Burleigh Media Ethics Lecture Reflection

Yesterday, I attended the Media Ethics Lecture where I live-tweeted the whole event.

At first when I got there I felt weird pulling out my laptop and having my eyes juggle from the screen to the presentation, but I couldn’t help myself.

I wanted to try and tweet every moment along with attempting to listen to the lecture.

Samantha Grant was the honorary guest at the lecture from her PBS film, “A Fragile Trust”. A documentary about Jayson Blair, a New York Times journalist, who plagiarized his way to the top.

He plagiarized form former colleagues, other periodicals, and basically anywhere he could find where it wouldn’t be totally obvious.

As a student at Marquette University I felt that this documentary related to me because of how much Marquette stresses academic integrity.

From the moment we enrolled into campus we were forced to take an academic integrity course. Each professor I’ve had has also stressed the importance of doing my own work and citing every source possible so I would never be thought of as a plagiarizer.

During this lecture it made it more clear to me why someone like Jayson would do what he did to get to the top. Sometimes taking the easy way out seems like the best option, but in the end one will probably be penalized.

After the event, I took a look back at my twitter feed and I was able to give myself a complete recap of the event. The short tweets were like little notes for me to remember the event.

Some of the tweets I honestly don’t even remember tweeting because I was trying to get the information down so fast.

Overall, I felt that the lecture and the live tweeting were an awesome experience. The tweeting made me force myself to think fast and keep going when I miss a point, which sometimes can be difficult for me.