DailyDirt: Cheering For Mathletes

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

It's a no-brainer that math is a critically important subject. Okay, a lot of people probably don't remember much calculus from high school -- or how to do "long division" -- but the exposure to advanced math and encouraging everyone to appreciate math is still laudable. And making sure kids aren't turned off by math will hopefully lead to more people involved in STEM fields in the future.

• Amazon's Education business unit is aiming to get teachers and students to improve their math skills and attitudes towards math. This "With Math I Can" effort is an attempt to encourage girls (and boys) who aren't confident with numbers to stick with math and math-related subjects. [url]
• A study of nearly half a million boys and girls (14-16yo) from 69 countries shows that there's a negligible gender gap when it comes to math skills. A few countries favored boys over girls in math tests, but a couple of countries also had girls beating the boys. So the differences are chalked up to effort and teaching, not any innate ability differences between boys and girls. [url]
• Apparently, girls seem to do more homework and play less with computers than boys do. According to an OECD report, boys test better at math than girls in many countries -- but girls in Shanghai seem to be really good at math. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: education, homework, learning, math, stem, teaching
Companies: amazon

UK Police Deny Misspelling Led To Investigation, Say It Was Other Schoolwork Instead

from the still-a-problem dept

We had just relayed a story via the BBC about an elementary school kid in the UK earning a visit to his home from the authorities after writing in an English assignment that he lived in a "terrorist house", when he reportedly was trying to say he lived in a "terraced house." The crux of this story was that the UK's Anti-Terrorism law, which requires that school teachers act as surveillance agents for the state in an attempt to weed out future-radicalized will-be-terrorists is a policy built for unintended chaos, given that teachers are neither trained nor properly equipped to fulfill this role. The resulting visit to the boy's home by the authorities from a misspelled word was billed as an example of this overreach by government.

But, as some in the comments pointed out, Lancashire police have pushed back on the BBC's story, saying that it wasn't the misspelled words that triggered the visit and ultimately resulted in the authorities determining there was no need for an investigation, but was instead other schoolwork the boy had done that triggered the visit and ultimately resulted in the authorities determining there was no need for an investigation.

In a statement, police and the county council said it was "untrue to suggest that this situation was brought about by a simple spelling mistake. The school and the police have acted responsibly and proportionately in looking into a number of potential concerns using a low-key, local approach," it said. "No concerns were identified and no further action was required by any agency."

For some reason, there are those that think this vindicates both law enforcement and the UK's law because police say the spelling error had nothing to do with any of this. I can't quite figure out the logic of those people, because this is still a story about a teacher using schoolwork to identify a Muslim boy possibly being dangerous that triggered a visit to the boy's home from the authorities. While the BBC has pulled its original post as a result of the pushback, the fundamentals of the story haven't really changed at all. We still have a scared child and an annoyed family stemming from law enforcement action built on the back of a teacher picking through the child's schoolwork. That isn't a sustainable model for combating terrorism, but it is a sustainable model for alienating an entire subsection of a nation's population.

Miqdaad Versi, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, the UK's largest umbrella group for Islamic associations, said he was aware of dozens of cases similar to that of the schoolboy.

"There are huge concerns that individuals going about their daily life are being seen through the lens of security and are being seen as potential terrorists rather than students," he said. "This is a natural consequence of the extension of the 'Prevent Duty' to schools."

Regardless of the police pushback, which was extremely light on details, that hasn't changed.

Filed Under: children, homework, police, spelling, terrorist, uk

Can You Copyright Homework Titles?

from the that-may-be-difficult dept

Earlier this summer, we wrote about how SJSU computer science student (and Techdirt reader), Kyle Brady, had won a fight with one of his professors, over Kyle's decision to post the code he had written for the class online. He had only done so after the assignments were due (so as not to reveal the answers to other students), and did so to show off his coding skills and to help him get a job. Yet, the professor threatened him, claiming he was "cheating" and that he would get a failing grade. After taking the issue up the administrative chain, Brady was told that he had done nothing wrong and had not violated any academic policy.

At the end of the post, I noted that I was a bit surprised that a separate issue hadn't come up. The entire discussion had been about school policy, and not about copyright. Yet, many schools these days now try to claim the copyright on code written by students. Perhaps I spoke too soon.

Kyle alerts us that, with the new school year beginning, the same professor has added a new copyright policy to his assignments. Thankfully, it doesn't sound like he's claiming copyright over the code, but over the assignments themselves. You can see the policy for yourself, where it states:

The homework assignments in this class are copyrighted by Dr. Beeson, including the names of the assignments, and the names of all the required classes and methods, all the examples that are posted with the assignment, and the problem descriptions and programming hints that are posted. Your solutions are your own, but if you want to post them publicly, you must change the names of the classes and methods, and you cannot post the problem descriptions. This should enable you to show your work to a prospective employer, and possibly allow me to re-use the assignments without future students being able to Google your solutions.

Now, to give Dr. Beeson credit, he appears to be trying to come up with a reasonable compromise here, allowing Kyle to do the sorts of things he wanted to do, without making it so that he would have to come up with new assignments every semester. So, I can respect that. But, I'm not sure that he's got a legal right for all of that. It's not entirely clear if the names of the assignments are enough "creative expression" to warrant a copyright. Ditto for the names of required classes and methods. Even if they were, I would imagine any student would have a pretty strong fair use argument in reposting them.

I think it's fair for Dr. Beeson to request students not post info that makes it so easy for future students to Google the answers from former students (though, let's face it, students will always find ways to get similar info anyway), but claiming it's due to copyright seems like a stretch.

Filed Under: copyright, homework, sjsu

High School Student Sues Amazon For Deleting His Summer Homework?

from the pr-nightmare dept

Well, you just knew that there were going to be class action lawsuits filed over Amazon's decision to delete unauthorized George Orwell ebooks that had been sold for the Kindle, but it appears that the class action lawyers have found the most headline-worthy story to get the word out. As we mentioned in the original post on this story, at least one kid lost the notes he had been taking on one of the books. So, we get a story about how a high school student is suing Amazon for deleting his summer homework, and the lawyers are hoping to turn it into a class action.

As bad as Amazon's actions were, I can't see this lawsuit getting very far. For most Kindle users, they're going to have a hard time showing any sort of real "harm." The kid with the lost homework might be able to show some (small) amount of harm, but I have to imagine that Amazon is mostly protected from liability in such cases. Still, with Amazon being quick to apologize and swear it would never ever ever delete an ebook again, you have to wonder if Amazon will step up and just try to appease the kid (and get the lawyers to go away).

Filed Under: class action, drm, ebooks, homework, kindle
Companies: amazon

New Service Lets You Use 'The Computer Ate My Homework' As An Excuse

from the wow dept

The old standby for unfinished homework, "the dog ate my homework" has long since gone out of style. It certainly has become popular to claim that one's computer was the problem, with people saying that files got lost or corrupted or the computer died. However, Mathew Ingram points us to a new service that tries to help bad students get away with this, by selling students corrupted files that they can turn in. Yes. They will sell you a corrupted Word document, Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation for just $3.95 (a bargain!). The service claims that this can be useful as a diversionary tactic to "buy time" since it may be days before the teacher/professor tries to open the bogus file -- at which point you may have completed the actual assignment. Or, you know, you can just do the work on time.

Filed Under: corrupted files, homework

Turnitin Found Not To Violate Student Copyrights

from the might-be-a-good-thing-for-Google... dept

Last year, we noted that some students were suing iParadigms, the makers of "Turnitin" the excessively popular plagiarism checker used by many colleges and high schools. The professors feed student papers into the system, and it returns a "score" judging how likely the paper is to be plagiarized. However, it also takes a copy of each paper and includes it in its database for future plagiarism checks. This annoyed quite a few students who felt that this was copyright infringement -- using their papers in a commercial database.

However, a court has now rejected the students' arguments and found that Turnitin does not violate the copyright of the students for a variety of reasons. First there is the fact that students had to agree to the terms of the service to use it -- even if they were forced to by their schools. However, the court finds that this is a problem for the schools, not Turnitin. But, much more interesting is the rationale for why storing those papers is considered "fair use." Among other things, the court found that Turnitin isn't using the papers for their creative meaning and even though it stores the entire document, it doesn't really publish a full copy of it for others to see.

That becomes especially interesting given the current lawsuit concerning Google's scanning of books from various university libraries, as it may be able to note the similarities in this situation to Turnitin's. There are some differences -- and clearly, the publishers will claim that the impact on the commercial value is quite different (despite evidence to the contrary -- but this ruling is likely to help Google's position at least somewhat.

Filed Under: copyright, homework, plagiarism, students, turnitin
Companies: iparadigms

Teachers' Union Debating Ending Homework For Students

from the ah,-if-only-I-were-a-kid-again... dept

In the past few years, we've seen quite a few reports suggesting that homework doesn't help kids learn along with some other reports questioning traditional learning techniques. However, it's still a bit surprising for it reach the level where a teachers' union in the UK is already considering a proposal to ditch homework for most younger students and drastically scale back how much there is for older students (found via Digg). The reasoning is a bit different. The older reports we saw pointed out that homework wasn't particularly effective at helping kids learn. The reasoning for this new proposal is that homework makes kids "unhappy and anxious" and that leads to stressed out kids and potential disciplinary problems. It would be interesting to see any actual research supporting one side or the other here. I think it's great that teachers aren't just assuming that homework must be good, since that's how it's always been done, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be done away with completely.

Filed Under: homework, teachers union, uk