Jesper Sandberg

The last few days, there have been a lot of focus on plagiarism in the news in Denmark, this is due to a recent investigation which shows that there from 2008 to 2009 have been an increase in plagiarism by 88% at Aarhus University, 37% at Copenhagen University, and 33% at Copenhagen Business School. (Sources (all in Danish): http://politiken.dk/uddannelse/1047376/studerende-snyder-mere-til-eksamen/ http://nyhederne.tv2.dk/article/33217173/ http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2010/08/30/024934.htm)

It should be noted that all of these numbers are those that are discovered and registered, the actual plagiarism number is valued to about 3-5 times higher.

They claim that this is because of the current generation has grown up with the Internet and websites such as Google and Wikipedia, from which many students quote text from without adding the sources.

If we take a quick look at the facts; the Internet dates back to research done in 1960s but was not commercialized until the mid 1990s. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet), Google was started in 1996 but not founded until 1998 (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google) and Wikipedia was launched in 2001 (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).

So a person born in the 1980′s would be ~25 years of age now, which  suits the claim very well for university time and growing up with these websites. But can we derive from this, that because people have grown up with it, and the fact that it is easier to copy/paste text instantly from the Internet, compared to copying the text from a book, will cause them to perform more plagiarism?

I do not know where the line goes for plagiarism, but I believe that people have always done it, by looking in books and rewriting the text, and in our time with a lot more students at the University, more will also get caught, the reasons for more people getting caught (not only for being in the amount of students), I will leave up to your imagination.

The three mentioned universities are all taking action against plagiarism by tougher sanctions when caught (being expelled from the university) and informing all students about the consequences of plagiarism.

It should be noted that I do not conduct plagiarism. I believe that education is given by receiving information and then you make your own judgments, conclusions and thoughts from this information. It is important that we all do our best to get rid of plagiarism, as if nothing is done, it will eventually devalue our education system and degree/diploma.

I guess its about time that I update my blog again.
Since my last update I have been Head of IT at Cross Border – Vermø and the company have moved to a different venue where I had to set up all the network, servers, etc.
I have also:

• been hired at High Performance Institute to improve their website, webshop and visibility on the web.
• been working on www.playthemax.com – a flash game portal
• been working on a marketing project with 2D Barcodes
• and other small projects

Most importantly though, I have been given the offer to work as the IT Manager at Kidz Entertainment/EEMC A/S, which I have accepted and thereby resigning from my job at Cross Border – Vermø.

Since I started my internship at Cross Border – Vermø, I have been representing our magazines at 2 different fairs.

The first one being in “Bella Centeret” during Copenhagen Fashion Week, which by the way, is a much bigger place than I thought it was, it was quite fun out there, had a lot of good talks with people, handed out a LOT of magazines, our stand was placed just next to the entrance of one of the fashion shows, so we had really loud music a lot of the time, which was nice sometimes, and sometimes not so much.

The second fair was at “Tap·1″ at an event called CPH Lifestyle, which was an event about luxury things, it was a really cool event with a lot of nice things, and I enjoyed it a lot. People were very interested in our magazines, and we handed them out a lot quicker than expected, so we actually ran our of magazines before the event was closed.

This Saturday I was in Odense representing the University of Southern Denmark (SDU)’s IT educations at an educational fair for high school students. We were 4 students representing all of SDU’s IT educations, and during the fair, we were given the task to make a website that would connect students from all of these educations more, both socially and academically. We did this with great success, even though we were not completely done with the site, and celebrated it with champagne at the end of the day.

On the 6th semester of my bachelor degree, we have an internship, for this I had 4 interviews with different companies, and decided to go with one called Cross Border – Vermø, as they seemed the most interesting and had highest potential for me to “grow”.

For a very quick introduction, they are producing free magazines in the same quality as the ones you purchase in a store, the magazines are financed by ads. At first I was hired to develop a website for one of our magazines called “ModeMagasinet”, however I quickly became in charge of all IT and web, including servers, network, buying new computers, phones, setting up new users, internet, maintenance of our other websites, e-mail system, etc.

They are placed in the middle of Copenhagen, and since I lived in Slagelse at that time, I was looking at 2 hours on the train each day, so I decided to move to Copenhagen, and so I did, the day before I started my Internship I moved all my stuff here.

All in all, I really like it here, both Copenhagen and my internship, so far I have voluntarily worked approximately 2½ hours overtime every day(approx. 10 hours a day), just because I really like it there, and the days go by so fast, I started the 1st of February and it still feels like it was yesterday.

During my study at the University of Southern Denmark, I was offered the chance to participate in a voluntary course called “Entrepreneurship in Northern Europe”. This is an international course where 5 universities from 5 different countries each participate with 5 students, the course is then divided into 5 groups with 1 student from each country where each group is given a problem formulation within their topic.

We then work with this topic in each group for a few months via skype, google docs, etc. Then we all meet up in one of the member countries, in our case it was Latvia, Riga. We then got lectures, studied, prepared our presentation from 9am until we went to bed, except for Tuesday and Thursday night, where we went our for some drinks, and Friday which was our day off to do some sightseeing.

It is possible to read more about this course at http://www.baltic-business.org/

I met some really nice people during this course/week, and even though it was a very intensive and tiring week, I had a great time and would love to do it again sometime. In fact I am going to visit some of the people I met from Germany in February for the carnival in Cologne, Germany.

Today I went to the IT University (ITU) in Copenhagen with my friend Michal.

My plan is to study a masters degree at ITU after my bachelor, so it was very interesting for me.

At ITU they have 5 floors, where the 3 middle floors are filled with classrooms and study tables with 3 small iron doors in the table, that you could open to get power for a laptop, internet, etc. The top floor is reserved to companies of some sort. The bottom floor has 3 labs (gamelab, designlab, and a 3rd I am unware of what is for), bar, libary and information. The gamelab is where I spent most my time today, they have some really good computers there, 2 computers for each 23″ widescreen that you can switch between, one for gaming (which had like 50-100 of the best/newest games) and one for “normal” things. Oh and I almost forgot to mention that they have a really good canteen as well, for breakfast I got pancakes with maple syrup, bacon, scrambled eggs and sausages, no need to say I was very happy with that!

Was a really good day, when I got back home I went to the movies with my girlfriend and watched a Danish movie called “Simon og Malou”.

Okay, last blog is almost 2 months ago, guess I have not learned to blog more.

Anyhow I will try to do it more from now on, so everyone can read about all the interesting things I discover and try in my life.

Like the other day I discovered this website called www.iwearyourshirt.com, where the guy is making his living from wearing a new t-shirt every day from various companies paying him to do it, and then he takes pictures and video of what he is doing that day in the t-shirt and then blogs about it.

I was thinking about doing something similar, but I don’t think there is a market for it in Denmark, and with my blogging habits, it might not be a good idea.

Thursday the 17th of September I was at SDU in Odense, at the introduction to the Ambassador Team. We are about 25 ambassadors from all around Denmark.

I met some awesome people there, got a lot of info, took some pictures, had a few beers, etc. All in all great time, until the headache next day.

Just added a new blog system, again, hopefully this time I will learn to use it more often.

I have chosen a more popular CMS solution this time, and I hope it will satisfy my needs.

Happy blogging everyone!