Month: October 2005

Link to: The Chronicle: Daily news: 10/27/2005 — 02

I first saw the announcement of these electronic study guides and naively thought of how valuable it would be to students to have audio excerpts of some of the key parts of the literature they were studying.

I keep making these mind trips back to the year I spent as a 12th grade English teacher. I remember using the Monarch Notes extensively to help my students follow the complexities of the Dante’s Inferno. (This was long before resources like TeachersFirst helped translate the complex allusions and obscure references into activities that would engage 12th graders.)

This Chronicle article focuses on the more negative aspects of the technology to enable electronic “crib sheets”:

The guides released by SparkNotes and iPREPpress are compatible with most iPods — including the new video-playing model and the iPod Nano, which has a screen about the size of a postage stamp. That could be bad news for professors, who may worry that such small devices could easily become digital cheat sheets in the hands of unscrupulous students.

Mr. Goszyk conceded that iPods loaded with study guides could be smuggled into classrooms. “I think anytime you’ve got something — whether it’s technology or just a slip of paper — that you could sneak into the classroom, those people who are going to want to cheat are going to cheat,” he said.

Professors whose reading lists include works like Pride and Prejudice or The Odyssey may have to police their classrooms carefully on exam day, Mr. Goszyk said.

Will Richardson offered an alternative to more careful policing in the piece I wrote about yesterday.

… they take the ideas we have tried to teach them and connect them to and show us that they can teach it to someone else with their own spin on it, their own remix.

If we can figure out assignments that help stduents do that, we don’t have to worry about postage stamp screens displaying the contents of the Cliff Notes

Link to: Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Do University Honor Codes Work?

Ed Felton has an interesting post in light of last night’s discussion about the ethics of Turnitin.com and class requirements to submit papers. Felton responds to a string of comments to a post by Rick Garnett on a popular “blawg” (blog for lawyers and law professors) based on his experience at Caltech and as a facutly member at Princeton. His assessment is that honor codes require enforcement if they are to survive. Students will support the code if they believe that the system is fair, unbiased and adequately enforced. However:

One has to wonder whether it makes much difference in practice whether a system is formally honor-based or not. Either way, students have an ethical duty to follow the rules. Either way, violations will be punished if they come to light. Either way, at least a few students will cheat without getting caught. The real difference is whether the institution conspicuously trusts the students to comply with the rules, or whether it instead conspicuously polices compliance. Conspicuous trust is more pleasant for everybody, if it works.

My own experience with strong honor codes at two institutions suggests that they are much more effective at helping manage the level of cheating on exams than they are in helping control plagiarism for papers outside of class. One of the touchiest parts of many honor codes is the expectation that students will turn in their peers who cheat. As an undergraduate at Hamilton, I can still remember the moral dilemma when my roommate fell asleep in the middle of our first Government hour exam. Was waking him up considered “giving assistance on this exam” and therefore a violation of the honor code? I did wake him up (roommate loyalty code trumps honor code), but I can remember at least a few days of worry that some one would report me.

Link to: Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Blackboard Acquisition of WebCT

Hi All,

I’m sure that all of you have seen the news about the Blackboard WebCt merger. (Thanks to Mary who got the news from WebCT some hours before those of us in the Blackboard world.) Stephen Downes has pulled together a comprehensive summary of reactions from across the blogosphere.

Few folks on the lists that I’m reading see much positive from this for current BB or WebCt customers. Most think that this is just one more step toward monopoly pricing in the IMS market. Others see it as a great opportunity for Sakai or Moodle to make inroads into the market.

What are your predictions on the impact?

Link to: danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: So Friday was a pretty bad day….

One of the articles we read for our “should graduate students blog?” discussion was Confessions of a Scholar Who Blogs by Daniel Drezner at the University of Chicago. Last week, the political science department voted to deny him tenure. Lots of analysis and a host of comments. Was his blog the reason?

[Wait a minute, you can’t leave it at that. What happened? What the hell happened? Why didn’t you get tenure? Was it your failure to anchor yourself within a clearly established theoretical paradigm? A lack of respect from peers in your IPE subfield? Too much output? A declining respect of your subfield by your tenured colleagues? The departmental turn away from mainstream political science scholarship? Your political orientation? Jealousy of your public intellectual status? WAS IT THE FRIGGIN’ BLOG??!!–ed.]

My answers in order: I dunno, perhaps, probably not, maybe, I guess so, a little, could be, I seriously doubt it, and who the hell knows? Any decent social scientist must allow for multiple causes, so it’s not necessarily an either/or question.

Link to: lifehack.org » Online Document Collaboration Tool – 37Signals’ Writeboard

Lifehack points to a web-based application called Writeboard that might be a better way of writing collaboratively than any of the tools we’ve considered so far–wiki, blackboard forum or sending multiple word documents among 7-8 recipients. This another lightweight application from 37Signals which produces the BaseCamp project management system and Backpack list manager. 37Signals is dedicated to producing highly focused software to perform very specific tasks with a minimum of fuss and bother. For example, Backpack is described as “a wiki without the wacky”, and one customer refered to BaseCamp as “the iPod of project management.”

Some have called Backpack “a wiki with out the wacky.” Others have called it “blogish.” Others have said it’s a project management tool for all the little things in your life. Some say it’s a application that helps you get things done. Some have called it Basecamp’s little brother. Call it what you will. We call it useful and hope you do too.

Both Writeboard and BaseCamp might be worth a look as tools to help us in our project management.