems like the Internet is finally forcing this issue into the world of education. How will we deal with it? The answers undoubtedly are "not in the stars/ but in ourselves" (Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar", I.ii).