Week 4 Learning Journal

So week three is now coming to a close. My first essay of the program is finished and turned in, and  most of the rest of the non-essay busy-work of the week was spent studying ethics in preparation for an Ethics Argument essay. I've submitted a topic for evaluation, and am waiting to hear back and hoping for approval. All truths told, I wasn't expecting to be so enthralled by the topic of how ethics arguments were set up. I was expect things to be fairly nebulous going in, with most matters being context dependent. I was correct in the latter, but the former was unexpected. 

Short answer: Context matters. The longer one looks more like "questions and debates regarding the ethics involved in a given field are to remain bound to that field and the frameworks within." Just because the logic of an argument is correct in one place, doesn't necessarily mean its correct everywhere. If that is an obvious fact of debating ethics, then it just goes to show how seldomly I actually participate in such debates. I could go on, but there are other matters to consider for the week. 

There was a couple of other readings provided this week regarding a Students' Code of Integrity. Much of it are simple rules of etiquette when helping other students with their work, or reminders to site one's sources clearly, or clear declarations against plagiarism of any sort. Very much the same things I've heard elsewhere. Don't get me wrong, I take these things seriously, and I do understand the logics and reasonings behind a good number of the rules and protocols presented here in the code. The big issue for me is that this particular iteration of the CoI also mentions computer code and algorithms. The problem with here is the very real possibility where multiple students achieve a similar, if not exact solution to a given prompt or problem by means of coincidence alone. At the time of penning this particular entry here, there is a lot of noise being raised over a company retroactively filing patents on computer game mechanics in response to their competition's games out performing their own. Now, I get there is a clear difference in stakes here, but the reason I bring this up is that if we aren't allowed to reach a solution to a problem because someone's already used it themselves, what's the point. There is the very real possibility that there is only a select few solutions to meet a given problem with, and that there will be duplicate solutions. Make a list of 15  random single-digit numbers and you will have duplicates in that list. There is the very real chance I'm overthinking this sort of thing, which happens much more than you think. And I do respect that there are a lot of students all submitting their own work for instructors to go through and that said instructors may use tools to make the work easier. I just feel that the odds of coincidence being non-zero makes it worth considering as possibility. With the punishments for plagiarism being as rightly harsh as they are, the though of being punished as result of said tools marking a false-positive scares the daylights out of me.