iPods in Economics

At the ASSA conference I enjoyed seeing the various posters in the AEA/CEE Poster Session on Teaching Ideas and Projects organized by Rae Jean B. Goodman. One in particular I knew would be of interest to readers of this blog, Jean Shackelford's "iPods in Economics? Technology for Enhanced Active Learning." I talked to her for quite a while and she admitted to recording and trying just about everything from lectures to short vignettes. Her paper is available on AEAweb.org (click here).

You can listen to her presentation by clicking here. I thought, how clever is that -- to present your paper on podcasting via a podcast.

I have posted an alternative method to record podcasts in an earlier posting (click here) and have made use of such recordings to send explanations back to students when neither typed words nor digital ink were enough. My own hypothesis is that few students will ever listen through all of a lecture, but smaller amounts on specific topics might just be the trick.

Best quote of the evening:
"It isn't about how you use technology to improve education, it's how you rethink education in the context of technology." -- Rick Rashid, Microsoft Research Chief, quoted in an article on iCampus (MS-MIT's 7 year initiative to study technology and education)

Bill Gates at CES or All About VISTA

Last night I watched the over one hour keynote address by Bill Gates at CES, Las Vegas. Not susprisingly, the topic was the new operating system Vista. I marvelled at the fact that I was many states and many hours away from the event, but here I was watching Gates describe what is happening as part of the 'digital decade.' The text of the speech and various video feeds are available on the microsoft website here.

I was very interested in certain features of Vista and how all of our electronic devises were being merged. Since my wife and I have talked about putting in a home server, I was particularily interested in the introduction in the second half of 2007 of the HP Home Server which will identify and automatically back up all devices in my network and can be expanded by adding more hard drives at the hardware leve. The software (something like MS Home ServerSoftare) will identify the extra space and automatically incorporate it.

What's this to do with teaching economics? Everything. Vista will bring to all computing devices the special features now only available to the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. This means greater compatiability to the computer (what ever it is) used by our students and the Tablets that each of us economists are likely to want to use as our next laptop.

Go look at the video, if you have the time, the demonstrations are certainly worth it.

Click here to view Bill Gates' CES Keynote Update from the Microsoft Education News
January 9, 2007
Ready for a new day
The launch you've been waiting for is finally here: Windows Vista operating system, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Be among the first to see these products in action at local launch events or online demo sites. <http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6029481>

More Tablet PC Research

I just received Dave Berque, Jane Prey, and Robert H. Reed (eds.) The Impact of Tablet PCs and Pen-based Technology on Education, Purdue University Press, 2006. This is an excellent compilation of papers presented at the first WIPTE (Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technologies on Education) held last year at Purdue.

The book has 21 short papers from a variety of disciplines (including Economics thanks to Mary Dixon, Kerry Pannell, and Michele Villinski of DePauw, who contribute "From 'Chalk and Talk' to Animate and Collaborate...", pp 49-55.) The reviews I have read are from encouraging to overall positive that the Tablet PC is an evolutionary leap in a technology that will assist student engagement and learning. More research is on the way from many sources, but the same conference will reconvene this year.

There is a current call for participation for the June 11-12, 2007 WIPTE and that deadline is February 1, 2007.

Dan Talley (Dakota State) and I did a review of Tablet PC value and made some suggestions for assessment research at the ASSA Annual meetings to the AEA/Computer Assisted Instruction group just a few days ago. More on that later when I get things posted.

Marginal Revolution: The economics of plagiarism

I am not sure if I plagiarized this :) but Tyler Cowen at marginal revolution.com (Marginal Revolution: The economics of plagiarism) writes on the changing economics of plagiarism. I like his list and makes me think of both the increased ease of doing it as well as the increased ease of finding it. My child in his high school has to submit all his work to turnitin.com and the teacher gets a great report showing what parts are not properly cited. I wish my University would license this product, but has decided not to use any technology to make more efficient the professor in catching students plagiarising, while the students have no barriers to their efficient searching of the literature.

While denying the professor the opportunity to use turnitin.com my university does suggest we can take the time consuming process of Googling each and every suspicious bit of writing. The reason my university denies our use of turnitin.com is that they believe that the student has a copywrite in their own papers and then the paper will be stored in a database at turnitin.com and violates their copywrite. Specifically, "(o)nce submitted, the papers are considered proprietary property of the software vendors and are used as comparative data for future submissions and analysis, totally disregarding any intellectual property rights of the students. It is a lawsuit waiting to happen! (reference)" Turnitin.com, not surprisingly has a very different view and backs it up (see here).

Geoff and Sosin have a section in their paper, which I have previously cited, on plagiarism that is worth a re-read. They start their section with survey results (not theirs) that 82 percent of students admit to cheating and while not all cheating is plagiarism, this raises a fairly serious alarm. They point our the limitations of Googling for discovery and seem to support products like turnitin.com.

So try this.. google my phrase above, 82 percent of students admit to cheating and while not all cheating is plagiarism, and see the number of links that point out the seriousness of the problem. I am amazed at the seriousness of the problem, but I do not find the source where I stole that phrase (Geoff and Sosin) until page three of the Google listing. I did substitute 'while' for 'although,' and used 'not all cheating' instead of 'not plagiarism' and left out a citation, but it was taken directly. I think Goeff and Sosin would agree: Google checking is very inefficient and not reliable. Can't we just have turnitin.com?

I have long maintained we should not use a technology unless we believe it increases student learning and makes the professor more efficient. Turnitin.com could make us more efficient, especially more efficient than endless Googling of phrases, and student learning is always enhanced when they are doing their own work and not stealing the ideas of others.

(And yes I did post this while wading through
student end of term papers).