Is Wikipedia a Trustworthy Academic Resource? Scientists Think So
It might seem like common sense to exclude Wikipedia from the list of great science resources, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would like you to reconsider that notion. A team of researchers from MIT and the University of Pittsburgh asked chemistry graduate students to flex their writing skills and create new Wikipedia articles on scientific topics that were missing from the site, eCampus News reports. The new scientific Wikipedia articles received thousands of views per month, including many from researchers writing scientific literature. eCampus News reports that the researchers found Wikipedia to be influencing one word in every 300 in typical scientific articles. “Our research shows that scientists are using Wikipedia and it is influencing how they write about the science that they are doing,” Neil Thompson, an assistant professor of innovation and strategy at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, tells eCampus News.
Plagiarism in Pop Culture: Coco
Coco is a 2017 film animated film by Pixar Studios that achieved both critical and commercial success. It won two Academy Awards, including Best Animated Feature, and became the 15th highest-grossing animated film of all time. Inspired by the Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, which are ongoing as this is post is published, the film tapped into themes of family, culture and destiny to tell a story that connected with audiences around the globe. However, the film had one theme that wasn’t widely reported: Plagiarism. To understand how, we first have to take a look at how the story in Coco unfolded and then we can examine just how likely the plagiarism is, both in the context of the film and our modern era. Content Warning: Spoilers for Coco. The Plot The film begins with 12-year-old Miguel telling the story of his great-great-grandmother Imelda. Miguel learns of a local talent show but is unsure about entering it. However, when the two meet Ernesto, Hector confronts him. Bottom Line
To tackle student cheating, we need to reimagine university assessment | Jon Scott | Higher Education Network
Ghost-writing academic work is nothing new but until relatively recently it was out of reach of most students. Now essay mills have started rolling on an industrial scale. Their sophisticated websites offer production of a whole range of assignments up to and including dissertations and theses. If required, a typical undergraduate essay, on pretty much any topic, can be turned around in less than 24 hours. They have become so normalised that last month, a BBC investigation uncovered YouTube stars being paid to promote an academic cheating website based in the Ukraine, in videos with more than 700m views. This is an international business, with writers ranging from undergraduate students through to academics lining up to bid to write the assignment for the prospective client at prices often well below £100. It’s clear that essay mills are here to stay, so where do we go next? Instead, universities – including my own – are starting to think creatively. Looking for a higher education job?
A Very Good Web Annotating Tool for Research Students and Teachers
March 16, 2017 Lumio is an excellent tool to use for bookmarking, curating, and clipping web content. Students can use it to highlight interesting content in a webpage, add notes to it and save it for a later access. Highlights are recorded together with source information so students can easily check back and cite source pages. Users can organize their highlights into collections and rearrange them the way they want.
Why reference?
You probably know that it is important to use referencing in your writing at university, but why is it so important? Using the right sources in your work provides you with the supporting evidence you need in your assignment. Referencing is the acknowledgement of the sources that you use in your work. You must reference all sources that you use in your assignment, including words and ideas, facts, images, videos, audio, websites, statistics, diagrams and data. Good referencing: Shows what you have readYour references demonstrate the depth and the breadth of your reading. Some referencing styles use footnotes (e.g. When reading and taking notes, always write down the full details of the source (author/s, title, page number and other publication details). Australian university referencing requirements may be different from those at your previous school, college or university. There can be variations even within one referencing style. Different units may use different styles.
Integrating Quotations into Sentences
You should never have a quotation standing alone as a complete sentence, or, worse yet, as an incomplete sentence, in your writing. IVCC's Style Book explains this concept well with a good analogy that describes quotations as helium balloons. We all know what happens when you let go of a helium balloon: it flies away. In a way, the same thing happens when you present a quotation that is standing all by itself in your writing, a quotation that is not "held down" by one of your own sentences. The quotation will seem disconnected from your own thoughts and from the flow of your sentences. Ways to integrate quotations properly into your own sentences are explained below. There are at least four ways to integrate quotations. 1. Example: Thoreau's philosophy might be summed up best by his repeated request for people to ignore the insignificant details of life: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Example: Thoreau ends his essay with a metaphor: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in." 2.
8 Great Citation Generators for Academics and Student Researchers
For those of you working in academia, research students, and anyone else keen on learning how to properly cite sources in different styles, the tools below are definitely worth your attention. These are web-based citation generators you can use to easily generate and format your references based on various citation styles. They support several citation formats (e.g., APA, MLA7/8, Chicago and many more) as well as a multitude of sources that include newspapers, journal articles, chapters, books, web pages, videos, audio clips and many more. Using these citation generators will absolutely save you so much time and efforts to channel into the actual writing of your paper. We invite you to check them out and share with us your feedback:1- EasyBib Some of its features include:Generating citations in various formats.A grammar and plagiarism checker.Offers help with style mechanics.Offers relevant guides and resources.4- Tweet2Cite
Using Wikipedia for assignments? Expect a zero grade in Oman
Photo for illustration purpose only. - Shutterstock Muscat: University professors in Oman have said that students who are caught using material from Wikipedia in their assignment submissions will be told to redo them, or worse still, be awarded a zero on that subject. Times of Oman spoke to university teachers and lecturers in the Sultanate, who said that their universities had strict checking procedures to ensure their students were not found using copy-pasting information from Wikipedia, instead of doing the research required to actually understand the subjects they were studying. Dr Saqib Ali is the Head of Department of Information Systems at the College of Economics and Political Science at Sultan Qaboos University. He revealed that students who were caught plagiarising work from Wikipedia would be handed a zero on their submissions. “At SQU, our academic policy is very clear,” said Ali. Al Badi added: “Finding sources is a learning process.
