Category: Education

Online study group grounds for expultion?

TheStar.com | GTA | Student faces Facebook consequences

A Ryerson University student is facing academic misconduct charges for organizing a Facebook group for fellow chemistry students to “get help with some of the questions the professor would give students to do online.”  As he describes it:

“So we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we’d post the question and say: `Does anyone get how to do this one? I didn’t get it right and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.’ Exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the Dungeon [a physical study space],” said Avenir yesterday.

I can see that the prof might be worried about an online version of answer keys that I’ve been told have been popular in fraternities for years.  Yet if this is a method of studying that students find valuable, and they go about it in an honest way, it should be encouraged…especially since they’re going to do it anyway. It might be more work for an instructor to structure questions so that answers can’t be shared, but it’s work that all students would benefit from.

This Course Brought to You By…


This Course Brought to You By…. (Inside Higher Ed)

Here’s an interesting story about a university course with some pretty blatant corporate ties:

[The] IACC [International Anticounterfeiting Coalition] sponsor[ed] a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real.

I can almost understand how this might have seemed like a good lesson for the students of a course to learn a new marketing tactic, but it’s a bit fishy that they 1) received $10,000 from the organization, and 2) received materials to teach from. As an instructor, this is perhaps the most egregious thing–that the classroom became a pulpit for the IACC to present their view to paying students. It doesn’t sound as though critically engaging the issue of counterfeiting (or guerrilla marketing) was a part of the course at all.

Borrowed Time

Borrowed Time

Slate is running a brief montage about rebuilding public libraries, asking “What sort of public library does the “digital world” of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle require?” This is right along track with a dialogue some of my colleagues have been having with the UW-Madison libraries as we also consider what the “library of the future” might look like. Rather than a warehouse of books, many see libraries as a re-emerging community space. I’m sympathetic to this view, but at the same time, there are elements of the library of the past that are worth keeping around:

Copenhagen, Denmark

Library at Copenhagen University

Patry: Non-profit, non-partisan education in copyright

The Patry Copyright Blog: Non-profit, non-partisan education in copyright

Inspired by a response by the director of the Copyright Alliance to a previous post, Patry takes on an issue I’m hoping to take on in my own research: how do we educate the public about copyright.

Patry argues that the Alliance practices “‘education’ of a distinct type; equating copyright education overwhelmingly with stopping file sharing,” rather than a “balanced viewpoint.” This type of “education” happens on both sides of the debate (example: the Association of Research Libraries produces material which they hope will “encourage the campus community to confidently and assertively exercise their rights.”)

The difficulty here is that copyright has developed to be so complex and indeteriminate that I would argue any effort at copyright education (short of quoting the law) will end up being political. The result of this is when the law is put into action by creators and users of copyrighted works, they have their choice of interpretation. Additionally, educational materials are easy to ignore.

In my opinion, a better approach than education about copyright is to involve the public more in the debate over pending copyright reform. Giving people the feeling that their voice has been heard increases the chance that they will buy in to the resulting law. I believe promoting compliance in this way is a much cheaper and (eventually) less political way to go.