As a university student, I have a lot of experiences with online learning tools and educational tools. I feel fine with all these useful tools and I do not realize problems until I read the article assigned. As an international student, I took a language program when I first came to Canada, which involved a lot of writing. Instructors will always tell us student to watch out for plagiarism and our work will be tested through Turnitin. During my four years in university, I have lost count how many papers I submitted have been run through Turnitin, that is why I am shocked when I read the article “A GUIDE FOR RESISTING EDTECH: THE CASE AGAINST TURNITIN”. Until now, the idea of I loses my full right to my work whenever my work runs through the software did not pop up in my head. However, I understand why Turnitin is very popular in university. It is a huge amount of work to prevent and detect plagiarism with the huge amount of papers produced in a university, and Turnitin is the easy way out. In addition, the reason why most of the student and educators did not realize the problem is most of the paper is not important enough to create a copyright crisis. Furthermore, the Terms of Use section of an app is always very long and detailed, long enough that most people just skip to the end and click “I agree”. Actually, all the details about the app are written in that section. As the case in “A GUIDE FOR…..”, people can not legally blame or accuse Turnitin of anything just because they did not read the terms of use very carefully. I personally have encountered similar problems in a gaming app. For new games, it is almost guaranteed there are some loopholes or so-called “BUGs” in coding, and some people will take advantage of them and claim “It is the gaming companies problem they have BUGs.”. After they are banned, they will argue how they got punished because of someone else’s mistake. In fact, using a loophole instead of reporting it is definitely in most if not every gaming app’s terms of use.
In conclusion, today’s reading is very interesting and got me thinking about protecting privacy on the internet. I think it is very important to read about the terms of use section of an online tool or app before using it. There are a huge variety of tools can be used online, and it is not too late to change the tool if you are not comfortable with what you read in terms of use.