Ethical Scholarship

Focus substantively on our course topics. As all assignments are an assessment of your learning (including all posts), ask yourself for each post what you are demonstrating about what you are learning from the course readings and current scholarly research.(2) Academic integrity (ethical scholarship) is essential. All information taken from sources needs to be briefly cited and referenced even when paraphrased. Another important thing to keep in mind here is that this also involves the credible use of information from other sources. In other words, if you copy in bulk (cited and referenced or not), that can bring into question the integrity of your information. Your task is never to copy in bulk from others. In shorter assignments such as the assignments we have in this course, that means we typically would not want to use block quotes (quotes of 40 words or more) or quote-heavy writing otherwise.(3) Sources must be current credible sources of scholarly authority. The focus of sources used must be on current credible scholarly findings. Look at the questions in each assignment. You will notice there are no actual history questions in this course. Though you are asked in some situations to consider some older sources as a part of some assignments, the focus must be on current applications, etc. Our focus is on current research, practices, and applications. So, it is essential we actually focus on what we know currently from current credible scholarly sources.