Assignment One: Unit Six

Academic integrity allows assignments to be comprised of actual work from the student instead of a cluster of inaccurately cited information provided by other sources. Academic integrity allows for students to acquire the ability of citing information and sources correctly, where they're able to avoid being accused of plagiarism, causing them to not be able to be expelled, suspended, or put on academic probation. Avoiding plagiarism is the most important part of academic integrity, because plagiarism consists of academic dishonesty. Students that have academic integrity will tend to excel in school and avoid having trouble with future papers and research papers especially. In this first quarter of college I have been working on citing sources of information implemented in papers of mine to avoid being accused of plagiarism which is the biggest concern of mine when writing papers. I also try my best to summarize information acquired from other sources with my own words, and if I'm not able to do so I cite the information properly rather than taking the risk and involving myself in academic dishonesty. I will usually cite my information directly after the source, but will also cite information in the middle of the source or occasionally at the beginning of the source being cited. The Open Access system allows for people to acquire information from texts and having the opportunity to copy, share, distribute, print, and link among others without copyright infringement for free. All that is really needed is proper citation and acknowledgment of the author responsible for writing the text. Creative Commons allows for people to build upon others' work with allowance given to authors to choose what they choose to fully copyright or have all rights reserved and those that they wish to waive for other users or some rights reserved. Creative Commons tries to avoid problems with copyright laws that are created for the sharing of information. The fair use doctrine allows limited use of copyrighted material without having to acquire permission from the rights holder. I believe that our privacy is challenged in a big way with the passing of the Patriot Act where the government can monitor conversations held between two parties if suspicious of your involvement with being a threat to the government, as well as being able to acquire your library records if found suspicious of activities that threaten the United States government. Also privacy is threatened where your personal items that you chose to throw away in the garbage once put out on the street becomes available to the public and can be used by police officials to gain a search warrant if wanted to search through the belongings within your home. I believe that privacy can only be protected with appeals to court systems and to get policies overturned starting with the Patriot Act. Nothing in this country has ever been changed without involving the court systems. So the court systems is where we need to start first and then go from there to help ensure the protection of our privacy in this country. I wasn't very surprised by the list of challenged books, because people are always going to hold ridiculous points of view and beliefs regarding everything in life especially in literature. It seems to me that most ridiculous beliefs held by people tend to stem from religious ideals where most literature that was challenged tended to hold some form of sexually explicit material and homosexual material. Not to mention the individual's challenging the literature beliefs about sexual material and homosexual material try to convey it as being not appropriate for children and could potentially corrupt children's minds, but is really just the challenger's feelings of uncomfortableness and insecurity with the subject matter being discussed within the text of the literature. My overall ideas about information ethics haven't changed much except for my ideas about Open Access and Creative Commons uses, which I believe to be a very good idea and should be incorporated into more aspects of literature and sources of information, making the information more readily available to those in search of the information.