Musings

So I came across this article called Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual Classroom (the link generates an error at the time of this writing). I didn't actually read it; I just read a synopsis of it in a book. It's apparently about teachers fears that online classes somehow increase students ability to plagiarize and about electronic measures that we can take to catch people who turn in stuff that they didn't write. I think that the words that caught my eye were "academic integrity." It goes on to talk about how we can give time-limited quizzes that are proctored to keep people from cheating on them too.

To me this game of cat and mouse completely misses the point. If the things that we ask our students to do seem so pointless that students would rather to spend time searching for something that looks like what they were supposed to do, then something's fundamentally wrong with the assignment. I see a couple ways to solve this problem.

The need for SPSS caused me to try to do actual work in a computer lab. This is my story.

I used to think that learning was fun. I decided today that learning isn't fun. Knowing things is fun. If you want people to learn things you need to either make them easy to learn or convince them that their lives will be much better if they have learned the stuff.