Advanced Online Media Production

Truth. Trust. Accuracy. These are essential to a journalist's craft and reputation. Not all of you are journalists, but I expect you to act as if you were.

Do your own work. Be original. No copying. No fiction writing in this course. Never make things up. Never use other people's words without quotation marks and the speaker's (or writer's) name attached. The proper use of citations for ALL source material is required.

This is very simple. The penalties:

• You get an E for this course.
• You get a permanent record in your student file that (among other things) will prevent you from being admitted to law school. (That happens when the instructor reports your case to the Office for Student Judicial Affairs.)
• You are forbidden to take any further courses with me.

When you copy and paste from a Web page, you are committing plagiarism -- unless you place the full block of text within quotation marks and provide a complete and correct attribution for the copied material.

A "rewrite" of another person's text (or Web page) is plagiarism. You must either quote it, or else write entirely from your own mind, your own thoughts, your own words -- without copying from something else. Any and all uses of another person's words must be attributed.

The consequences are not negotiable. If you have any questions about what plagiarism is, or what academic dishonesty is, it is your responsibility to ask me -- in advance of handing in any questionable work.

I take both academic honesty and journalistic credibility very seriously, and I expect all students in our college to do the same.

Code and scripts

An accepted practice in Web production is the "borrowing" (really copying) of other people's code. As in all professional practice, however, there are limits to what is truly "acceptable."

Copying a page or screen design is considered dishonest and sleazy. It is also more noticeable than you may realize -- Web professionals will quickly recognize a page design that you copied and thought you had changed. The reflection on you is bad; in some cases, it would eliminate you from consideration for a job.

If you want to copy any code that has more lines than a JavaScript rollover routine, ask me first.