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The Internet gives the edge to good guys in academic cheatingYesterday

One of the digital age education whipping boys has long been that the Internet makes student cheating easier. An essay by Greg Forster called “Universities Wimp Out on Fighting Cheaters” sets this matter straight. as Forster writes: the technology edge is really for the good guys. This is the crux of it:

Nowadays, everyone who’s concerned about academia talks incessantly about how computers and the Internet have made plagiarism so much easier. But not a lot of people are willing to talk (in public, at least) about the real source of the problem.

Let’s be clear: computers and the Internet aren’t the problem. They’re a big net gain for the fight against cheating. They do make the act of plagiarism easier, in the sense that there’s a wider array of things available for copying, and it’s less work to hit “cut” and then “paste” than it is to copy things out by hand. But computers also make catching plagiarists easier — and the technological edge for the good guys is a lot bigger.

There are some really impressive computer programs that will take your students’ essays one by one and search the web for similar text. Search engine technology is so powerful these days that it does an excellent job of rooting out plagiarism. You can’t even fool the machine by changing some of the wor

Getting paid by your mob for being smartDecember 2

A story on Yahoo! News today describes a new online project GradeFund.com where students can get paid for making A’s at school. This is the project’s pitch:

The GradeFund is a community-based revolutionary approach to student education financing that encourages academic success. Imagine a world where family, friends, philanthropists, corporations and other organizations join together in the mission of rewarding students for performing well in school.

And some background from Yahoo!’s report:

Pay for performance is not an entirely new concept - public schools in New York City have started paying students up to $50 for performing well on standardized tests, and other school districts are experimenting with giving gift certificates to top-performing students. But GradeFund puts the rewards in students’ hands. Or rather in their friends’ and families’ hands. The site is akin to Facebook in that it lets students create a profile and send out invitations asking for sponsors to pledge whatever they please for each A - $1, $2 or more. Sponsors can also donate by subject area, giving money to students who ace, say, organic chemistry or film studies. For example, ZooToo.com, a website for pet enthusia

Video Overview of OpenCongressDecember 1

This seven minute screencast overview of OpenCongress, by Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman of RyanIsHungry.com as a volunteer project, is a great introduction to the project sponsored by Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. A great example of how transparency in government and social media can help improve the working of democratic institutions.

The Public Domain by James BoyleNovember 30

James Boyle’s new book The Public Domain is now available. Boyle, a founding board member of Creative Commons, and current Chair of the CC Board, is a professor at Duke University School of Law and a seminal thinker in the field of information property rights and law. The following excerpt from James Boyle’s Preface to The Public Domain sets out issues that make this book a fundamental resource for understanding and advancing the smart mobby future of ideas:

For a set of reasons that I will explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”12 Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, property’s various antonyms, and

Roland’s Sunday Smart Trends #242November 30

Sharing the Browser

Online collaboration often consists of little more than forwarding links or snippets from a Web page to a friend or colleague with a few comments dropped in. IBM is hoping to change this by letting people share the browser itself. This is the idea behind Blue Spruce, an experimental browser project that IBM hopes may change the way many people use the Web.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, November 26, 2008

IBM Reveals Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years

Unveiled today, the third annual “IBM Next Five in Five” is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years: Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows; You will have a crystal ball for your health; You will talk to the Web… and the Web will talk back; You will have your own digital shopping assistants; Forgetting will become a distant memory.
Source: IBM Press Release, November 25, 2008

Collective solution to accessing the internet via satellite

In many rural areas of Europe, getting on the internet means putting up with sluggish dial-up connections or, at best, erratic mobile services. A new sat