X-Culture: Finish By Any Means Necessary

Guest Blogger: Robert Moroney III

The X-Culture project to me, was a very different experience.  I was something I had never done before, and overall was somewhat interesting.  I liked how there were people grouped together from around the world in pursuit of the same thing, but the unfortunate part was how much people started to care after the first few weeks.  It basically turned into everyone caring when the work was only surveys cause they took less than 10 min, but once there wok and research came into play, everyone disappeared.  Luckily there were 2 other people on the team that really cared and were dedicated to doing a good job, otherwise, the project would have been a huge failure.

Another problem that we had to deal with was plagiarism.  I’m not sure what the standards are in other countries, but some of the sections that were submitted for the paper were completely plagiarized.  As if the student went to Wikipedia, copied the entire section they needed, pasted it in a Word document, and submitted it.

This then became a problem for myself because I had to rewrite a section that a student submitted.  The students section was more than 90% plagiarized, and was confronted by another group member that they needed to rewrite their part before submitting it again in order to take care of the plagiarism problem.  However, the student didn’t do what they had to do.

The day the paper was due, I was at our training area for ROTC for our Field Training Exercise.  The group member that was submitting the final paper Facebook messaged me that the student had not rewritten their section.  They told me that I needed to rewrite it and then send it back so we could submit it.  I currently was in the middle of the field with no internet access for a computer and was expected to rewrite this section.

Luckily, another Cadet had the ability to create a hot spot from their phone and I was able to access the internet.  That’s when I opened up my computer during training and took about 45min to completely rewrite this student’s section for the paper.  Finally I completed it, sent it back to the group member and we were able to submit the final paper.

The project overall was pretty decent, but in order for the projects to get better and run smoother, group members that don’t participate should be removed from the group.