I believe that if classrooms have sufficient numbers of computers available that teachers will have their students use them. Schools typically have 1 computer for every 4 students. This counts computers in labs that are booked all day long and old computers that are not connected to the internet or are so slow that they may as well not be. I have demonstrated repeatedly that using Linux and thin clients can put lots of fast, reliable computers in classrooms using equipment that schools are throwing away. No one seems to care. I think I've figured out why.

I stumbled on a piece called EZ Bibilographies over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. The tag line is "Do Web sites that format citations for students negate the need to teach them how to create a proper source list?"

Something I read linked to an article called Do Kids Have the Right Internet Skills?. The first paragraph reads:

Earlier this year, a Midwest bank manager told me about a youth market survey the bank had conducted on youngsters and technology. The survey revealed that while youngsters were “Internet-savvy” and attracted to mobile banking, when it came to making critical decisions about finance, they weren't so savvy. They relied on word of mouth from their parents and friends—and limited their Internet searches to well-known search engines like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) or Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)

The article seems to go on to talk about how this isn't sufficient. I couldn't really read the rest because of my knee jerk reaction to this much of it. It's probably not fair to the author and may just be because I was in a meeting all day with my University Senate hearing about budget reductions (so we know that we won't get that money next year either) and "impoundments" (where they take back what they said they would give us, but just once). But I digress.

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.