The Internet: Death of Personal Creativity or Learning Scaffold?

I have had a lot of conversations this week about plagiarism. They came on the heels of grading poetry reading anthologies; some students decided they needed some help interpreting poems, so they turned to the undisputed font of all wisdom-- the internet.

I believe they did this because they didn't trust their own interpretations. I had already seen the preparation work they had done, on paper, by themselves, with the poems. We had had conversations around their interpretations, and I had helped them tease out some of the more obscure or abstract lines. However, when they went to write up their notes into paragraphs describing meaning and musical devices, they got a little digital help (and didn't think about citing their source).

I am finding this to be a growing habit with my 8th graders. We became a 1:1 laptop school this year, so their devices are with them at all times in all classes. There are many advantages to this, and I am a big supporter of the change. But I do see behavior changing as a result.

It's not just this "borrowing" of ideas from others without crediting that I'm seeing. I've seen this before in previous years. My concern is the growing trend for my students to not trust their own thinking unless they get it confirmed by something on the internet.

Here's another recent example. In Social Studies, I put them in "Tavern Groups" during our Road to Revolution role play activity. I asked them to think of a name for their tavern and to draw a logo for their sign. I gave them a list of historical tavern names to choose from or to pattern their own original name. This part went well. When it was time to draw the logo, however, the laptop screens were flipped open.

"What are you doing? There weren't computers in 1765! What do you need your computer for?"
"I just need to see what an eagle (or a horse or a turtle) looks like!"

These children are 14 years old! They know what an eagle (or a horse or a turtle) looks like. However, they didn't trust that they could draw a familiar animal without seeing a digital image first (and no, they didn't ask if I had any animal books with pictures they could look at. If they had, I might have allowed it).

Is the internet the death of personal creativity and originality? Is creativity being re-defined as borrowing bits and pieces from other sources and putting them together into something new which is then claimed by the author as theirs? I see the .gifs on Tumblr or other sites that do just that. I watch the song or movie parodies on YouTube when my daughter shows me something she finds clever or witty. I have read the fan fiction she writes. None of these "new" products are completely original.

Or are these the scaffolds that budding artists and authors and thinkers need before they can launch their own original works? Certainly creating a piece based on a model is the foundation of the learning process in art and writing. Is it so bad that the model is an internet-based work?

At some point, however, we want our students to leave the models behind and find their own creative voices. That will take confidence and a spirit of risk-taking.

I guess my questions come down to these: How do we help our students break away from the scaffold so they can take that leap of faith into original works? and How can we ensure that they are ethical "borrowers" along the way?