As the clock strikes midnight the night before the big paper is due, you’re still struggling to find that one source to really tie your thesis together. The books in the library don’t quite have what you’re looking for, and the databases are so expansive. Figuring out where to start makes your headache worse as the clock keeps ticking.
Every student has been through some variation of this experience, and Jonathan Edson, creator of Carmun.com , wants to do something about it.
Carmun.com is a site that combines the worldwide social networking power of Facebook with the collaborative reference abilities of Wikipedia . Users share and rate academic sources for students in similar studies to utilize, compile and save their own sources online, ask the community questions and easily format bibliographies and footnotes.
This sharing of documents may invoke concerns about academic dishonesty. Professor Irene Mulvey, secretary of the general faculty, sees potential problems with such a service.
“Collaboration with peers can enhance everyone’s learning. But when you collaborate with someone who knows a lot more than you, it’s very easy for that collaboration to turn into the other person doing your work,” she said.
Mulvey also expressed concern that student use of the site could lead them to underdevelop their own ability to conduct research, a skill “not necessarily comparable with making use of those resources, but still an extremely important academic skill.”
Fairfield Academic Vice President Orin Grossman also said he worries that students may unknowingly misuse the service for plagiarism purposes.
“Just about everyone knows it is plagiarism to copy words directly from a book without acknowledgment. But somehow, some students don’t seem to realize that it is plagiarism to do the same thing from an Internet source.”
Edson sees the potential for abuse that Carmun’s services may eventually have. To combat abuse, Carmun will default all uploaded documents to private, with users then electing to share, to avoid creating a “repository for people to start searching for documents.” Edson also hopes to eventually partner or interface with paper analysis services such as TurnItIn.com to allow professors to easily find students plagiarizing others’ work.
Despite the potential issues, Grossman said he would rather adjust to rather than oppose the new resource.
“Of course, the Internet allows for a level of collaboration and sharing that was unheard of a few years ago, and it won’t do much good for faculty members and administrators simply to say how terrible it all is.
I’m a musician and I have seen how the music business lost out by simply trying to oppose the new technology of music sharing rather than figure out how to work with it. I suspect professors will have to find ways of constructing assignments to make room for these new sharing opportunities and still allow for appropriate student learning,” he said.
Edson, a former AOL executive, had the idea for the site during while studying for his doctorate at Harvard, after he left the corporate world. He found that after seeing the benefits of continuous collaboration on projects in the business world, the lonely individual work of academia seemed inefficient.
“You are not rewarded in the business world for recreating the wheel. Nobody thinks that by ‘doing something the hard way’ it makes you a better business person; in fact it’s quite the opposite.
“You’re rewarded for doing things as quickly as you can, and the way to get things done quickly is to create a network of people you can rely on to avoid having to recreate the wheel,” he told The Mirror. “This way you can spot issues at the beginning of the process rather than at the end of the process.”
The site, with over 14,000 registered users, is still in the process of growing. New users come not only from individual students, according to Lori Cohen, director of marketing for Carmun.com, but also from “ready-made communities” joining together.
Recent examples of these communities include a class of 40 students at Garden Grove High School in California and another class of 40 at Wayland Baptist College.
The site will also see future growth in terms of features. Edson said he anticipates improving the question and answer section, creating a way to take and store notes during class on the Web, and allowing users to store and share their own documents in the community.
Students stand to be, as intended, the biggest beneficiaries of a service like Carmun.com. Biology major Fenwick Gardiner ’08 said that such a vast network will help students better see the full academic picture.
“Carmun would allow for the flow of information on research topics outside the walls of Fairfield’s campus. This networking capability would truly enhance the ability of students all over to diversify their thinking and hopefully think in a more worldly perspective than may otherwise be possible with just looking articles up at the library,” he said.
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