Eric Baber's blog

A while ago the Guardian interviewed me about Voice over IP (VoIP) for language teaching; the resulting article has just been published.

This came to me via http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/facebook-new-study-hall-for-wired.html .

In summary, a first-year student at Ryerson University is being charged with 147 counts of academic misconduct for running a Facebook study group for one of his engineering courses. At the university, study groups are encouraged to discuss the course content. When the administrators got wind of the virtual study group, though, they slammed him with one count of academic misconduct and, get this, a further 146 for each fellow student who had signed up for it. The student, Chris Avenir, derived no financial or other benefit from setting up the group apart from the benefit that he would receive from the same group on a face-to-face basis.

In order to avoid students cheating on assignments (rather than exams), "Each student in the course received slightly different questions to prevent cheating, she said, and she did not see evidence of students doing complete solutions for each other. Instead, she said, they would brainstorm about techniques." Which is what teaching and learning should be all about: enabling learners to develop problem-solving skills, something which is often best done in a collaborative environment.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out as it says a lot about the university's approach to learning.