Responsibilities

Attendance

You are responsible to attend all meetings of class. It will be extremely difficult to absorb the concepts and ideas without attending all of the lectures. This class is small and highly participatory, and for that reason I do not have any attendance policy except that if you have to miss 2 classes or more in a row or more than 2 classes total, please come discuss it with me so you can recover the lost material and get feedback to complete the final project.

Turning in work

This course involves Posting to a Blog http://lng340lehmanfall13.blogspot.com , three tests, a final paper building on the written assignments and a “presentation”.

  • The pre-class blog posts will be completed by Wednesday at midnight (except when there is a Tuesday deadline, in which case, they should be done by Monday night). The purpose of these assignments is to contribute material everyone can relate to and to show that you are understanding the concepts as we go. They do not fulfill that purpose if they are completed late, so they will receive half credit if they are done after the deadline but before November 26th.
  • The three tests will not be accepted late since we will be going over them the next day in class.
  • The final research paper will be accepted until December 17th at 5pm. You have as many opportunities as you like to get feedback until then and can submit as many drafts as you care to do until that point. Due to the time bound nature of the semester (it’s an achievement – not an activity), I cannot accept late research papers.
  • Extra credit will be counted until December 17th as well.

Academic Integrity

Stand on the shoulders of giants.[1]

All students will uphold academic integrity and only engage in ethical intellectual conduct. This means students will not plagiarize, use fabricated data, present biased findings, or present opinions as fact.

Plagiarism

  1. Copying word for word someone else’s work.
  2. Paraphrasing someone else’s ideas without giving credit to the original source (of the idea- not just the words).
    1. This includes sources taken from the internet. It is far better to cite webpages (including Wikipedia) and give credit where credit is due than to accidentally take someone else’s idea or summary.
  3. Not indicating which ideas are from someone else within the text. A list of sources at the end of a paper is not sufficient –readers cannot identify which ideas are the author’s and which ideas are from another source.
  4. Here: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/plagiarism/ is an excellent source for information about plagiarism.  Here: http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/student-affairs/documents/student-handbook-02.pdf is Lehman’s policy.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.   –Arthur C. Clarke

Technology

Students will utilize the course website to download supplemental readings, videos and podcasts. There is a link to the course webpage on the blackboard site, but the course materials will not be hosted on blackboard. I mostly use the course website and email. Therefore, it is very important that I have an email address for you that you regularly use.

For technology needs, students have access to the library, which has a multimedia lab as well, where all of these materials can be listened to/watched.If you are having trouble with technology on campus, please call the Help Desk at 718-960-1111 or visit them in Carman Hall.

Technology in the Classroom

If you are using your phone, laptop, ipad, etc. to take notes, look up things relevant to the course, make an ongoing list of Squib ideas, etc., I encourage you to bring your device. If it’ll be a distraction, I encourage you to leave it in your bag as there will be significant amounts of group work and building this theory together – so distractions are just that: a “drawing away of the mind,” from Latin distractionem (“the definition of distraction,” n.d.).


[1] This quote is currently Google Scholar’s motto, but originally from Isaac Newton in a letter about his scientific discoveries “If I have seen far, it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants” (“Standing on the shoulders of giants,” 2013). It is also used in the free software movement, which is committed to the collaborative building of works by and for the people rather than ownership of our tools, efforts and creativity by corporations (Lessig, 2007). For more on this, visit http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html

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