Turnitin Sued

My friend Dawno alerted me to this story about anti-plagiarism service Turnitin.com being sued for copyright violation by four students. Turnitin is a service contracted by universities and schools. Faculty submit student papers for analysis by Turnitin which compares the text to papers stored in an internal database and to text stored on the Web; […]

What does Pedagogy Mean in IT?

Way back in January of 2002 I wrote a rationale for this blog. It’s been linked to and quoted a few times, most recently by Shelly McCauley Jugovich and Bruce Reeves in an Educause Quarterly article entitled “IT and Educational Technology: What’s Pedagogy Got to Do with IT?“. They quoted this bit (without the links):

This […]

The Influence of Individuals

I’ve been watching an interesting saga unfold; bear with me while I expound.
I’m a member of a community for writers called “Absolute Write.” It’s a combination of a resource site and an online community, with a particular emphasis on outreach and advocacy for writers. There are a lot of scams that target naive writers, including […]

On “Serious” Blogging

New Kid on the Hallway drew my attention to this article in Inside Higher Ed by Jeff Rice.

Rice has two central points, I think, in his initial article. I say “I think” because the argument is less than coherent. Rice begins by referring to the “Ivan Tribble” articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, asserting […]

Unix Frivolities and LOTR

Open the Terminal in Mac OS X (Applications / Utilities).

Type

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history | grep “LOTR”

You should see a list, in month and day order, of events in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. For instance, September 14 is the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo.

This particular Stupid Terminal Trick is not unique to OS […]

Unix Frivolities and The Language of Flowers

We all know Unix, even with the very user-friendly OS X GUI, is the realm of the serious user, especially when it comes to using Terminal, the OS X application for using a command line interface. But thank goodness that along with all the Unixy goodness OS X inherited from BSD, we also got the […]

Musical Baton

I’ve been passed the “musical baton” meme by Dori. My responses are:
Total volume of music files on my computer: my iTunes folder is 2.14 Gb with 647 songs. Some of those are audiobooks, though, so I’m not sure how they count. That includes some drama and poetry, and the total is about half what it […]

On Apple, Wiley, and the Spurning of Books

In retaliation for John Wiley and Sons’ forthcoming publication of an unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs, Apple has instructed that all Wiley books be removed from the shelves of all Apple retail stores. The story first broke publicly Tuesday in Mercury News’ Silicon Valley Report. Later the story was picked up by Associated Press. Bloggers […]

Please Help: Tsunami and Quake Relief

As best I can determine, any money you donate will go entirely to quake/tsumani relief. If you’d rather, you can donate to the Red Cross/Red Crescent via Amazon with a single click. The British Red Cross page, with a direct donation link is here. Oxfam UK is here. CNN has a list of sites from […]

Sometimes, it is the User’s Responsibility

I’m generally a user advocate, but there are limits to even my patience and understanding. For instance, users who knowingly use beta software pretty much are out on a limb. Users who use Beta software as part of an active, primary production system are, well clueless. Dori Smith linked to this post from Mary […]

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