Lawrence Lessig gives his Free Culture presentation for the final time on January 31, 2008 at Stanford University.
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Techno-Cheating
Last week we had two speakers on campus that both addressed academic dishonesty and technology’s role in cheating. Most of the examples were what I would consider low-tech because they involved nothing more than a scanner, Photoshop and a color printer.
Take a look at this picture.
Now compare the original with the one below that has been altered to clear the nutrition facts.
Using any photo editor a “cheat sheet” can be easily created on a pack of gum. All the student has to do is sneak the gum into the test. Most teachers would not think to check something as innocent as a pack of gum.
I found both of the above images on the web by search for “carefree gum cheating” on Google. The page I found had all the instructions. If you prefer to learn you cheating via multimedia, here is a YouTube video that does something similar using a Coke bottle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRgM9-n7K5E
If you are giving an exam, you can avoid problems created by these cheating techniques if you ask your questions in the right way. Questions that are more conceptual in nature aren’t as easily answered by a short list of definitions, but having a list of formulas can give someone a real advantage on most math or physics tests.
I do not a big concern for cheats like these. All my exams are open book with a time limit. I am looking out for more sophisticated chicanery. All my students have USB drives. One student could easily copy a file onto one of these devices and pass it to another student who could copy it into a new project.
One or two times each year I have a student turn in the wrong file during a test. Normally the file is the “starting document” with the instructions for the final project. The student saves the initial file to a USB drive, works on the test and then saves a new file to the USB drive. When it comes time to submit the completed work, the initial file is uploaded. Of course I don’t know it’s the wrong file until I grade the projects. By that time, the student has had time to tweak the final project, if the intent was to cheat.
My solution to this problem is simple. If I give a student a test and the student gives that test back to me without making any modifications, it is the same as turning in test a without adding any answers. It’s a zero.
I am waiting for a student to take cheating to the highest level. This would involve some sort of remote control of the lab computer. During the test, the student could permit an outside “paid expert” to take control of the lab computer and complete the test. All the student would have to do is “look” like he is typing and moving the mouse.
Fortunately the jump from Coke bottles to expert remote control isn’t easy, but some day it will be.
Domain name by any other name
There was a time when the web wasn’t the only game in town. There were just as many Gopher, FTP and News (NNTP) sites as there were web sites. To distinguish web pages from other technologies, the familiar “www” was added as a prefix to the domain names.
Then everything got a web page. There were so many web pages that every other protocol virtually disappeared. Today getting on the Internet usually means getting on the web. I have heard many people ask, “do we have web access”, instead of asking if we have “Internet” access.
It also means that most people by default start every web address with “www” even though we don’t necessarily have to. Today I told someone about my del.icio.us links and he typed
before I could stop him.
I am a big fan of shortcuts and typing
instead of
is a savings of four keystrokes. More importantly,
will take you to UF’s web based email while
will take you nowhere.
Here is my point. We should stop using “www” as much as possible. The owner of a domain name decides what “names” are matched to the servers. It has become normal for domain name owners to map both the “www” prefix and the “no prefix at all” URLs to the web server. It is all set up in the site’s DNS.
DNS is that magical system that takes the names we humans can remember and associates them with the numbers that computers use. Think of DNS as a phonebook for Internet. It looks up the names and dials the numbers for us so that we don’t have to remember all those numbers… just the names of the people we want to call.
Just like the phone system, several different names can be connected to one phone number. You may have your name as well as your spouse’s name in the phone book. If you have a home business, that name might be “mapped” to the same phone number.
I have started to drop the “www” on as many references to URLs as possible. It will take some time, but eventually we will all stop typing “www” as the default prefix to any web address we put into our browsers. I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
Use Common Sense
The Christian Science Monitor has an article about teachers striking back against student online activities. Cyberbullying has received a lot of attention recently, but most of it has focused on student-student incidents. Not only are students attacking each other, many are creating online content about school teachers and administrators.
Some of the victims have fought back in court with law suites. What may have started out as a joke by a creative student can have the potential of costing that student’s family a lot of money.
Here’s the bottom line. Before you publish it, consider how long it’s going to be out there. Sites like the Way Back Machine can keep a permanent record of your “joke” for all your future friends, employers and children to see.
Use some common sense before you press the “publish” button.