Response to missed class January 24th

GRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!! Why the growl? I hate missing class. When I first started college, I would use any reason I could to miss class. When my first child was born life changed. I had a renewed focus on life. I started living my life as a role model for her. My last three years of college I didn’t miss more than five class sessions total. So missing class was frustrating, but I am glad that you were understanding and gave us an option for making that up. Unfortunately I will have to miss two more sessions.

This Wimba session was very informative. Thank you for archiving the session.  There were a few things that I may have missed without it. The rubric about the YouTube presentation is going to be very helpful. Also Mary Dyer’s action plan is extremely helpful. I wasn’t sure how to complete the digital action plan, but I am going to use hers as a guide. I also had some due dates messed up. I knew the blog posts were due on the 6^th, but I also thought the YouTube presentation was due then as well. This news has just made my upcoming week and weekend a lot less stressful. 

"Wikiality"

I tend to shy away from using Wikipedia, however, I recently found myself deeply enthralled in the pages of a few NFL officials. I read a story of how one official was caught on tape cursing out another official during a preseason game. I also read about how one official hit a player in the eye with a flag filled with ball bearings. I was linked to several different pages and I spent the good part of an hour reading the stories.

My main use for Wikipedia has been to find non-educational material. I like that public knowledge is out there. Many times when I Google search a quote or an event involving certain people I am directed to Wikipedia. I am comfortable with the knowledge I get in those instances.

As an educational resource I have always been against using Wikipedia as my main source. One reason for this is that I have been warned about the inaccuracy of Wikipedia. Many of my professors and colleagues say stay away from Wikipedia. The other reason that I have been against using Wikipedia was brought up in the Colbert Report as well as the book Made To Stick. Based on the Colbert report, if enough people believe something then according to Wikipedia it is true. That is just like the myths about The Kentucky Fried Rat, Coca-Cola, and the Kidney Heist from the book. There have been no facts to back those myths up, yet they are absolute truth to many people. That is why when I use Wikipedia, I always check another reputable source to back up my information.

When I started this assignment I was dead set against using Wikipedia as an educational resource. As I did some research on the topic of whether or not Wikipedia is a reliable educational took, I found some surprising results that started to sway my opinion on the matter. Wikipedia has been used as a reference in educational and scientific journals 2,047 times since 2003. That year Wikipedia was cited 1 time. In 209, Wikipedia was listed as a source 614 times. This is a trend that shows increased confidence in the information provided there. I came across other studies that have shown that accuracy of Wikipedia rivals that of Encyclopedia Britannica.

My position of Wikipedia is still skeptical. Some topics are incomplete and not informative, while others are full of information. My skepticism comes from the fact that anyone can type information in. Many of us falsified information and although mine was changed back in less than 24 hours, what if someone used that before it was corrected? My belief has been weakened, and it may eventually sway towards trusting Wikipedia, but right now my best advice is to find many different resources to back up the given information. Information is the key and the more you have the better off you will be.

Terdiman, Daniel. Cnet News. Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica. January 15, 2011. http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html

Heath, Chip and Heath, Dan. Made to Stick. Random House, January 2, 2007.

Wikipedia. “Track and Field” January 15, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_and_field

Wikipedia. “Ron Winter” January 15, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Winter

Wikipedia. “Jeff Triplette” January 15, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Triplette

Wikipedia. “Reliability of Wikipedia” January 15, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

The Increased Need for Academic Integrity in the Digital Age

Working with high school students I, unfortunately, get a first hand look at academic dishonesty. Recently I busted two students in the same day. I was handing out the tests to my 4^th hour class advising the students not to cheat because I already caught one that day. This girl in the back row asks me how I caught the first student. I finish telling the story, I walk back to my seat, sit down and look up and the girl who was asking my about the incident reaches under her seat and pulls out a cheat sheet. I was shocked that after I just told the story she thought she could get away with it.

An academic dishonesty concern that I have is with homework. It is hard to monitor how students complete their homework. When I see that an assignment has been copied, or a student turns in someone else’s assignment, I give them a zero and call home. When a student is copying homework from another class I contact the other teacher so they can proceed according to how they see fit. I am not sure how much homework copying happens, but I wonder if consequences were higher would their be less instances if would students just get better at it. 

This was an enjoyable assignment. I was looking forward to how well SafeAssign picked up on instances of plagiarism. I started to plagiarize my essay with passages from the assigned reading. I took phrases from the assigned reading and typed those into Google to find more passages. I copied and deleted several articles trying to find the words that fit into my essay. Once I found pieces of information that fit, I would include those and then delete the unnecessary parts of the article. The assignment said to plagiarize at least 900 words and then “massage the plagiarized content into a cohesive essay.” I did this by merging articles together. I would combine different articles and make them sound like they were from the same author. I switched the order of sentences in paragraphs. I changed some words into words that I would use.

After submitting my plagiarism assignment I was extremely surprised to see that my document was recorded as 54% plagiarized. SafeAssign found 5 sources that I had used. I noticed when I looked at what had been picked up as plagiarized, it was the large pieces of information that I did not edit very much were highlighted as plagiarized. The sentences and paragraphs that I edited to make the essay make sense were not picked up as plagiarized.

This leads me to believe that with a little work and reorganization I could get my plagiarized percentage pretty low. It did not take me long to compile the data and make the essay seem cohesive. With an hour or less, I could probably get that percentage pretty low. It seems by mixing different articles and combining them with my own sentences it throws SafeAssign off the trail.

I was really surprised at how easy it was to complete this assignment. I have always struggled with properly citing sources and using a bibliography page. I am a math teacher and math has always been my strong point. This assignment has helped me be more aware of how to produce a paper with integrity. It has also shown me how easy it could be to fool the system.

After completion of this assignment I had an interesting thought. I was interested to know what would have happened if I would have copied my sources from the last few pages on my Google search. Google tries to put the most relevant pages first, so if I went to the end, would SafeAssign have a harder time identifying those sources?

Purdue University Calumet. "Academic Integrity" Purdue University. January 8, 2011. http://www.calumet.purdue.edu/integrity/plagiarism_examples.html

Stack, Robert. Artwork by Robert Stack. January 12, 2011. http://www.rstack.net/large-view/illustrations/201465---16560/Illustration.html

Ready to Rock n Roll with Grad School

I am looking forward to grad school. I hope I can keep up with all of my stuff. I was extremely busy before I added one more demanding thing.