Monthly Archives: March 2010

Why Do Students Cheat?

According to Young-Jin Lee at the University of Kansas, the main driver for college-level cheating is procrastination:

…repetitive copiers—students who copy over 30 percent of their homework problems—had enough knowledge, at least at the beginning of the semester. But they didn’t put enough effort in. They didn’t start their homework long enough ahead of time, as compared to noncopiers… Because repetitive copiers don’t adequately learn…topics on which they copy the homework…copying caused declining performance…later in the semester.

This is partly our fault: we put students in an environment that seems designed to reduce productivity, then chastise them for trying to cope in ways we don’t approve of. However, as I reminded a group of students this morning, how they respond to those pressures is still their choice: if someone says, “I had too much work from my other courses to do my part of this group assignment,” they had better be able to explain why the other eight members of their team were able to manage it.

For Those With Only a Passing Interest in Software Carpentry…

Now that Software Carpentry Version 4 is a go, I’ve moved most blogging about scientific software development over to http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com. Recent highlights include:

  1. You can now follow Software Carpentry’s progress on Twitter as @swcarpentry.
  2. I’m helping teach a course on analyzing next-generation sequencing data at Michigan State University at the end of May.
  3. Some thoughts on online course delivery.
  4. Some more thoughts on instructional design. (These two posts are mostly actually pleas for help.)
  5. The announcement that the course bibliography is online.
  6. A discussion of what’s missing from that bibliography.
  7. My analysis of the pros and cons of various formats for the course material. Much to my own surprise, LaTeX is the frontrunner…

Apple Makes The Government Look Good

Maddie’s third birthday party was today. After she went to bed, we uploaded all our pictures from our Canon into iPhoto on our MacBook, then selected the ones we liked best for upload to Flickr. Nothing seemed to happen—there was no network traffic, and nothing was showing up in my Flickr photostream—so I quick iPhoto and restarted.  Guess what?  All of the pictures had disappeared.  They weren’t in the iPhoto album, they weren’t in the Flickr upload area, they were just… plain… gone.  And of course, I’d clicked “delete from camera” when the upload from the Canon finished. And of course, what with it being an Apple product and all, iPhoto 8.1 doesn’t save photos as plain files on disk for me to try to recover the old-fashioned way. I’m pretty angry with myself right now, but even angrier at Apple.

Another Online Government Fail

I needed a long-form birth certificate to renew my daughter’s passport, so I went onto the Ontario government website, filled in the form, ticked the box saying “regular delivery (15 business days)”, gave them my credit card information, and clicked “submit”. Three days later I get a letter:

Dear Applicant,

Upon review of your application or request, additional information is required.

The payment that has been received is not sufficient to pay for the products and services that you requested. Please forward a further payment of $10.00 so that the ORG can continue processing your request.

Huh? I filled in their form—they calculated how much I owe. And they have my email address—why send a printed letter? Government 2.0 feels like it’s still a long way away…

Productively Lost

From Greg DeKoenigsburg:

We are delighted to announce the release of version 0.8 of our textbook, “Practical Open Source Software Exploration: How to be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way”.

The URL for the wiki release: http://teachingopensource.com/index.php/Textbook_Release_0.8

We are already working on the 0.9 release.  The work continues here: http://teachingopensource.com/index.php/Textbook_Roadmap

My heartfelt thanks to my fellow contributors, who helped over the last weeks and months, and especially over the last few days: Karsten Wade, Max Spevack, Chris Tyler, Mel Chua, Jeff Sheltren, and Matt Jadud.