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The Web is going social. And now it seems that plagiarism might be heading that way, too.

A new study found that social and user-generated Web sites are the most popular sources for student copying. Academic sites come in second, while paper mills and cheat sites are third.

A report on the findings was released today by iParadigms, creator of Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service that takes uploaded student papers and checks them against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal content. For its study, the company analyzed 40 million papers submitted by high school and college students over a 10-month period.

“It shows that plagiarism in sourcing work is going the way that everything else in the world is going,” says Chris Harrick, vice president of marketing at Turnitin. “People are relying more on their peers than on experts.”

But the findings come with a big caveat: Turnitin detects “matched content,” not necessarily plagiarism. In other words, the software will flag material from a paper mill, but it will also flag legitimate stuff that is properly cited and attributed. The company leaves it…

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Wired Campus

One of the most popular sessions every year at the SIGCSE Symposium is “Nifty Assignments.”  Faculty choose their coolest assignments and package them up with directions and examples.  These are submitted to Stanford lecturer Nick Parlante, who selects the best and maintains his carefully curated Nifty website.  Nobody wants to be scheduled opposite the Nifty session because all other sessions are nearly empty — the Nifty room is always SRO.

We did submit some Media Computation assignments early on, but they were rejected.  Criteria for a good Nifty assignment include that it be easily taught by others, that the technologies and pedagogies used were widespread, and that the assignment could be picked up by just about anybody.  The argument was that MediaComp just wasn’t that common back then.

That was then.  This year, Nick Parlante the Curator selected a Media Computation assignment submitted by Nick Parlante the Lecturer!  There’s another Nifty Assignment this year, from David…

Computing Education Blog

Interesting piece by Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.  Read all the way to the bottom where he points out that just giving workers degrees won’t restore middle class society.  Krugman’s argument makes sense, but he makes the same mistake that most education administrators make.  The real advantage to the individual of computing is not in using computers.  That doesn’t require any particular education, as Krugman points out.

Krugman misses that the economic advantage goes to those who know how to create with computing. Those who can program (which does require education) have (a) an advantage which enables innovation and (b) the ability to marshal the resources of what used to take many human laborers, thus increasing productivity.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that…

Computing Education Blog

Instructure, a course-management software company that recently won a large contract in Utah, announced on Tuesday that it would make most of its software platform available for free under an open-source license.

Instructure is one of a wave of new entrants into an increasingly competitive market for learning-management software in higher education. The company’s year-old Canvas platform allows instructors and students to manage course materials, grades, and discussions online.

In offering its basic software for free, the company could offer new competition for Moodle and Sakai, the two main existing open-source platforms. Like commercial arms of those platforms, Instructure intends to make money from colleges by supporting, hosting, and extending its software.

In December, the company won a bid to provide software to a collection of Utah colleges that serve roughly 110,000 students, provoking a lawsuit from a competitor that lost that bid, Desire2Learn. The suit was quickly…

Wired Campus

A new facility at the University of California at Davis pairs winemaking with Wi-Fi to make the process more precise.

Roger B. Boulton, a professor of enology at the university, says even the best winemakers frequently discard many batches of wine that haven’t developed properly.

The technology in the 152 fermenting vats at the new Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science is an attempt to address that.

Fermentation is the process by which grape juice and sometimes skin is combined with yeast and other ingredients to make wine. At the institute, custom-built probes embedded with microchips measure the sugar density and temperature of fermenting wines every 15 minutes.

The readings are wirelessly transferred to a server at the facility and then displayed on a large monitor. Soon, the measurements will be viewable on the Web and via smartphones, he says. Smartphone users will even be able to scan bar codes on the sides of individual vats to follow their progress.

The…

Wired Campus

Chem4Word, a free, open-source plug-in that lets authors draw intricate chemical structures—and store information about molecules—within their Word documents, has been released by Microsoft Research (the company’s unit that collaborates with universities), the University of Cambridge, and the Outercurve Foundation.

Wired Campus