It:lectures-2011

Chemical Information Technology 2011-2012

Go to Lectures | Go to Coursework | Go to Assignment

IT for lecture courses, tutorials and set projects

Two pages available for general IT skills; not fully part of this course, but important for reference

• General IT facilities
• General file management

Managing your location

It is important to manage your location while accessing scientific journals as access to almost every electronic resource is controlled by your internet (IP) address. You will not need to worry about this when you are connecting to your resources on campus (which by definition also includes South Kensington Halls of residence). If you are outside this catchment area however, some IT services will not work unless you enter the campus virtually by switching on something called a VPN, or Virtual Private Network. It allows you to access resources through the campus network from your own internet connection.

Accessing lecture notes and submission of assignments

Lecture materials online

Course notes may be found either using the College Virtual Learning Environment, called Blackboard or using the Chemistry Wiki (which you are using now). Most lecture notes will be available as a Portable Document Format (a PDF document) or, less commonly, a Powerpoint slide show. These may be downloaded to your computer and stored in a document library (e.g., EndNote or Mendeley), printed or viewed on the computer. You are encouraged to annotate lecture notes during the lecture and to review them afterwards, rather than simply filing them away until to Revision Week!

Lecture notes are not intended to be exhaustive in their content and you are encouraged to support them with further information from textbooks and other sources as appropriate.

Lecture notes will be placed on Blackboard by the lecturers for your convenience, however the PDF document alone will not necessarily contain all the content required for understanding; in the event of missing a lecture you should go over the content with the aid of textbooks to ensure you understand the concepts.

Online submission of assignments

The Department is moving towards electronic submission of all assignments through Blackboard. All submissions will be checked by Turn-It-In, a software packaged designed to 'read' assignments and, through comparison with a huge number of resources, will assign it an "originality score". This is also known as "Plagiarism Detection Software". Instructions for the submission of assignments can be found within each module on Blackboard. Always ask if you are unsure how any course submission works, or if you are having problems.

If you know you will not be able to submit work on time, contact your tutor or course leader as soon as possible - the sooner we know if you are having problems the more we can do to help you find a solution. If you miss a deadline for whatever reason, you must contact the course leader as soon as possible or you will not receive a mark for that assignment.

Plagiarism

The College has a simple attitude towards plagiarism; "Do not plagiarise" .

The College's official statement on plagiarism is thus:

"Plagiarism is interpreted by the College as the act of presenting the work of others as one's own work, without acknowledgement. Plagiarism is considered as academically fraudulent, and an offence against College discipline. The College considers plagiarism to be a major offence, and subject to the disciplinary procedures of the College.
"Plagiarism can arise from deliberate actions and also through careless thinking and/or methodology. The offence lies not in the attitude or intention of the perpetrator, but in the action and in its consequences."

The Educational Development Unit has extensive information on plagiarism and how to avoid it here: you are encouraged to read and learn about plagiarism here.