December 10, 2007
Oh No You Didn’t…
Our blog experiment has come to an end. The semester is over, and our blog is up for review. Don’t panic, Amanda and I aren’t going anywhere. We will continue to write this blog. But the era as students is coming to an end. Amanda graduates in exactly one week. And I graduate in one semester and two days.
As part of our final project (this blog) we also had to write a paper (sooo old media *wink*) explaining various aspects of the blog: subject matter, voice, style, reader persona, seo, and such. The last question was regarding ethical dilemmas. This took Amanda and I a minute to figure out. We are such ethical beings that figuring out dilemmas was difficult!
We finally settled on a few to write about, and I thought that I would post one of them up here for all of you to comment on. We would love to hear your perspective on the dilemma and any further advice you have on how we can be more ethical.
Over and out. (for now at least).
“The most (seemingly) straightforward ethical issues is that of giving due credit. Throughout college we are warned against plagiarism, but there are few plagiarism laws on the internet, especially when it comes to the intellectual property of blogs. We have tried to be vigilant in linking content within the blog to its thought author. In many ways, giving due credit is more difficult online than in a scholastic paper. We all know the rules for footnotes and bibliography, but online, the rules are different. We are still learning what they are, and luckily seasoned pros have been kind enough to gently clue us in when we stumble (if this was a blog post I would hyperlink “seasoned pros” to Steve Garfield). When a name is mentioned — hyperlink. When a site, book, article is mentioned — hyperlink. If a picture is posted, don’t just give photo-credit, but hyperlink to the source of the photo. And this is just the beginning. Every piece of a blog post has to be multidimensional to make sure that everyone can find the source of what you are saying.
In order to adhere to the standard of being ethical, we try to remember to link everything and welcome with open arms, any suggestions of how we can give even better link-love. The ethical students that we are, we will not fail to give credit when we know that credit is due, and as much as we can, we will spread the link-love.”
On the PRowl 