-
wePapers – Creating the world’s biggest study group
Another source for plagiarists – Amusingly enough when I looked at some of the papers and googled phrases, there were plagiarized elements in the downloadable wePapers “articles” for study purposes. So now there are layers of plagiarism.
It is obviously increasingly difficult to control this kind of dishonesty without changing some of our academic practices. We need approaches like supervised offline writing, and complex screens requiring game-like manipulation to demonstrate knowledge. Or, radical thought, classes small enough that teachers can actually recognize individual student’s work by knowing their knowledge level and writing style.
-
3 Simple Ways To Send Huge Files Over The Web | MakeUseOf.com
I use YouSendIt regularly because it’s simple and free for one file at a time, and takes very big (audio) files. I’ve also had students use Box.com for “sharing” (handing in) their audio assignments and it works very well too. via makeuseof.com
-
Dismissing critical pedagogy: Denis Rancourt vs. University of Ottawa | rabble.ca
-
At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard – NYTimes.com
“The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. … Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.” An excellent educational move, but the new teacher skills and the technology costs will inevitably slow down adoption.
-
Micro Persuasion: Why Text Remains King of the Web
“think about just how much of what you consume and share online remains text-based. Twitter – it’s all text. Friendfeed – mostly text, but augmented by images. Facebook – a mix but certainly a ton of text. Even what makes YouTube hot is the metadata and commentary around the vids. So I don’t see any big threat to King Text. “
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Learning Living 
Hello,
Ehud here, from wePapers.com . I went over your post and I would like to response:
wePapers is against plagiarism. As the site allows it’s visitors to upload any kind of academic document, the current content is based on informative free lecture notes, books, presentations and articles- real ones.
As a student, it happened to me many times that I couldn’t understand my lecturers presentations or my own notes, so I needed to look for academic material on the web. This is very hard to find, unless you’re a good googler. We don’t think that there is something wrong with that- in the contrary, we want to make the world a smarter, exactly like wikipedia does.
In addition, wePapers offers great collaboration tools for both students and lecturers for online study groups.
Yes, students can take advantage on our platform and upload their seminars to our site- that’s the way the internet works, and we do not have any control of it. We would like to offer plagiarism detection tools in the near future. I think it will be easier to detect plagiarism from a free content website, than from a website that sells ready made works. We understand your worries though.
Here is a post by a lecturer about wePapers from yesterday:
http://q-ontech.blogspot.com/2009/01/wepapers-taking-study-groups-into-cloud.html
And that’s how most posts about wePapers look like.
LikeLike