Our first and most important line of defense against academic dishonesty is simply good teaching. Cheating and plagiarism often arise in a vacuum created by routine, lack of interest and overwork. Professors who give the same assignment every semester, fail to guide students in the development of their projects and have little interest in what…
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars).…
I warn my students not to freak out when they see a lot of ink in the margins of their papers. I explain my golden rule: “You put effort in, writing to me? I put effort in, writing back to you. That’s the respect writers give each other.” Whenever I’ve watched my under-confident students in…
Tiny, even microscopic, cameras, deployed ubiquitously, should worry us in any number of ways. Individuals will lose even more of their privacy. Companies will find it difficult to maintain traditional notions of trade secrets. And governments will confront a world in which, to some extent, people will spy on the official snoops, not just the…
It must be the painkillers, we thought. Or maybe hypoxia, the oxygen deprivation in the blood that often contributes to delirium in sick people. Or that the cancer now was destroying his mind, just as it had racked his body. But then our cousin Lynne mentioned that her parents had done a lot of similar…
The grading system for courses offered by CCS is focused on accomplishment, a combination of Pass/No Record grading and variable unit credit. For each course taken in the College, the student enrolls for a specific number of units of work that he or she plans to do during the quarter, from 1 – 6 units.…
This is a school with no set hours, no required classes, no grades, no parent-teacher meetings, and no rules except for the ones the people here make up and vote on themselves. It’s a school where youngsters have a say on everything – from whether sipping soda should be allowed in the sound-proofed music room…
”Students felt more empowered,” said Frank Klapak, an education and communication professor at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, one of the schools participating in the study. Klapak let his students help decide how to structure the course as a way of showing them the results of democratic involvement. The study also found that…
I recall seeing a number of my high-school teachers, all with master’s degrees or Ph.D.’s, painting houses and cutting lawns during the summer. This kind of thing still happens all over the country, and it’s a disgrace. When teachers are forced to tend the yards of students’ homes, to clean houses, or to sell stereos…
A history of videogames, just as a history of any software “type” or “genre,” will reveal an open-source origin and a legacy of “borrowers” and “derivers” hoping to capitalize on what was originally free, whether through buying up copyrights or creating enhanced commercial versions. With an increase in the size of a software corporation comes…
To paraphrase Matt Barton‘s hyperbolic words playfully, let’s remove our lips from the poisoned suckbottle of proprietary software and switch to the wholesome breast of open source. —Clancy Ratliff —Taking Copyfighters to Task (CultureCat) Beware, open-source activists, if your praxis is not as pure as your theory! In the theater world, it turned out that the…
“Under the right circumstances,” Surowiecki argues, “groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” For evidence, he cites how groups have been used to find lost submarines, correct the spread on a sporting event, locate a Web page, even predict the president of the United States. So why aren’t…
How would you feel if a group of people (who aren’t associated with the IRS) just offhandedly decided that it was all right for them to steal one-tenth of your yearly income because they felt that what you did for a living wasn’t really work, and you made all kinds of money from the advance…
In order to gather sufficient resources to support my self, my spouse, and my offspring, I must augment my vision with externally mounted lenses, which I wear on the bridge of my nose. My glasses make me feel professorial; without them, I still feel like an ordinary person pretending to be qualified to teach. But…
“Capable of navigating the billions of thoughts, experiences, and emotions that make up the human psyche, the new Yahoo soul-search engine helps users find what’s deep inside them quickly and easily,” Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said. “All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past.” —Yahoo…
If you hope to accomplish anything, you will inevitably need all of the people you hated in high school. I once attended a very prestigious design school where the idea was ?If you are here, you are so important, the rest of the world doesn’t count.? Not a single person from that school that I…
Looking back I am amazed that Mary and I have made it this far, both of us laboring as freelance writers, and nothing but. There is the constant danger of work running out, and from time to time it has. Once due to the harassment of the aforementioned child support authorities. However, we’ve always found…
To cut to the chase: The game industry currently doesn’t believe in “game research”. You’re either working on a shippable product, or you’re bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation. There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can’t be…
In an online world where bloggers’ frenzied mutual promotion seems increasingly the norm, the Wiki emerges as an oasis of dignified restraint. It was invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who now works for Microsoft. But the underlying idea of the Wiki – a Web page that anyone can edit or even delete – could…
A mattress and box springs stacked near a curb catch the professor’s eye. There is some scrap metal on top of the mattress, along with a few sticks of discarded lumber. He reaches into his pocket and retrieves the small, round magnet attached to his key chain. “This,” he says, “is a scrounger’s most important…