About plagiarism and making myself clear

Maybe a some of you don't have the time to go through all the comments made in all of the class blogs so I'll repeat what i said in one of my comments in this post:

PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SOURCES WHEN YOU COPY SOMETHING AND POST IT IN YOUR BLOG! If its from hard-copy reference material say so. If its from another website, provide a link to that website and then write your input.

GO THROUGH THE RUBRIC FOR THE CLASS BLOG PROJECT! It's found (and downloadable) in the share box below the archive section. It would also be good for you to note the other criteria in the rubric so that you can review your class blog and align it with the rubric.

JUST TO EMPHASIZE MY OPINION ABOUT PLAGIARISM - IF I FIND THAT YOU HAVE POSTED SOMETHING IN YOUR CLASS BLOG THAT IS SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK BUT YOU CLAIM IT AS YOUR OWN ... YOUR ENTIRE CLASS WILL GET A FAILING GRADE FOR THE CLASS BLOG PROJECT.

I HOPE THIS IS UNDERSTOOD BY EVERYONE.

Why am i being particular about plagiarism in your blogs? There are many "netizens" who make a living looking for copied/plagiarized content in websites and reporting them to the authors of the copied/plagiarized content. What happens is that your blog might be shut down or attacked!

On the issue of posting versus commenting: note that long comments make it difficult for others to navigate your site. Non-sense comments also clutter up the comments section of your posts. A blog is not a forum so (at least) try to keep comments concise and relevant to the purpose or topic of the post.
Read more!

A few words on blogging, the internet, our "safety"

Before we get further into our class blogging experiment we need to familiarize with the risk-reward trade-offs of the internet. It is a powerful tool not only for learning but for many other things (if not everything else). In the immortal words of "uncle ben": with great power comes great responsibility. We can't always assume that everyone on the internet will be responsible; we even have a hard time understanding what that is(i say "we" because i find it difficult too).

We need to explore our safety on the internet and blogging path and yet learn as much as we can from it too and have as much fun as we can along the way. So, let me be the "mother goose" (big smile) on this post (hopefully the last mothergoose post from me).

Over at Educational Origami is useful information on internet safety (and the like), specifically, cybersafety and the 3 i's of internet safety. I hope you read them.

It would be great to read about your thoughts on internet safety. That would give me indication if you would like to have a few blogging rules for bamboo grove and your class blogs just like what the Room 9 Nelson Central kids have(click here for their simple blog rules).

We will discuss this when we meet in class next week. Perhaps a short talk after "Show and Tell Asia!"

The Freakonomics blog posts about wikipedia and uncyclopedia (click here) will also give you an idea of why this important. Apparently, wikipedia has credibility issues, hence, the appearance of sites that poke fun at it. If you think wikipedia is really a great source of information, maybe this will make you think twice about what you get from there. Read more!