Wonderdonkey

Cheating is such a fluid concept anyway, and it's inconsistently applied. Some schools will suspend students for using calculators on a math test; some force students to bring calculators to their tests. Some give out the questions before a test, while others expel students for distributing test questions. Some require students to collaborate or use online sources; some forbid it. It's arbitrary.

Punishment for cheating also presumes the validity of 20th century-style academic testing, which is debatable.

What is the purpose? To ensure I'm qualified for a job? A job where I am free to look up words in a dictionary whenever I want?

I'd also add this: The internet is developing quickly into a literal extension of the human mind. I don't think it will be all that long before we're connected much more intimately to the internet than we are right now with just our eyeballs and fingertips. And that means we need to reevaluate what it means to learn information versus to find information.

Same question here.

Yes! That's great to hear!

I remember a bunch of "X is evil" sites sprouted up at some point. There was even a site that aggregated them.

I did mine when my wife was pregnant with our first daughter back in '96. I had quit smoking cigarettes, and this was one of my outlets. It would be cool if someone could produce an accurate timeline of all the AOL, Geocities, etc. sites. Too bad we only have incomplete snapshots! I wouldn't even now how to start something like that.

White type on black background made my eyes disobey my wish to have functioning vision for about three minutes after I clicked away.

Side topic: As an end user, the worst for me software that only tells you what's wrong with your password AFTER you've done it wrong, and then only tells you one thing at a time even when you've made multiple errors (dictionary word, password too short, needs one capital letter, needs one number...). Just tell me the damn rules and let me get on with my life!

The trouble is the only thing our state and cities ever do is widen freeways, and that never works. The core of the problem is traffic management, which technology can solve without added tolls. (It's the same with city streets. There is absolutely no reason in 2017 why we should ever hit more than one or two red lights in intra-city travel.) It's just that the state and city governments seeem truly oblivious to any new ways of thinking about the problem.

Tolls are regressive and will have a greater impact on poor people who have to commute to work. Second, public infrastructure is paid for by by both taxes and use fees/licenses/fines. That's a bit different from a utility. If the feds and state gave me back the money for the roads I've already built, I'd be fine switching to a pay-as-you-go model. Another consideration: This state is already funneling too many public funds to private toll road operators — to the tune of billions of dollars. I'd really hate to see more of my money go to people who are already charging the public way too much for setting up booths on the roads I paid for and charging me to drive on them.

As a side note, I've always thought California was leaving some big revenue opportunities on the table by not issuing special licenses for high-speed driving and creating high-speed lanes for people with those licenses. It would be a neat experiment. We could try it out on the 15 between LA and Las Vegas, were people are driving 100 anyway.

Freedom of press will easily survive an ephemeron like Trump, maybe even come out stronger for the short-term tribulation. He's superficial.

The more insidious statist leaders create deep, subtle, lasting harm. It's the Bushes and Obamas who set up the largest illegal domestic spying operation ever and got away with it because, even when called out, people trusted them not to commit evil acts with the store of data they were collecting. It was Obama who routinely violated journalists rights yet continued to be generally supported by mainstream news outlets.

That genre of politician will be making a comeback after Trump, and that's when people will start feeling comfortable again and go along with anything that promises stability and safety. And I believe that's the environment where the type of manipulation described in this article ("liberal paternalism") can really thrive.

Both collaborative assignments and assessments of those assignments are often poorly conceptualized in school.

Why, for example, do curriculum developers create (or choose to adopt from textbook publishers) scenarios where if one person fails, everybody in the group suffers? That's not why we collaborate. In fact, that's the opposite of why we collaborate. We don't do it to create multiple points of failure.

It's also a problem with the way we assess and the fact that we almost exclusively conduct summative assessments on these types of projects with high-stakes consequences rather than formative assessments that allow the experience to be used to foster understanding.

I'm a parent (and an education journalist). I see a lot of this. My daughter has had to do the entire work for several "collaborative" projects to maintain her GPA just because the other students wouldn't do the work or wouldn't do it well. That's a common complaint.

Two ideas for getting around that:

1. For the types of assignments where a small group produces a single outcome and shares responsibility for it, assess formatively. If the group does poorly, the teacher sits down with them and gives them supplemental instruction. And, in talking to the students, that teacher can also discover where the weaker students are and focus on them. That way you get assessment with zero high-stakes consequences, and you help advance learning rather than ending it with a letter grade.

2. Assign projects where each student has a job and is evaluated singularly for that job but is allowed to work collaboratively with other students (and the teacher) to complete it. There are all kinds of ways to encourage collaboration in those cases without resorting to punishing others for one person's failure in the end product of a collaborative assignment.

As others have said, there's also the question of assessment itself. Why assess for a grade or points or what have you? There's a movement to do away with grades and test scores. It's working fairly well, but it requires serious dedication from the teacher to ensure that students are learning. Large-scale, that's difficult. We don't have 4 million+ teachers who would be willing to do that extra work.

Side note: The volume on BBC's media player goes to 11.

I had kept my Macs at 10.6 for a long time but had to "upgrade" one of them to help my daughter with an iPhone problem (really annoying that you have to update your Mac just to copy files to a phone, but whatever). Everything was worse. Search was terrible. Mail was in the crapper. The weirdest shock was when I was using Apple apps and discovered they'd changed Shift-Command-S from "Save As" to "Duplicate." That move is really emblematic of Apple's direction with the Mac — arbitrary changes that either eliminate features or make everyday workflow more cumbersome.

I bought my first Mac in 1989. I bought my first non-Mac PC in 2015 and stopped using Mac altogether.

Came here to see if anyone else noticed that and what people made of it. That was the real revelation in this story.

If nothing else, if you followed that one tutorial on running a Tor hidden service using Docker, maybe stop doing that now.