Another iPod “upgrade” - cheating in school!
Schools across the country are targeting digital
media players as a potential cheating device.
Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious — students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers to each other.
Now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device. Devices including iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.
“It doesn’t take long to get out of the loop with teenagers,” said Mountain View High School Principal Aaron Maybon. “They come up with new and creative ways to cheat pretty fast.”
Conversely, Duke University in North Carolina began providing iPods to its students three years ago as part of an experiment to see how the devices could be used to enhance learning.
The music players proved to be invaluable for some courses, including music, engineering and sociology classes, said Tim Dodd, executive director of The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke. At Duke, incidents of cheating have declined over the past 10 years, largely because the community expects its students to have academic integrity, he said.
“Trying to fight the technology without a dialogue on values and expectations is a losing battle,” Dodd said. “I think there’s kind of a backdoor benefit here. As teachers are thinking about how technology has corrupted, they’re also thinking about ways it can be used productively.”
Nice to hear of someone getting beyond Luddite responses to technology used for ill-gotten gains. More typical, I’m afraid, is the simplistic “solution” with no consideration of a discussion about ethics.
You do recall “ethics” - right?
Posted: Fri - April 27, 2007 at 08:16 AM