Plagiarism

I really wanted to go to the beach on Thursday but since I wasn´t feeling too good I decided to take it easy and just go to a required orientation session, Academic Language Skills. It was meant both for international students and local first year students. During the 2-hour-long session we were lectured about academic writing (which is precise, consice, includes lots of nouns instead of verbs etc...) and shown some examples. I think I need to develop my academic writing skills in order to get good results for my subjects here. The ELSSA center offers intensive English courses, which I´m planning on taking. The lady also spent quite a while talking about plagiarism. I´ve always thought plagiarism means intentionally copying someone else´s text and using it as yours. But here they can accuse you of plagionarism if your references aren´t correct or if there just happens to be someone else coming up with the same idea or result you´ve figured out. They´ve got this software that compares your text to any other text and if it finds too many similarities (ie same words) you have to explain your actions to some board. I was feeling frustrated listening to that. She even showed some examples of what it being considered plagionarism here and that´s exactly what we´ve been doing at LUT all the time without being accused of anything. So I think I´ll have some interesting moments writing my assingments...

I didn´t do a lot for the rest of the day on Thursday. Just bought the Australian (a newspaper) and read it in Broadway Cafe drinking cappucino. Then came home, cooked some dinner, wrote this blog, watched a movie and went to bed.

On Friday Carla and I woke up early and went to do a basic Excel workshop to the UTS. It was held by this IT student and it was a really good basic review of how to use Excel. I learned some new things, as well. The UTS is offering many different sessions for new students but since most of them are meant for new university students (telling how to study for exams, work in a group, manage stress etc...) I haven´t felt like attending them. Anyways, after the session we went to Bondi beach. Unfortunately it became half cloudy after just an hour so we took the same coastal walk to Bronte that I had already done with Tim and Moy before. We walked back to the bus stop checking out some of the nice houses in the area.