 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
In the Comments
You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
Library Protesters to Ohio State U.: Digital's OK, but Save Our Books!
Recent Posts
Advocates for the Blind Sue Arizona State U. Over Kindle Use | Comment [50]
A California Dream: Saving State Universities With an Online Campus | Comment [22]
Are Scholarly E-Mail Lists Fading in an Era of Blogs and Twitter? | Comment [7]
David Wiley: The Parable of the Inventor and the Trucker | Comment [21]
Introducing Guest Blogger David Wiley | Comment [1]
Submit to Wired Campus
Tell us about stories we should be covering, and what you don't like.
Wired Campus Writers
Internet issues, new technology, security, computing
Jennifer Howard
libraries, publishing
Sara Lipka
piracy, student technology use
Marc Parry
distance education, security, the technology marketplace
Jeffrey R. Young
video, audio, how technology is changing scholarship and teaching
Need more tech news?
Read our complete IT section.
Categories
June 26, 2009
Promoting 'Netiquette' in the Classroom
In today’s college classroom, it seems that more students have laptops than don’t. In many lecture halls, professors see several of their students typing away all class long. But some professors have to wonder: how many of them are taking notes, and how many of them are checking Facebook.
To help professors keep students concentrated on class work, several colleges have offered guidelines and suggestions for curbing misuse of computers in class and setting “netiquette” standards, like turning off the computer’s volume before class begins. Other college guides give tips on ways professors can use technology better in their class, as long as they comply with copyright laws.
The University of Wisconsin suggests professors implement a “no laptop time” when “laptop users must close their lids.” An online guide also says professors may want to create a policy in the event a student breaks the established laptop rules.
In past years, several law schools have banned all laptop use in class in an effort to guarantee students aren’t surfing the Internet during lectures.
Northern Michigan University’s guide, “Suggestions for Addressing Computer Use in the Classroom,” lists sample policies either limiting or prohibiting computer use that can be printed in a professor’s syllabus, and offers philosophical rationales for imposing the rules. “Laptop misuse is today’s version of having a ‘dirty’ magazine hidden in the pages of the textbook,” the guide says. “It is the student’s responsibility to use the laptops responsibly.”
The University of Dayton’s guide doesn’t dwell as much on student misuse of laptops during class time, but it offers ways professors can use computers to enhance learning strategies. — Marc Beja
Posted on Friday June 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [32]June 25, 2009
Should Definitions of Cheating Change in the Age of Texting?
Over at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blogs, Mark Bauerlein raised some interesting questions this week about students’ views of cheating.
Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, points to a new survey showing that about half of students have used their cellphones or other technology to cheat, and that many students do not consider their behavior to be cheating.
He suggests that they may have a point. “Don’t we see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead the healthy spread of ‘participatory culture’?” Mr. Bauerlein wrote. “In the digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the definition of cheating. Right?”
Posted on Thursday June 25, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [55]June 18, 2009
At College Fairs, Recruiters Turn to Swipes and Scans to Attract Students
While swiping his credit card at an airport check-in station to get his boarding pass, Joe Manning got an idea.
Mr. Manning, associate director of admissions at James Madison University, figured a similar system could be used at college fairs to obtain prospective applicants’ information electronically. Instead of students’ wasting time by filling out information forms by hand, he hooked up a laptop computer and a bar-code scanner and had students swipe their driver’s licenses or learner’s permits.
As The Chronicle’s Eric Hoover reported, the National Association for College Admission Counseling has introduced similar bar-code scanners at 15 of its annual college fairs, and it expects the service to be available at all 50 annual events by 2012. With the new system, students get their own printable bar codes to take to the fair that give recruiters their contact information and areas of academic interest electronically.
Recruiters hope that the new system will increase the number of students interested in their college, and that receiving more accurate information electronically will help recruiters spend more time talking to students.
The scanners allow college representatives to spend more time looking prospective applicants in the eye, “rather than students standing there with their heads down,” Gregory A. Ferguson, NACAC’s director of college fairs, said. —Marc Beja
Posted on Thursday June 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [2]June 15, 2009
Student Beats Cheating Charges for Posting Work Online
A student majoring in computer science at San Jose State University said he fought against a professor who had tried to force him to remove his homework from the Internet, and won.
On his blog, Kyle Brady explained that he had posted his computer code assignments online after the due date, in an attempt to help others and serve as a reference for future employment. But Mr. Brady says his professor, Michael Beeson, demanded he remove the content, or he would fail the course for breaking the university’s policies for cheating. Mr. Brady said the professor said students in the future would be explicitly forbidden from publishing their work in other courses. Professor Beeson did not respond to messages requesting comment.
“It was not my intention to help others cheat or facilitate it. In fact, I still don’t believe this could be considered cheating, since it is a very different situation than passing a Final around the room,” Mr. Brady said he wrote in an e-mail to his professor. “There is no reason to not make homework solutions public at an appropriate time, and what I have done is no different than sharing answers after they have been turned in for grading – or reviewing graded homeworks in groups before a Final Exam. I merely used the Internet as my distribution method, instead of a paper-and-ink solution.”
After several e-mail messages were exchanged between them, Mr. Brady said, he was informed on June 3 that he would not be punished by the university for his actions.
“I have now heard from Debra Griffith, Judicial Affairs Officer of SJSU, and she agrees that what you have done does not in any way constitute a violation of the University Academic Integrity Policy, and that Dr. Beeson cannot claim otherwise,” Mr. Brady said his department chairperson wrote him in an e-mail.
On his blog, Mr. Brady triumphantly wrote, “Thanks to some perseverance and asking the right questions, SJSU Professors are now prohibited from barring students from posting their code solutions online, as well as penalizing their students for doing so.” —Marc Beja
Posted on Monday June 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [17]June 10, 2009
'The Computer Ate My Homework': How to Detect Fake Techno-Excuses
Forget about making up stories about sick relatives. There’s a new way to get around homework deadlines by sending professors corrupted documents, buying a student extra time because the professor will likely blame computer errors and take hours or days to ask for a new version. There are, however, ways to identify the frauds.
Corrupted-Files.com, a Web site developed in December as a joke, its owner says, offers unreadable Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files that appear, at first glance, to be legitimate. Students can submit them via e-mail to professors in place of real papers to get a deadline extension without late penalties. For $3.95, the site promises a “completed” assignment file will be sent to the buyer within 12 hours, to be renamed and submitted by the new owner. By the time a professor gives up on the bogus file, in theory, a student will have been able to complete the actual assignment.
“I made CF in 3 hours while watching old episodes of Seinfeld, so if any inspiration, it was George Costanza, the sad king of excuses,” the site’s owner, who didn’t want his name used, said in an e-mail message. “The site was really all just one big goof.”
He added that he didn’t believe his Web site promoted cheating, since its users are not plagiarizing others or using an essay mill, but just buying some extra time.
The corrupted-file idea could work, said T. Mills Kelly, an associate dean at George Mason University, because faculty members are often busy with work and grading, and used to getting an occasional corrupted file. But Mr. Kelly says it would not work with him.
“Every time a student e-mails me a paper, I open the file to make sure that it will open so I know that the paper is turned in, and if it doesn’t work, I write them on the spot: ‘You have to send me a new copy,’” he said. “If they don’t send it right away, my brain starts ticking over.”
Mr. Kelly said that by checking a document’s properties, anyone can see what computer the file was created on and on what date, as well as how many times the file has been edited.
“What are the odds that you wrote a 10-page paper 10 minutes before you e-mailed it to me, without an edit?” he asked, adding that circumventing the system by intentionally using a corrupted file was cheating. “I always recommend failure for the course.”
It seems a corrupted file purchased by The Chronicle — which had a glitch and arrived several hours late — would pass some of Mr. Kelly’s tests, but not all of them: The file’s original author was hidden, but the creation and edit dates and times were marked for the time the document was downloaded from the Web site.
After the owner of the Web site was contacted by reporters, it changed slightly. Now the comments section reads: “If you need an extension, just be honest and ask your professor before you use a corrupted file.” —Marc Beja
Posted on Wednesday June 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [24]June 9, 2009
Brigham Young U. Reconsiders Its Ban on YouTube
Students and faculty members at Brigham Young University could view YouTube on the campus for the first time this fall if a re-evaluation of its policy results in a decision to lift the ban on the video-sharing Web site.
The university first restricted access to YouTube, along with several other Web sites, in 2006, after administrators said some content could be found offensive and was inconsistent with the university’s mission statement.
Since then, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has released an official YouTube channel, Mormon Messages. Videos posted on the channel have since been viewed more than 2.9 million times.
“The amount of educational material on YouTube is increasing,” said university spokeswoman Carri Jenkins. “What we’re looking at is the opportunities that are there for material that might be useful on campus and in the classroom.”
Ms. Jenkins said students are free to view any kind of online content off campus, but the current ban restricts YouTube from all campus computers, including those connected to the Internet in campus housing. The university does allow certain video-sharing sites on campus, like Google Videos, that it says uses a more thorough filtering system to catch offensive content.
The restriction is being reviewed by university administrators, with input from faculty members and students, Ms. Jenkins said. The university expects to make a decision by the beginning of the fall semester.—Erica R. Hendry
Posted on Tuesday June 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [20]June 4, 2009
College Students Help Connect the Vatican to Internet 2.0
Samantha Chin helped bring Pope Benedict XVI to YouTube and Facebook — literally.
As an intern for the Vatican’s Internet office, Ms. Chin researched different ways for the Roman Catholic Church to publicize the Pope’s message for annual World Communication Day, in May.
“My main job was to figure out new ways to reach a larger and a younger audience for this message to be delivered,” Ms. Chin said. “I immediately thought of ways to incorporate the Internet. I use it every day. I don’t think I could possibly live my life without it.”
And by January, the Communication Day message was posted on the Vatican’s YouTube site; a Facebook application called Pope2You, which allows users to send virtual postcards and get-well messages in five languages; and an iPhone application that distributes news in the Catholic world.
Ms. Chin, who received a bachelor’s degree in communications last month, was part of a Villanova University internship program that has been working for the past seven years to keep the Catholic Church up to date with multimedia tools and technology.
Over the past year, student interns and their professors have also begun a project creating virtual tours of several sites at the Vatican, the first of which — a tour of the Basilica of St. Paul — made its debut on the Vatican’s Web site last month.
Positive feedback from the first virtual-reality tour and interactions with the Villanova groups paved the way for the students to begin filming other sites, including an after-hours photo shoot of the Sistine Chapel, in March.
Samantha Coveleski, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications from Villanova last month, called her experience filming inside the chapel “breathtaking.”
“I had been there before and been inside the Sistine Chapel with the million other people,” Ms. Coveleski said. “But then to go back into the chapel at night knowing that nobody else was going to be there, you were really able to take in the artwork as it was designed to be witnessed.”
Professor Bryan Crable, director of Villanova’s communication department, said cardinals at the Vatican were hesitant at first to let the teams from Villanova have more access to the sites.
“They wanted to make sure that what we were able to present would accurately capture Michelangelo without distortion,” Mr. Crable said, adding that the virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel will most likely offer a feature that allows viewers to click on different historically significant items and get background information on them.
“It’s just been a phenomenal experience for our students to be not only engaged in an internship that’s teaching them about multimedia, video production, and editing, but also to do it in such significant cultural, historical, religious spaces, and aesthetic spaces,” he said. —Marc Beja
Posted on Thursday June 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]May 29, 2009
College Radio Station Says Goodbye to the Airwaves
DJ’s at Augustana College’s student-run radio station won’t be spinning over the airwaves much longer.
The college announced this week it will move its station, KAUR 89.1 FM, to an online-only format. KAUR, which now reaches listeners up to 60 miles away from its station in Sioux Falls, S.D., was founded in 1972.
Bob Preloger, the college’s vice president for marketing and communications, said the decision was not a financial one, and that the college has considered the move for at least three years.
“It’s become obvious to us that our students are not listening to the radio station,” he said, referring to the results of a recent campus survey. “Listenership on the radio ranked among the lowest forms of communication on campus.”
Tom Prochazka, the station’s general manager, who graduated from the college this month, said the transition is a “sad day for radio and Augustana College,” but that it also offers KAUR an opportunity to explore new directions, such as downloadable podcasts.
“Being a broadcast station, we could reach out 60 miles in any direction. We have 300,000 listeners over the air that can get the station if they just happen to scan their dial,” Mr. Prochazka said. “On the Internet, we’re going to lose a lot of those people, who listen in the car or at work, but now we can reach out as far as we want to.”
College radio stations across the country have added online-only stations since the late 90s, but usually only to supplement their FM or AM broadcasts, said Fritz Kass, chief operations officer for the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System. The system, a coalition of education and nonprofit stations, has 1,000 members.
Mr. Kass said at least three of its other member stations have sold their frequencies to move online in the past few years. Those stations include St. Olaf College’s KSTO and Adelphi University’s PAWS Web Radio.
“When a college loses the opportunity to interface with their community, that’s unfortunate, because the college has a real opportunity to affect lives and people,” Mr. Kass said. “On the other hand, Webcasting opens up a whole other area of digital communication, and certainly the iPod generation needs to have those kinds of skills.”
Augustana College is not interested in selling its frequency, Mr. Preloger said. The college is looking to lease the station, however, and has met with interested parties.
“We said, ‘Here we have this asset of the college that really isn’t being utilized as best it should be,’” he said. “We weren’t being good stewards of that asset.”
The station will complete the transition sometime this month. —Erica R. Hendry
Posted on Friday May 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [3]May 28, 2009
Twitter Shuts Down Account Impersonating President of U. of Texas at Austin
Last week Twitter removed an account claiming to be written by the president of the University of Texas at Austin, William C. Powers Jr., which had actually been written by editors of Texas Travesty, a student-run humor magazine at the university.
“I think it’s game over,” said Ross Luippold, the magazine’s editor in chief and a senior at the university, in an interview Thursday. “It was pretty popular — it actually had more followers than the student government’s” Twitter feed, he said. He said he received an e-mail message from Twitter notifying him that the account would be removed unless he could quickly send proof that he was Mr. Powers (which he’s not).
University administrators had contacted Twitter weeks ago asking it to remove the account, which it did just hours after The Chronicle first wrote about the parody. Mr. Luippold said it was “a little annoying” that university did not contact him, but chose to go to Twitter instead with its grievance.
“It seems like this opens us up to making fun of them even more mercilessly over the next year,” said Mr. Luippold, arguing that the magazine plans to have the last laugh. “There’s nothing that can stop us from doing cover-to-cover Powers parody.”
Another spoof university-president account — of John J. DeGioia, Georgetown University’s president — has not been suspended, even though officials there asked Twitter to shut it down. Andy Pino, Georgetown’s director of media relations, said last week that he believed that the account violated Twitter’s terms of service by not making it clear that it is a parody. Since then, however, the student running the parody account, Jack Stuef, has changed the account page, and has removed a link to the university president’s Web site. Mr. Stuef could not be reached Thursday for comment. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Thursday May 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [6]May 27, 2009
Online Students at Bryant & Stratton College Will Graduate via Second Life
Some students at Bryant & Stratton College will have a short commute to their graduation ceremony: All they need to do is turn on their home computers.
On June 10, approximately 40 students in the institution’s online-degree program will sign on to Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world, where they will watch computer simulations of the college’s vice president and a student speaker address them before their names, degrees, and honors are announced.
While several colleges have experimented with Second Life for college tours, debate tournaments, and more, Bryant & Stratton College claims it is the first to hold a commencement in the virtual world. It will also hold traditional graduations on its 15 campuses.
Scott Traylor, Bryant & Stratton’s director of admissions, says students are now stretching farther from the college’s physical campuses, and with work schedules and the high costs of travel, students asked for an alternative graduation. In addition to the June 10 event, online students are given the option to attend an in-person ceremony.
“They really wanted to have something that was more closely tied to their experience online, and they wanted to graduate with their classmates,” Mr. Traylor says of the students. “Just as they chose their mode of delivery for their education, they can choose their mode of delivery for their graduation.”
For Sheri Frost, the third attempt at a college degree was the charm. Having began her associate degree twice before, in 2001 and 2002, she will receive it this June, in paralegal studies. At first she was uncertain whether she could attend the traditional ceremony because she has four children and commutes using public transportation, but she later decided to go.
“I’m the first college graduate in the family, and I wanted my parents to see me walk across the stage,” Ms. Frost says.
Although she will receive her diploma in a cap and gown, Ms. Frost says she will still sign in online to attend the virtual ceremony.
“A lot of friends that I made through online schooling won’t be able to attend in person,” she says. “I wanted to be there for them and watch them graduate.”
For now, only the students and faculty members can watch the online graduation, but a video will be posted to the college’s Web site later. –Marc Beja
Posted on Wednesday May 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [10]