Blame the goat?

I came across a poem. 

But, the essay in which I came across that poem is not really about the poem. Nor about the poet.

You need to read the essay. I highly recommend it.  Especially if you are an academic who has an inflated opinion of your writings ;)

Here's the poem by Shel Silverstein:

Blame

I wrote such a beautiful book for you
About rainbows and sunshine and dreams that come true
But the goat went and ate it—you knew that he would—
So I wrote you another one as fast as I could
But of course it could never be nearly as great
As that beautiful book that the silly goat ate
So if you don’t like this new book I just wrote
Blame the Goat.

Schooling, creativity, and .... plagiarism?

I was absolutely intrigued by the caption of a column in The Hindu--Creativity and Education: Contradictory Impulses? So, I started reading it, given my own interests in this topic.

Well, the overall tone there seemed to be less original, and more of a convenient paraphrasing of Sir Ken Robinson's much viewed and discussed 20-minute Ted.com talk. (I have embedded it at the end of this post.)

The only "new" idea in Rajivan's column is right at the beginning about cows and amoebae.

When I reached the end, I was simply taken aback that Rajivan would outrightly use Sir Ken's anecdote about a child drawing a picture of god, without attributing the source!

I wonder if the author thought this was kosher; not in the definitions of plagiarism that I tell my students.

The author fails outrightly in trying to convey the argument about creativity and education, and instead comes across as having no original idea--perhaps an example of a lack of creativity on the author's part, on top of the plagiarism ....

Plagiarism is ok: not in academia, but in politics!

So, the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, is the latest in a long line of politicians who have used other people's ideas without acknowledging that they borrowed those ideas. We academics call that plagiarism, but apparently the practice is par for the pols.
A Canadian columnist writes in the Toronto Star:

Academics and journalists are particularly conscious of this sin. When Rae says that Harper might have been expelled from university for stealing someone else's words, he's right.
But politicians – unlike students – regularly borrow without attribution. Indeed, given that few practising politicians write their own speeches, most are guilty of intellectual theft.

Oh well!