Kids are bringing all kinds of technology into schools these days. First it was cell phones and now iPods. Is it any surprise they will quickly find novel ways to use it to...cheat? What should we do, ban or embrace these new technologies?
School Construction News reports on the iPod Cheating phenomena that is apparently "sweeping the nation". SCN reports that Mountain View High School in Meridian, Idaho has banned the use of
digital music players among students to curb cheating on exams. Students were recording answers and hiding them as song-lyric text files.
I am glad to find that a few institutions have taken a different stance with regard to the potential use of MP3 players for cheating. North Carolina 's Duke University actively promotes the use of digital music devices and began providing iPods to students several years ago in order to evaluate how the devices might facilitate or enhance learning in courses as diverse as music, sociology and engineering, officials say. Guess what? the incidence of cheating among the Duke student body has declined during the past decade, officials say.
This post captures my interest - it makes me ask "what is cheating?" in the age of new media.
Lev Manovich suggests in his The Language of New Media that we will rethink our notions of stealing, plagiarising, and authorship, in the context of the many forms of collaboration available through ICT (Manovich 2001 p127)). Notions of individual authorship change when there is collaboration between author and software, including remixing, mashups, sampling, and user interactions with music, video, images and open source software.
Posted by: Artichoke | 2007.06.27 at 01:24