Is It Cheating Or Is It Collaboration?

from the sounds-like-collaboration dept

A few years back, we had an interesting discussion around the idea that many students might not view using modern technology to share answers as "cheating" so much as they would view it as wikipedia-like collaboration. I thought this was an interesting observation, since I'd never really thought of it that way. Someone who ought to remain anonymous alerts me to a discussion of a recent study on student "cheating" on exams via mobile phones and similar technology, which found, not only that lots of kids do it, but that they don't think it's wrong. In the comments to that post, there's a fascinating comment by Ryan Scott that again highlights the point about collaboration:

The premise of memorization is the problem here. What's far more important than memorizing some formulas is knowing where to find them and how to apply them.

In NO industry is collaboration considered cheating. Only in SCHOOL is this a problem. What are we teaching our kids?

I'm an employer. I want my employees reaching out and building networks of people that can help them. I struggle with this whole 'that's cheating' attitude. It's something I need to UNTEACH my employees. It does NOT matter to me if you know how to do something, it matters to me that you can figure out how to do it. Most businesses, especially information based, need employees who know how to find and apply information, not that have a repository of facts in their heads. We are creating everything new -- NO ONE knows how to do the things many companies deal with on a daily basis unless you are a clerk of some kind. We are figuring it all out on the fly. Building alliances, search skills, knowing where and how to find information -- all these are what's valuable.

The argument that school, memorization, and solitary work teaches you how to think is absolutely wrong. If we really want to teach people how to think, we should have a class called How To Think, not Ancient Greek History. You don't teach thinking skills by forcing 30 people to memorize the same names, dates, and events. You do it by teaching principles, and by teaching directly the actual skills the education system claims to want to create.

We need more 'How to Think', 'How to Collaborate', 'How to Negotiate', 'How to Resolve Conflict' and less 'Memorize a bunch of stuff for a test'

Plagiarism is an exception. Passing off someone else's work as your own is clearly wrong. But forcing kids to memorize facts and not giving them what's truly important -- that is to say thinking skills is the big problem here.

Thinking about plagiarism some more. I'm always telling my employees to research before writing -- cobble together a collection of other people's work and give me an opinion. Build on whats already out there, don't start from scratch.

Well said. Again, I don't think that "cheating" is the problem here. The problem is this focus on not teaching people how to work together to solve problems and assuming that everything needs to be done by the individual themselves. That's not how things work in the real world, and it does children a disservice to downplay collaboration and reinforce the idea that building off the works of others is somehow wrong. Standing on the shoulders of giants is important, or we're always reinventing the wheel.

Filed Under: cheating, collaboration

Recording Industry, Once Again, Stomps Out Optimism

from the it's-what-they-do-best dept

My initial summary of my trip to the Midem music industry event in January was that it was about turning "optimism into denial." There was a tremendous sense of optimism from all sorts of upstarts: musicians and companies who were really innovating and creating wonderful success stories over and over again. And then... the old school industry guys showed up. They spoke about the optimism and the success stories... and said a few things that made it sound like the got it. They talked about ending this "war" with consumers, and focusing on solutions that worked. But, then the clouds would descend, and they'd immediately start angrily saying that even with these great new business models and innovations, "we need to stomp out piracy." In doing so, they demonstrated how severely they missed the point -- and it's now showing in their actions. We've been seeing more braindead maneuvers over the last month with highly questionable lawsuits, and licensing decisions that only serve to piss off users.

It seems that my initial read is (unfortunately) the same conclusion others are coming to as well. Two of the "industry insiders" I got to meet at the event -- who both came down on the "optimistic" side at the event have each written up blog posts for the MidemNet blog, complaining about the very same thing. That initial sense of optimism that was seen at the event has pretty much gone away -- crushed by dumb moves within the industry. Ted Cohen, who helped moderate much of the event, diplomatically points out that for all the talk of collaboration at the event, the chaos isn't over, and he wonders when we'll actually get down to business. Meanwhile, Bruce Houghton (of the excellent Hypebot blog) more specifically fears that all the talk of a more collaborative approach was nothing more than talk -- and there is no intention to really collaborate.

This is a pretty big problem -- and I obviously won't speak for either Bruce or Ted, who I'm pretty sure would disagree with this assessment -- but, it won't change until the old system and the old structures and the "old guard" are finally pushed out. There are tons of success stories -- but those are in spite of the industry, not because of it. It's time to wipe out the house of cards that the industry has built in terms of Rube Goldbergian copyright licensing schemes, and start fresh. There are business models that work great for everyone -- but the current system is designed to allow bystanders and middlemen to profit at the expense of the musicians and the public. Get rid of the old system, and everyone but those middlemen will benefit.

Filed Under: bruce houghton, business models, collaboration, midem, music, optimism, ted cohen

Is An Online Study Group Cheating?

from the once-it's-on-facebook,-it-must-be dept

Vincent Clement writes in to let us know that that a student at Ryerson University in Toronto is facing expulsion for setting up an online study group for his chemistry class using Facebook. The school is saying it wasn't so much a study group as it was a place for 146 students to cheat and share answers (though, it's only blaming the student who ran the group). Students at the university are reasonably up in arms over the matter, as they don't see how it's any different than a traditional study group. Of course, the whole thing seems a little bit silly. As we discussed almost exactly a year ago, people working together to collaborate is an important skill in the real world, and what some people consider "cheating" these days seems a lot like the type of collaboration that kids are quite used to doing online, and which should serve them well later in life.

Filed Under: cheating, collaboration, college, facebook, online, ryerson university, study groups

Is Yahoo's Zimbra Buy An Attempt To Move Into The Enterprise?

from the one-way-to-do-things dept

Earlier today, the news broke that Yahoo was acquiring email and collaboration tools provider Zimbra for $350 million. Some may find this a little odd, since Yahoo just recently (finally) revamped its online email client based on the code it obtained years ago in purchasing Oddpost. However, one reasonable explanation is that this is (yet another) Google-inspired response. Yahoo bought Oddpost soon after Google released Gmail and Yahoo realized its email client was looking woefully dated. More recently, Google's been getting all sorts of attention for its attempts to move further and further into the enterprise with Google Apps -- including pushing Gmail as a solution for enterprise email. Zimbra collaboration offerings were mainly focused on enterprises or organizations that would be rolling out email to many customers (such as ISPs). Yahoo hasn't focused much (if at all) on creating an enterprise-ready solution, so by buying Zimbra, it could be signaling plans to move much more aggressively into the enterprise with enterprise-ready apps. This is definitely a shift from the Terry Semel-run Yahoo that was so focused on being a media company with some technology. Of course, we've all seen acquisitions like this go nowhere, so there are plenty of questions still to be answered about whether or not Yahoo really be more of an enterprise-focused company, but it would appear that it's at least going to try.

Filed Under: collaboration, enterprise software
Companies: yahoo, zimbra