Nowadays, everyone who’s concerned about academia talks incessantly about how computers and the Internet have made plagiarism so much easier. But not a lot of people are willing to talk (in public, at least) about the real source of the problem.

Let’s be clear: computers and the Internet aren’t the problem. They’re a big net gain for the fight against cheating. They do make the act of plagiarism easier, in the sense that there’s a wider array of things available for copying, and it’s less work to hit “cut” and then “paste” than it is to copy things out by hand. But computers also make catching plagiarists easier — and the technological edge for the good guys is a lot bigger.

There are some really impressive computer programs that will take your students’ essays one by one and search the web for similar text. Search engine technology is so powerful these days that it does an excellent job of rooting out plagiarism. You can’t even fool the machine by changing some of the words around — it can identify text that’s similar but not identical, allowing the teacher to compare the two and judge whether plagiarism has occurred.

If you wanted to change the words around enough to escape detection entirely, you’d have to essentially rewrite the paper. In other words, you’d end up doing the assignment honestly in spite of yourself.

The GradeFund is a community-based revolutionary approach to student education financing that encourages academic success. Imagine a world where family, friends, philanthropists, corporations and other organizations join together in the mission of rewarding students for performing well in school.

And some background from Yahoo!’s report:

Pay for performance is not an entirely new concept - public schools in New York City have started paying students up to $50 for performing well on standardized tests, and other school districts are experimenting with giving gift certificates to top-performing students. But GradeFund puts the rewards in students’ hands. Or rather in their friends’ and families’ hands. The site is akin to Facebook in that it lets students create a profile and send out invitations asking for sponsors to pledge whatever they please for each A - $1, $2 or more. Sponsors can also donate by subject area, giving money to students who ace, say, organic chemistry or film studies. For example, ZooToo.com, a website for pet enthusiasts, is GradeFund’s first corporate sponsor, pledging $15 to the first 100 students each semester who earn an A in veterinary medicine.

When a student reaches $100 in donations, GradeFund mails them a check. (Students can withdraw the money before they reach the $100 mark for a $5 fee.) Kopko will be adding features to bring in revenue - including a job search engine that will let employers search for a computer science major who aced Spanish or any other equally specific set of skills.

For a set of reasons that I will explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”12 Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, property’s various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone.

Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as “the environment” rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment.

We have to “invent” the public domain before we can save it. . . .

Online collaboration often consists of little more than forwarding links or snippets from a Web page to a friend or colleague with a few comments dropped in. IBM is hoping to change this by letting people share the browser itself. This is the idea behind Blue Spruce, an experimental browser project that IBM hopes may change the way many people use the Web.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, November 26, 2008

IBM Reveals Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years

Unveiled today, the third annual “IBM Next Five in Five” is a list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years: Energy saving solar technology will be built into asphalt, paint and windows; You will have a crystal ball for your health; You will talk to the Web… and the Web will talk back; You will have your own digital shopping assistants; Forgetting will become a distant memory.
Source: IBM Press Release, November 25, 2008

Collective solution to accessing the internet via satellite

In many rural areas of Europe, getting on the internet means putting up with sluggish dial-up connections or, at best, erratic mobile services. A new satellite-based solution developed by European researchers promises to change that.
Source: ICT Results, November 26, 2008

Semantic desktop paves the way for the semantic web

European researchers have developed innovative software to make finding information on your computer and sharing it with others considerably easier. In the process, they may have solved the chicken and egg problem that has held back development of the semantic web.
Source: ICT Results, November 25, 2008

Restaurateur tracks down bill dodgers on Facebook

An Australian restaurateur left holding a hefty unpaid bill when five young diners bolted used the popular social network website Facebook to track them down — and they got their just deserts.
Source: Belinda Goldsmith, Reuters, November 27, 2008

Nokia robots take over the home

Finnish handset vendor Nokia unveiled some blue skies technology on Thursday, in the shape of its Home Control Centre. The world’s biggest handset manufacturer claims that the platform will be the basis for next generation security, smart home solutions and household energy management systems. What this means is that Nokia sees its gadgets eventually taking full control of your home.
Source: telecoms.com, November 27, 2008

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

. . . In a way that even e-mailed photos never could, the Web cam promises to transcend both distance and the inability of toddlers to hold up their end of a phone conversation.

Some grandparent enthusiasts say this latest form of virtual communication makes the actual separation harder. Others are so sustained by Web cam visits with services like Skype and iChat that they visit less in person. And no one quite knows what it means to a generation of 2-year-olds to have slightly pixelated versions of their grandparents as regular fixtures in their lives. . . .

Howard Rheingold recounts on his popular SmartMobs blog the University of random twittering that he is experiencing on twitter, with “increasing frequency and accuracy.”

“Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures” is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives.

For a summary of this research project and to read the full report please visit: Digital Youth Research.

This insight from Eisner about the current internet scene is strong stuff:

“It’s always the content that defines the platform,” he says. Now the platform owners are “being arrogant and saying, ‘we’re it,’” he adds. “But eventually exclusive content wins out.”

Then he gives an important caveat: The content must be professionally produced as well as exclusive. “How many skateboarding cats can there be?” he says.