Archive for March, 2008

Last year a group of students decided to fight back against the plagiarism tool being used by their school.  Before submitting an assignment to Turnitin, one of the students submitted all the legal documents to register the original paper as a copyrighted work.

Turnitin is a service that scrutinizes papers to determine if any part of the work has been plagiarized.  Turnitin does this by comparing all submitted papers with what is on the Internet in addition to all other documents submitted (about 100,000 per day) by subscribers to the service.

The argument by the students was that Turnitin was infringing on the copyright holder’s exclusive rights and also making money in the process.  To prove the point, the students jumped through all the hoops required to register a paper with the US copyright office and then filed a suite against Turnitin for copyright infringement.

It didn’t work.  Judge Claude M. Hilton has thrown the case out in a US District Court in Virginia.

Hilton found that iParadigm’s use of the students’ essays was transformative and valuable. In contrast, student essays in their normal form were viewed as having no market, and their reuse by turnitin did not in any way diminish the students’ “incentive for creativity”—namely, their grades.

Until a teenager writes a best seller, the market for high school creative writing assignments isn’t likely to expand.

Here is something most teenagers don’t know.  Stealing a CD from Wal-Mart isn’t nearly as bad (based on the magnitude of the fine) as downloading the same CD using an illegal P2P networking.  See chart below.

If the height of the “steal” bar is twelve inches, the “download” bar is as tall as the Empire State building.  The exact difference will depend on where you live.  The “steal” bar could be 1/4 as tall (three inches) in your state.

I have discussed the one major problem that I have had with Microsoft Vista.  For no apparent reason, my ability to right-click randomly stops working.  The problem continues until I close Internet Explorer.  Often closing it doesn’t work and I have to end the IE process from the Task Manager.

In the last week this problem has seemed to happen more each day.  On Monday I had to kill IE more than ten times.  I can live with once or twice a day, but not multiple times each hour.

I was anxious to download SP1 when it became available yesterday.  It took an hour to install, but I think it fixed my right-click problem.  So far (knock on wood) I haven’t had to restart IE one time.

I don’t know if IE was actually upgraded as part of the service pack.  I didn’t look before the upgrade, but now I have version 7.0.6001.1888CO.  I will check my other machine running Vista sans-SP1 to see if the version is different.

Suddenly I don’t like XP as much.

If your web site uses a content management system, you probably have a built-in search tool that can find anything on your site. If you created your site using straight HTML, making the sight searchable isn’t as easy.  Now you can create your own site search engine using the power of Google.

http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

Search using the box above and you will see only links from my blog. Now use the search engine below. It will give search results from (all HTML) site on the UF server.

This could be a useful tool for teachers. A custom search can be created that searches an assortment of pre-approved sites. If you would like your students to find information about a curricular topic, a custom search can be created that is strictly limited to the sites that you have specified in your custom Google search.

I don’t know why I haven’t used this free resource before.  Today I was helping my wife with a presentation she is giving to a group of high school students that are thinking of becoming teachers.  She showed me the URL for ODE’s teacher licensure information.

http://www.ode.state.oh.us/GD/Templates/Pages/ODE/ODEPrimary.aspx?Page=2&TopicID=1222&TopicRelationID=1283

Can you believe that?  ODE re-did their web site last year and now most of their URLs are more than 80 characters.  For comparison, look at these nice short licensure URLs:

Arizona - http://www.ade.state.az.us/certification
Florida - http://www.fldoe.org/edcert
Indiana - http://www.doe.state.in.us/dps

Unfortunately we are stuck with that huge ODE link here in Ohio.

What if I could shorten it to

http://tinyurl.com/2ayfzy

That’s what TinyURL does.  Best of all, it is absolutely free.  You don’t even have to give them your email address.  You can go there right now with your super long URL.  Paste that URL into the box.  Your new 18 character URL will be generated.  That URL will never expire.  You can distribute it to as many people as you like and it works forever.  If you ever forget that URL, create a new one.  It takes five seconds.

BTW - Once you put a long URL into TinyURL, it will remember the associated short URL.  If you take ODE’s ridiculously long URL and put it in right now, it will give you the same short URL I provided above.