The JCIEL Plagiarism Detection Project acknowledges that:

the Internet is making it easier to copy other peoples work and with little or no alteration students can pass unoriginal material off as their own.

As an educator I am on the horns of a dilemma. I want to encourage interaction and cooperation amongst my students but whereabouts do you draw the line between cooperation and copying? Of course, the situation is further complicated by the ready availability of vast resources over the Internet. [Aside: I have even heard of teachers the ban the use of the 'net for resource discovery. How strange is that !?]. Ideally, assessments should be constructed in such a way to minimise the potential for plagiarism and yet don't overburden assessees with labour-intensive marking regimes . I must read up on the methods that work in this context.

I'm sorry if that last paragraph doesn't make sense. I only got three hours sleep last night and tiredness is catching up on me.

The Register: P4: first Sandra 2001 benchmarks

Being properly optimised for Screaming Sindie's second set of extensions (SSE2) makes a startling difference to the P4's Sandra scores. Overclocked to 1.6GHz, our P4 with 256MB of PC800 RDRAM managed an overall performance rating of just PR563 with Sandra 2000. With Sandra 2001 this increased to PR1916.

View from an Iowa Homestead: Still Runnin'

I was afraid that my oldest server, the one that's been running since 1992, would not start up again after the move. I hooked up the ethernet, plugged in the power cord, flipped the switch, and...nothing. Aargh. I tried whacking it while I flipped the switch. On the third try, the drive began to spin...and it's up!

It's a Macintosh SE/30!

I've just booked a place on a Computer Assisted Assessment Workshop at Strathclyde:

The focus of these workshops will be on presenting the findings and assisting people develop a framework for the effective implementation and delivery of web-based assessment.

Shame it's not before some major assessments that I need to arrange in the next week or so.

I missed out on the Round One Workshops:

The first round of dissemination events that SCAAN were running were designed to introduce people to web-based assessment.

I probably know most of the background but if need be I can catch up with the help of the PowerPoint slides linked from that page.

A couple of weeks ago I vented my displeasure with the Unlimited Freeserve service. Well, the connection success rate in the evenings and during the weekends has got worse if anything so I have signed up with another ISP for unmetered access at these times. So far so good with the new service although the sample size is small ;-)

Even though this is going to cost me another £12 a month I often found myself having to connect to Freeserve using a pay-for-connect modem number. So I might just break even. Not to mention the benefit of less hassle and wasted time waiting for BT network capacity or a free modem.

Doc Searls Weblog: Zope that lasts

I just noticed that the four sites that have been up longest at the largest hosting location (Exodus in Santa Clara, CA) are all Zope's. They're at 384+ days and counting.