Authorship and Plagiarism – Discursive Issues and Educational Effects

Abstract

New writing and reading practices, due to advances in technological convergence, demand changes on models of construction and circulation of cultural goods. That means new relations of authorship, which bring questions to the logic in the established copyright law, and simultaneously, highlight a trial of strengths between discourses, such as copyright and copyleft, regulation and transgression, author protection and public access to creative work (Fapesp 2010/52454-7). Therefore, this paper focuses on educational challenges, which are a result of these technical and social transformations.We take as the object of our studies, activities developed during the long distance course Reading/Writing Processes and Digital Technologies in Education, on Moodle's a virtual learning environment, in which Brazilian public schools teachers were the course's target. Based on the theoretical and methodological principles of discourse analysis, we explored the meanings of authorship and plagiarism that circulated during the course's activities, as well as virtual interfaces as potential authorship environments.As results we highlight two aspects: in order to avoid plagiarism, the importance of placing writing and reading in the perspective of an affiliation process; and, in order to maintain teacher's autonomy, the importance of comprehending the technical possibilities of a virtual learning environment, so that it can be used according to teaching principles and not as a given object, a neutral technology.