Academic Integrity in a Cultural Context

I. Cultural attitude towards academic integrity and intellectual property

II. Plan for learning citation and referencing skills

III. Usage of Turnitin for validation of my academic work during this module

Ad I. Cultural attitude towards academic integrity and intellectual property

I mostly grew up in Germany and Switzerland so if I refer to my cultural background and attitude it will be on the basis of my experience and knowledge from these two countries.

Germany also known as ‘das Volk/Land der Dichter und Denker’1 (country of poets and thinkers), has like among many other Western countries recognized since the 18th century the importance of individualism and thereby once right of words and knowledge. This notion has also been incorporated and resembled in the legislation as the copyright. One way of avoiding a breach of this law is the appropriate use of citation. In 2011 two well-known German politicians, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and Silvana Koch-Mehrin, resigned from their position after it got public that they have plagiarized on their dissertations2. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has used several paragraphs in his dissertation without citing the original sources. This misdemeanour was discovered by a law professor whilst putting several paragraphs of the dissertation into Google to check for the sources.3 Plagiarism is a double-edged sword, as on the one hand, like ‘dwarfs standing on the shoulder of giants can see more than they.’(“Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident.4” attributed to Bernard of Chartres (around 1130) and quoted first by John Salisbury (1159)), we would not have had the ability to build on the thoughts of our predecessors and big thinkers and thereby promote further development. On the other hand by not using citations the plagiary omits the original source of its credit and thereby adorns itself with borrowed plumes. So should we consider the vast usage of data from the virtual world as a platform for plagiarism? Internet is an easily accessible resource of collected data. Retrieving and copying information has never been easier than now with internet. But in the end it is up to the user which text and parts he is going to use for his research and how he is going to incorporate this newly gathered information for his own use. So it is not the invention itself that should be seen as a tool to misdemeanour but the end user of it. As the internet can also be the tool to uncover the misuse of academic integrity (see above for the described example of the uncovering of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg plagiarism by the law professor’s usage of Google to dismantle the sham).

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