Slashdot has some links to a discussion about how students are cheating in college, including leveraging Wikipedia, Turnitin, and so forth. One of the more intriguing links was to Student of Fortune, which appears to be a brokering service for, er, tutoring.

My traditional, glib response to worries about cheating has been that as long as the instructor comes up with unique, situated assignments and reviews drafts during the writing process, it's not an issue. But that solution works for instructors teaching small numbers of classes in small sections.

So I saw one of my students texting -- obviously texting -- during class yesterday. It brought up some of the questions that Johndan Johnson-Eilola raises in his recent book Datacloud about how much communication technologies can intrude into classes and how much students may end up multitasking. (Or: not paying attention.)

What do you do in a case like this? Do you tell your student to stop texting? To be more surreptitious? Or do you ignore it?

My first inclination was to call her out. But then again, I have been known to text during long faculty meetings (typically under the table). And I was still able to pay attention and participate. Her participation didn't seem to be suffering. So I decided to ignore it.

People have been buzzing about Gov. Mark Warner's appearance in SecondLife. (Warner has been described as the "fallback" Democratic candidate should Hillary Clinton's campaign falter.) The transcript suggests that SL can actually sustain decent Q&A, to my surprise, although I have to wonder how many of Warner's answers were canned.

On an aesthetic note, Warner's avatar looks kind of scary to me.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) have set up shop in SecondLife, providing interesting examples of how a virtual world could be used to educate people about how the real one works.

If you've been following the controversy about teaching 9/11 conspiracy theories at the University of Wisconsin, then this book might be an interesting read.

LaShawn Barber has a useful discussion of plagiarism in the blogosphere, including examples and links.

If you're teaching citation style and want to make citation software available to your students. Metafilter has a roundup on bibliographic reference management.

This list of ways to be good at giving bad news translates well to the task of giving bad grades.

One thing I always do in my undergraduate writing classes is to encourage them to argue their way to a better grade -- and lay down the ground rules for what constitutes a good argument. It gives students an option that doesn't involve telling me how hard they worked or assuming that I am just punitive. And occasionally these arguments are convincing and I'll budge on the grade.

I used to send students to the library for their research, but increasingly I send them to the Internet partially because it's developing structures that make it easier to gauge the reliability of pages (e.g., Google Scholar) and partially because I teach in computer-assisted classrooms. And let's face it: I do most of my initial research online too. Don't you?

So this article on "search 2.0" may be useful for those who want to bring searches into the classroom. They tend to bring in additional categorization, search more narrowly, and leverage social networking to a greater extent than search giants such as Google and Yahoo.

EducationBridges is a social networking site for teachers. (Via KairosNews).