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Quoting entire posts or large blocks of texts that other people have written within your posts is generally frowned upon and may annoy the person you are referencing sufficiently for them to ask you to remove them! You should quote the minimum amount needed to get your point across, and let your visitors decide whether they want to visit the author’s site and read the rest of the article.

many businesses are now finding that the pace of change demanded by the global economy and facilitated by various technologies is requiring them to rethink how they are organized. Many are restructuring themselves as learning organizations—organizations in which new learning and innovation are the engines that drive the company.

Knowledge Forum is, of course, not the only online learning environment available. Others of note include FirstClass, WebCT, and Blackboard. Palloff and Pratt (2001) note that, whatever online environment is used, "attention needs to be paid to developing a sense of community in the group of participants in order for the learning process to be successful"

How does it work? In practice, the teacher presents students with a problem of understanding relevant to the real world. It could be a question such as What is the nature of light? or What makes a society a civilization? The focus here is to make student ideas, rather than predetermined activities or units of knowledge, the center of the classroom work. The next step is to get the students to generate ideas about the topic and write notes about their ideas in the Knowledge Forum (KF) database, an online environment with metacognitive enhancements to support the growth of the knowledge-building process. In generating these ideas, the students form work groups around similar interests and topics they wish to explore. These groups are  self-organized and dynamic; the teacher does not select the members, and members can join or leave as they choose. Idea generation can take place during these group sessions, during which all students are given the chance to express their ideas, or in individual notes posted directly to the KF database. While in a typical classroom setting ideas or comments generated in discussion are usually lost, the KF database preserves these ephemeral resources so that students can return to them for comment and reflection. Students are then encouraged to read the notes of other students and soon find that there are differing schools of opinion about the problem. The teacher's job is to ensure that students remain on task and work towards the solution of the problem under study by reading each other's notes and contributing new information or theories to the database

But even people who want to give their work away may need to quote copyrighted material. They can’t give other people’s work away. We’ll never not need fair use, because copyright ownership rights are so widely seen as valuable, and because all culture builds on existing culture — as every academic who wrote a lit review section in a journal article knows.

Carol Rohrbach and Joyce Valenza of the School District of Springfield Township have put together a bulleted list to help you understand when it’s preferable to paraphrase, summarize and quote.