Learning Strategies

As of today, this blog has moved to blog.larrydavidson.com. See you there!

Labels: books, Dorchester, food, life, linguistics, math, model railroads, movies, teaching and learning, technology, travel, Weston

I just discovered a cool poster-creating applet called Wordle. In their own words:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

You can create an image from text that you type in, or from a URL of a blog with an RSS feed. In the latter case, the applet uses all the text it finds at that URL, excluding some common English words (or whatever other language you might choose).

I rather like the result I got by giving them the URL of this blog:

Labels: life, technology

One of my students asked me why his textbooks aren’t available for Kindle. Currently the typical Weston student’s backpack weighs 42 pounds*; Kindle weighs only ten ounces! Aside from everything else that’s available for it, imagine replacing your math book, your English book, your science book, your history book, and your Latin book (not to mention the extra book for the student taking two math courses or two sciences or two languages...) with a single light-weight device. It would be much cheaper for the publishers, too.

So why hasn’t anyone jumped on this opportunity? Save our students’ backs!
________
*Actually, I made this figure up. But the reality is probably all too close to that.

Labels: teaching and learning, technology, Weston

Having been an enthusiastic iPhone user for the past four months, I’m not surprised that many of my students want to play games on it (at least those students who don’t have iPhones themselves; this is Weston, after all). That’s a good excuse for installing games, isn’t it? Or do I just want to play them myself?

Maybe so, but at least the recommendations still came from the students.

Here’s what I have, in alphabetical order:

• First is Dactyl, a game of hand-eye coordination. Not unexpectedly, I’m terrible at Dactyl and can’t possibly compete with my freshmen and sophomores on the math team.
• Then comes Enigmo, which I haven’t learned yet, so I have no opinion on it. But my students tell me that it involves physics and problem solving, so it must be good.
• Then we have Labyrinth Lite, an astonishingly faithful reproduction of the classic wooden labyrinth game. Tilting the iPhone backward and forward in two directions exactly mimics the physical game, even to the point of accurately reproducing the momentum and sounds of the real-life steel ball.
• The silliest game that used to be on my iPhone is Scoops. Scoops of ice cream fall from the sky, and you move your cone left and right in order to catch the scoops while you avoid onions. Onions? Yes, onions. I’ve removed Scoops, even though a certain sophomore disapproves of my doing so.
• Then there’s Tetris, though I’m currently using the unauthorized knock-off called Tris, which I installed shortly before it got kicked off the Apple Store. Maybe I’ll get the real thing, as Tris rotates the tetrominoes counterclockwise rather than clockwise as nature intended.
• Finally we have my current favorite, Trace. It’s hard to describe this one, but it’s addictive and not time-pressured, so try it yourself!

Of course I also play Sudoku a lot, but that’s really a puzzle, not a game.

What’s next? Scrabble, perhaps? Or SimCity? Is the screen big enough for either of them?

Labels: teaching and learning, technology

I recently installed an unusual application on my iPhone: Ocarina. This program turns your iPhone into a four-hole ocarina, with the holes outlined on the iPhone’s touch-sensitive screen. But the really cool thing is that you actually blow into your iPhone to simulate blowing into the ocarina! Try it: it really works!

Many of my students agree that this is really cool, although some adults think that it’s a waste of time. I don’t really understand their point of view, since they are likely to spend their time on useless things like watching football games, but anyway....

The reason that I had to demo this product for my precalculus class is that we have just finished studying the use of trigonometric and exponential functions to model musical sounds, and one of the issues that arose is what the dependent variable represents when graphing an oscilloscopic rendering of a tone. Sure, if Middle C is 262 Hz, we notice that the frequency is 262 cycles per second since the period of the independent variable is 1/262 of a second. But what does the y-axis represent? We say pressure, and we may measure it in pascals or mV, but what does this have to do with the loudness of a sign? The direct analog construction of the iPhone ocarina application — with no intermediate abstractions of digital software — provides a clear understanding of this phenomenon, since the user’s breath blowing into the iPhone moves the membrane of the microphone, illustrating pressure in a literal way.

Labels: math, teaching and learning, technology

The Josephson Institute Study of the Ethics of American Youth has been widely reported on such widely varied outlets as National Public Radio, Fox News, and Yahoo News. They report “a troubling picture of our future politicians and parents, cops and corporate executives, and journalists and generals.”

I do agree that their picture is troubling, but something about their analysis makes me uneasy. First let’s look at their results:

More than one in three boys (35 percent) and one-fourth of the girls (26 percent)...admitted stealing from a store within the past year.

...

A substantial majority (64 percent) cheated on a test during the past year (38 percent did so two or more times).

...

As bad as these numbers are, it appears they understate the level of dishonesty exhibited by America’s youth. More than one in four (26 percent) confessed they lied on at least one or two questions on the survey. Experts agree that dishonesty on surveys usually is an attempt to conceal misconduct.

The justification, of course, is that “everyone else does it.” That may explain the cognitive dissonance:

Despite these high levels of dishonesty, the respondents have a high self-image when it comes to ethics. A whopping 93 percent said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character and 77 percent said that when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.

So, how do we interpret all of this? As a teacher of teens, I have to be troubled by these results. (I’m ignoring the self-reported accounts of using the Internet to cheat, as that’s a remarkably gray area.) But the report doesn’t quite ring true, despite the assurance that “These statistics have been verified by the Department Chair, Decision Sciences & Marketing, Graziadio School of Business & Management, Pepperdine University.” Maybe I’m in an atypical situation, but I just can’t believe that over half of my students have cheated on a test during the past year. I don’t want to be flippant, but maybe it depends on what the definition of “cheat” is. Maybe I’m just unobservant, but I don’t see students using notes on a no-notes section of a test, and I don’t see them texting on their cell phones, and it’s hard for me to figure out other ways in which they might be cheating. I do hear of the occasional student in other classes who texts during a test or sneaks in notes, but I just don’t see it, and it seems rare and exceptional. I guess I have to look into this matter further.

Labels: teaching and learning, technology, Weston

What’s a meme? Well, those of us who have spent too many years on the Internet (from its inception in 1969, actually, when it was called the ARPAnet) and those of us who have read The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, know what a meme is. Although the Wikipedia article on memes is far too long and leaves a lot to be desired, it definitely includes the correct definition:

A meme...comprises any idea or behavior that can pass from one person to another by learning or imitation. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, gestures, practices, fashions, habits, songs, and dances. Memes propagate themselves and can move through the cultural sociosphere in a manner similar to the contagious behavior of a virus.

That’s clear enough, so why is the word used incorrectly these days by so many people, some of whom should definitely know better but most of whom have never learned what a meme really is? Many writers seem to think that a meme is an informal quiz or questionnaire that is passed around by email or by the Web, often of the “you are a _____” variety. Now you can see both the similarities and the differences here: Do they propagate themselves, or do users intentionally transmit them? Are they cultural ideas and behaviors, or are they questionnaires? The word is definitely losing most of its import these days!

As a teacher, I suppose I’d better cite some sources for this claim. I’m sure that some of my colleagues would be aghast that I cited Wikipedia as my source for the correct use of a word, but so be it. As for the current incorrect use, I am reluctant to cite either email messages or websites of friends — for obvious reasons — but I can probably find similar use by strangers without much effort. Let’s see... most of the initial hits from a Google search actually lead to the correct usage (much to my surprise), but I’m sure I can also find the usage I object to... OK, here are a few:

• from Melissa somebody or other
• from one ExileJedi
• from VirusHead (??)

That’s enough. You get the idea. What’s up here?

Labels: linguistics, technology

By this point I’ve taught simplified versions of the RSA algorithm to ten different cohorts of teens: four years’ worth of Honors Algebra II students at Weston High School, juniors for four summers at Crimson Summer Academy, and two years’ worth of college-prep Algebra II students at Weston. Tweaking the details as I’ve gone along, and benefitting from changes in technology, I’ve learned a lot from these experiences.

There are several types of benefits for the students. Some benefits are conceptual, involving understanding ideas about public-key cryptography, ranging from technical questions like how a cryptosystem can use a public key, why that’s necessary, and why it’s secure, to public-interest issues like whether we can trust so-called “secure” financial transactions on the Internet. I could have predicted these benefits; the unit was designed to try to achieve them, after all. And I could have predicted the success of some of the more concrete mathematical benefits as well, since RSA involves exponentiation, prime numbers, modular arithmetic, factoring, representation of characters as integers, and other operations with numbers. But a third type of benefit is more of a surprise: because the technical details are complicated, and even a single mistake can doom the effort to failure, most of my students have been doggedly persistent in paying attention to details and getting them right. Too often we can fall into the trap parodied by Tom Lehrer: “The important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer.” We give so much partial credit that a student can get a B without ever producing a correct result. Part of the way that my colleagues and I have avoided this trap with RSA is that our sequence of activities and assignments concludes with a two-way exchange of messages: each student sends me a message using my public key, and I reply with a message using the student’s public key. This gives everyone practice in figuring out their private and public keys, enciphering, and deciphering. But fewer than half the kids get it right the first time, since there are so many opportunities to make mistakes. Unlike the usual math problem, they can’t settle for having a couple of points taken off; the message simply won’t work. So they try over and over again — sometimes four or five times — in order to get it right. If they don’t, I can’t read their message, or they can’t read mine.

If you’re interested in checking out how I’ve simplified RSA so it can be studied at the level of Algebra II, take a look at my worksheets, starting at RSA Phase One. (If you keep incrementing the “1” in that URL, you’ll find the next three worksheets at the expected URLs.)

Labels: math, teaching and learning, technology

No, this isn’t another one of those essays about the usefulness of technology in teaching math. This is a response to a fascinating post in Heather’s Comparative Childhood blog, in response to a newsletter from her daughter’s middle school. Here’s an excerpt from the newsletter:

Cell Phones, I-Pods, MP3 players, any other electronic devices are not permitted for student use at any point during the school day. If these items are seen or heard during school hours, they will be confiscated and a parent will have to pick up the device from your child’s house office.

This seems pretty reasonable, especially since the careful wording doesn’t prohibit possession of such devices, merely their use or visibility during the school day. And, of course, it is a middle school.

Heather’s post includes the following observations:

Is there ever a circumstance in which the presence and use of an iPod (or cell phone or MP3 player or digital camera or gameboy or fill-in-your-electronic-device-of-choice-here) is justifiable in a school setting? I guess I’m taking the perspective of the teacher on this one. There is nothing more annoying than someone’s cell phone going off during a lecture. And there is nothing more rampant in university settings than “creative” new ways to cheat during examinations. I can’t believe that the use of electronics for cheating begins at the college level.

My understanding on the ban of cell phones in public schools was that it was originally put in place to prevent drug deals going down on the school premises. But now cell phones could be used for anything from covertly cheating by sending text messages to voyeuristic photography in the ladies room to remotely setting off bombs. I won’t waste my space here, but we need only use of imagination to think of the ills of other electronics in the school settings. Nintendo DS’s create their own network within a local range.

These are eminently reasonable comments, but I need to take a different point of view, even though Heather is trying to take the perspective of the teacher. Of course she’s absolutely right that it is annoying and disruptive for a cell phone to ring during class, and she is also absolutely right that they need to be prohibited during tests, as they can be used for cheating (as Weston students know all too well). But there are also too many valuable uses of these electronic devices for them to be banned entirely in school — at least in high school, and I suspect in middle school as well. At Weston High School we ban cell phone use (or even visibility) in the classroom, but not in the cafeteria or outdoor areas; iPod use is left to the discretion of the teacher. Cell phones are a valuable way for students and parents to get in touch with each other, so students should be allowed to use them outside of the classrooom. And MP3 players may help many kids concentrate in noisy situations or just when taking a test; while I certainly don’t allow kids to shut out the world during a class discussion or lecture, I think it can be valuable to do so when trying to concentrate on individual work. I admit that there’s a small chance that a student may use an iPod for cheating, but that’s a lot harder than texting on a cell phone, which is currently the preferred method among high-school students and Boston firefighters. Of course a variant of the method used by the firefighters would be very difficult to prevent in school settings:

...a group of Boston firefighters took turns going into a men’s room at the Quincy middle school and sent answers via text message on their cellphones to colleagues in the testing room.

We can easily prevent this precise method of cheating in school by allowing only one student at a time to go to the bathroom and by banning cell phone use in the classroom during the test, but how do we prevent texting between a student who goes to the bathroom during the test and a classmate who has already taken the test and is currently in the cafeteria during a free period? Temporarily confiscating cell phones at the beginning of the test is the method preferred by some teachers. That works well...except for kids who have a second cell phone hidden away.

And while I’m looking at Heather’s blog, let me recommend several of her recent posts, especially the ones entitled “Wow” and “What would Jesus do, indeed”.

Labels: teaching and learning, technology, Weston

I have just finished reading Double Vision, by Randall Ingermanson. This science fiction thriller has a great concept, but the execution is disappointing. On the plus side, the novel speaks effectively to those of us who have worked in the computer industry, especially if we have any interest in computer science and physics. Knowing something about RSA and factoring certainly helps, but it isn’t necessary. Knowing something about quantum computing might also help — but since I know almost nothing about that field, how could I be sure? Anyway, the idea behind the book is fascinating, and the fact that the protagonist is a computer programmer with Asperger’s makes it fit into my accidental recent theme of Asperger’s Syndrome. However, there’s also the minus side: implausible characterization, poor writing (à la Dan Brown), unbelievable plot, and excessive Christianity. Worse yet, there’s a subsubplot concerning Jews for Jesus, and if anyone can explain to me how that organization is distinct from Christians, please let me know.

Labels: books, math, teaching and learning, technology

In one of those typical synchronicities, two of my students have just asked me how they can create their own blogs — a Weston sophomore yesterday, and a Saturday Course fifth-grader today. The Weston student suggested that I should post the answer in my blog, so here it is, short and sweet:

1. Go to www.blogger.com.


2. Follow the 3 easy steps displayed on that page.

That was easy^®, as they say at Staples.

Labels: teaching and learning, technology

Another of the great ones is gone. Scientist, science fiction writer, and visionary Arthur C. Clarke died the day before yesterday at age 90. He is best known for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which the eternally rewatchable movie of the same name was based (though they were written simultaneously!). But he made so many more contributions than that. The Wikipedia article on him provides a fairly decent summary, including links to various obituaries. I particularly recommend the article about him by fellow writer David Brin, in the Daily Kos of all places. The NPR story on yesterday’s Morning Edition was an effective four-minute vignette.

I particularly remember Clarke’s observation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” as well as his agreement with the late, lamented Isaac Asimov that each would refer to himself as “the world’s second best science fiction writer.” As Asimov wrote in his autobiography:

Arthur Charles Clarke was born toward the end of 1917 in Great Britain. He is another science fiction writer who has been thoroughly educated in science and he did extremely well in physics and mathematics.

He and I are now widely known as the Big Two of science fiction. Until early 1988, as I’ve said, people spoke of the Big Three, but then Arthur fashioned a little human figurine of wax and with a long pin.

At least, he has told me this. Perhaps he’s trying to warn me. I have made it quite plain to him, however, that if he were to find himself the Big One, he would be very lonely. At the thought of that, he was affected to the point of tears, so I think I’m safe.

I’m very fond of Arthur, and have been for forty years. We came to an agreement many years ago in a taxi which, at the time, was moving south on Park Avenue, so it is called the Treaty of Park Avenue. By it, I have agreed to maintain, on questioning, that Arthur is the best science fiction writer in the world, though I am also allowed to say, if questioned assiduously, that I am breathing down his neck as we run. In return, Arthur has agreed to insist, forever, that I am the best science writer in the world. He must say it, whether he believes it or not.

I don’t know if he gets credited for my stuff, but I am frequently blamed for his. People have a tendency to confuse us because we both write cerebral stories in which scientific ideas are more important than action.

Both Clarke and Asimov were science-based writers of science fiction; neither was a prose stylist, but both of them stuck to a transparent style that let the content of their writing shine through with great clarity.

Labels: books, teaching and learning, technology

Yesterday afternoon we had a half-day workshop on Maple, a computer algebra system. At least that’s how we think of it, but here’s the description on their website:

Maple is the leading all purpose mathematics software tool. Maple provides an advanced, high performance mathematical computation engine with fully integrated numerics & symbolics, all accessible from a WYSIWYG technical document environment. Live math is expressed in its natural 2D typeset notation, linked to state-of-the-art graphics and animations with full document editing and presentation control.

Users can perform everything from instant “in document” calculations to highly complex mixed symbolic and numeric programming involving millions of terms, at any precision desired. Maple’s intelligent technical document environment addresses the full spectrum of needs and requirements from high school students to advanced commercial research.

The question, of course, is how we can use this software productively in the context of high-school math courses. We looked at several possibilities yesterday, ranging from expansion of powers of trinomials to 3-D graphing. For instance, suppose we want to calculate the fifth power of a trinomial. If we simply type the appropriate expression, it gets echoed back:

But if we ask Maple to expand it, it does so:

And then suppose we want to solve or plot a system of three equations in three unknowns. Maple will do both:

This is just a beginning. We don’t know yet how we’ll use it, but it surely promises some major expansions of what we can do in high-school math.

Labels: math, teaching and learning, technology, Weston

According to the badge that I’ve pasted into the right sidebar, this blog requires a high-school reading level. I was glad to see that it passed that test, even though only a small part of my audience actually consists of high-school students, and many of those are surely reading at the college level. But a large number of adults read at or below the high-school level, and everybody finds it easier to read pieces that are written at a lower reading level.

After I wrote that paragraph, I wondered what the statistics are. In particular, what is the reading level of the average American adult? It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to get a valid answer. There is plenty of material giving figures (though inconsistent ones) about the shockingly large number of American adults who read at the third-grade level or below, who are unable to read a poison label, etc. In particular, Jonathan Kozol provides a wealth of material about functional illiteracy and its connections with race and class.

Labels: teaching and learning, technology

According to Blogger, this is my 500^th post! It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve written 500 of these short (and sometimes not-so-short) essays. One of my Weston students asked in class why anyone would bother keeping a blog, and I didn’t have time to answer him right then; I’d better get around to doing so real soon now. There must be something that drives me to write so much.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but the truth is that I often feel impelled to share my thoughts with others, and blogging is a good way to do so. It’s not the main reason I became a teacher — that’s more a matter of my interest in seeing people learn and helping them do so — but it’s surely a secondary reason, both for me and for many other teachers. For my entire teaching career I have wanted people to become better thinkers and better problem-solvers, so I want to help lead them in what I see as the right directions. Those people might be my students (in Weston, at The Saturday Course, at the Crimson Summer Academy), or they might be my colleagues or the general public. Blogging is just one of the ways I can reach them. I’m pleased to have kept it up for 500 posts, and I’m looking forward to 500 more.

Labels: life, technology, Weston

Mark Bernstein has an observation and a question:

I no longer trust my email. If you send me mail, I will probably receive it, but I’m far from certain that it won’t be lost in the vast deluge of spam.

Meanwhile, Eudora is obviously past its sell-by date; my spam bucket overflows every month, and apparently Eudora crashes when it has more than 32,768 messages in a mailbox. With a mere thousand spam messages a day, that’s suddenly a very real possibility.

Do grownups rely on mail.app? Is there another option?

I definitely rely on mail.app, and mail almost never gets “lost in the vast deluge of spam.” Here’s my setup:

• Most spam gets caught by spamassassin on the server, which sends it on to me appropriately marked.


• I then have a mail.app Rule that puts such messages into my SPAM mailbox without ever appearing in my Inbox.


• Spam that gets through the spamassassin filter unscathed might then be caught by mail.app’s Junk Mail filter. In that case it gets automagically routed to my Junk mailbox by another mail.app Rule.


• A tiny amount of spam manages to evade both filters. I manually mark it as Junk.


• I have separate Rules that delete all mail over a week old from both the SPAM and Junk mailboxes, so that I have a chance to look them over if I wish. I have almost never had any false positives, but they do occur every once in a while.

Data from a single day (yesterday):

Spam messages caught by spamassassin on server	212
Spam messages caught by mail.app’s Junk Mail filter	14
Spam messages that avoided both filters	2
False positives	0
Legitimate messages	52

Labels: technology

A reader of both this blog and Adam Gaffin’s Universal Hub asked why I’ve turned off comments in my blog. Naturally he had to ask the question on Universal Hub. I replied as follows:

I have comments turned off because they tend to generate flame wars and spam. Adam’s blog is meant for general discussion, but as a public-school teacher I can’t be in that position. You can imagine what would happen if somebody posted something inappropriate and it appeared on my blog (even though I wasn’t the author of the comment). No schoolteacher can allow his or her blog to become a public forum.

Coincidentally, I received an interesting rant by email in response to my post from yesterday concerning Huckabee’s so-called Fair Tax. My point had simply been that I wanted to illustrate one of the widespread errors that adults make in applying middle-school math, but it engendered a long rant from one of Mike Gravel’s campaign directors. [How weird is that? Politics makes strange bedfellows, including the two Mikes.] He had a point, at least a political and economic point, but it had little to do with the math, which, as he himself pointed out, he apparently understood. My point was simply that an n% tax is a standard concept from a mathematical standpoint, even if there might be motivation for redefining it for political reasons. While this writer’s rant wouldn’t have been unacceptable on the “public school teacher” grounds that I cited above, I still can’t open my blog to unmoderated comments, and I don’t have time to moderate.

Labels: teaching and learning, technology

This is a follow-up to my post of December 26. There are two separate and distinct issues here:

1. Has there been a decline in ethical attitudes and behavior among students in recent years?
2. Are some lines that used to be bright now in fact just shades of gray?

Let’s take them one at a time. First, I suspect that every generation believes that there has been a decline in ethical attitudes and behavior. But unfortunately the usual citations are highly questionable. For example, consider the following (attributed to Socrates via Plato):

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

What a great example! But apparently it doesn’t actually come from Plato, even though it has been floating around the Internet for years. Oh, well.

Despite quotations that might be spurious, it is hard to believe that there has been a recent decline. We usually view the past through rosy glasses. I just wish there were more actual evidence.

The second issue is probably more telling. Bright lines are easy when cheating is difficult. They become gray when cheating is easy. Not very many students are likely to go to the trouble of writing illegal notes on the back of a label affixed to a water bottle, though that kind of cheating is not unheard-of. But downloading a verboten copy of a song or a video is all too easy. As is making photocopies of copyrighted text. (Do you know any teachers who have done that?) Ease of cheating doesn’t make an act any more or less unethical, but it certainly makes it more likely. And the lines have become grayer. What is “fair use”? Can I photocopy some material for a class when I don’t have time to get permission? Can I do so when I am unlikely to get permission? What if it’s a single paragraph? What if it’s a whole chapter? What if the book is out-of-print? What if a student doesn’t cite a source for “commonly known” facts? What if a teacher copies a problem? What if s/he copies a problem and makes a small change? The lines aren’t so bright now that we have the technology to copy material off the Internet and to make photocopies of printed matter. Let him who is without sin...

Labels: life, teaching and learning, technology, Weston

So I’m at Microcenter on Wednesday to take advantage of their post-Christmas sale, and I walk in clutching their flyer with the descriptions of two external hard drives highlighted. These are advertised as being for both PCs and Macs, so I knew that I would have to go to the PC section, since the Mac section is for Mac-only stuff. (I guess it’s the reverse of Barack Obama, who is always identified as a black man with one white parent, not as a white man with one black parent. But I digress — we’ll save the subject of defaults for another day.) I approach a random salesman in the PC section, point to the two descriptions, and ask where I can find the drives.

“The Seagate is over here,” he replies, and takes me to one corner; “and the Maxtor is over here” halfway across the room. These are both 320GB drives, both on sale for $89.95, so I start to read the specs more closely. “If you’re going to use this with Leopard for Time Machine,” adds the salesman, “you should definitely pick the Maxtor.”

The question, of course, is why a salesman in the PC section of a predominantly PC-oriented store would make this assumption — which in fact was correct — rather than the default assumption in the case of a drive that works with both operating systems. Do I just look like a Mac user?

Then, as I’m waiting in line (or “on line” as I grew up saying, but now that means something else), a different salesman from way over the other end of the store in Tech Support land comes running up to me and tries to get my attention. “What did I do wrong?” is all I could think. Is there something wrong with my purchase? But no, he just wants to ask where I got such a cool jacket!

This jacket does indeed get me attention everywhere I go. And maybe it explains why I look like a Mac user.

Labels: life, technology

David Pogue has written a fascinating article about cheating and intellectual property — or imaginary property, as some call it. Pogue is a technology writer, but his article is aptly entitled “The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality.” Nevertheless, technology has a lot of impact on the moral issues he discusses, such as whether it’s all right to download a movie for which you haven’t paid.

Pogue reluctantly acknowledges that the issues aren’t as clear-cut as he had once thought:

Readers fired back with an amazingly intelligent array of counterexamples: situations where duplicating a CD or DVD may be illegal, but isn’t necessarily wrong. They led me down a garden path of exceptions, proving that what seemed so black-and-white to me is a spectrum of grays.

As a result, he concocted a whole spectrum of cases, ranging from borrowing a CD from the library — Hands up if you think that’s wrong! What? Nobody? — to making a personal backup copy of a disc that you’ve bought all the way to the aforementioned illegal download — Hands up if you think that one’s wrong.

I would expect to see a lot of hands this time. So did Pogue, who generally sees more and more hands raised as his cases get more and more questionable. But, he reports, a recent audience of 500 college students produced only two who agreed that it was wrong to make an illegal download of a copyrighted movie for which they hadn’t paid! What’s up with that? Pogue assumes that it’s a generational divide, and maybe he’s right. Probably the issue extends far beyond intellectual property to other forms of cheating. A reader named Bill Shepherd posted an interesting comment on Pogue’s article:

It’s not just music and movies. I used to teach a college course. One day I stepped out of the room while they were taking a test. Later in the day I received a couple of reports from disgruntled students, saying that as soon as I left, a number of people pulled out cheat sheets and opened textbooks in broad daylight. You might think the reporters were showing moral backbone, but it turned out that most of them were more concerned that they would be penalized by the cheating of others, not that the others were cheating per se.

The course? Ethics.

This anecdote is no surprise to me. It’s why I no longer give take-home tests. In fact, I am astonished that there are any universities left that still give unproctored exams, though there clearly are some — like Princeton, where “students trust each other enough to proctor their own exams.” And of course there was the famous 2001 cheating scandal at the University of Virginia, which has had an honor code even longer than Princeton: “Under trees and on benches, on a beautiful spring day, lone figures scrawled their answers in blue books, with teachers trusting that students would not peek into textbooks, steal solutions from the Internet or seek help from friends,” according to a New York Times article.

So, what does all this have to do with technology? The common answer, which I suspect is correct, is that technology has made it so much easier to cheat that many more people do it. And then they think it’s OK. Sure, there’s no logical connection that would say it’s more ethical because it’s easier, but that’s probably the reality. The most recent cheating episode at Weston High School illustrates the point: seniors taking a proctored test surreptitiously used their cell phones to text their friends (who were in the cafeteria or elsewhere) and get help on specific questions. Teenagers all seem to be able to touch-type on their phones, so they can appear to be looking at their own test papers, and a mere glance at the phone later on would be enough to read the answer. Surely some of these students thought their actions were wrong, but just as surely most of them didn’t think so, and it was merely the technological ease that let them cheat; old-fashioned methods would be either too cumbersome or too liable to be caught. Strict enforcement of the ban on cell phones in classrooms is the current solution, but that’s not going to change hearts and minds.

More on this issue later on...

Labels: life, teaching and learning, technology, Weston