Inter Alia’s Blawg of the Day

Our humble blog made Inter Alia’s Blawg of the Day!

This week, Inter Alia’s covering wikis and law, which I’m pretty excited to hear about. Check out the ABA’s article on Wikis for the Legal Profession.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that anyone should feature the BC IPTF Wiki. I’m not even linking to it, it’s so crappy.

Also, ZiefBrief of the USF Law Library mentions this blog, even describing our posts as “thoughtful and fun.” Who woulda thunk it?

Congress Investigating the Impact of University P2P Networks

On Tuesday, September 26, the Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness held a hearing entitled “The Internet and the College Campus: How the Entertainment Industry and Higher Education are Working to Combat Illegal Piracy”.

Congress has yet to regulate educational networks, but has considered measures that would require universities to actively monitor their networks to limit the sharing of copyrighted materials. As the holders of copyrighted materials continue to see sales eroded by online piracy, it appears that increased pressure will be put upon federal legislators to force educational institutions to limit access by students to P2P sharing of copyrighted works over their networks. This may not be as uncomfortable for universities as it may seem, as P2P sharing eats up network bandwith, and may put schools in tricky positions should one of their users be sued.

A full webcast of the Subcommitte hearing is available here.
For a summary of the meeting and further discussion please see Congress Looks At P2P in Academia at arstechnica.

Professor Giving Up on Battling Internet-Facilitated Cheating

The Concerned Professor: The internet and the decline of academic honesty:

. . . None of this would be worth writing about were it not for the fact that last year, about half of our graduating class was implicated or caught in some variety of cheating. While it would be unrealistic to assume that all of these students were actually guilty of whatever they were suspected of, I would not hesitate to say that 25-30% of our graduating seniors should never have been allowed to walk. . . . How can something like this change so rapidly? And how can it go unreported and unnoticed? Simple: Our students are now, more than ever, cheating in ways that leaves our older generations in the dust. . . . ushered in by the Internet itself.

The Concerned Professor talks about how students are plagiarizing the Internet, especially Wikipedia, more than ever. While educational institutions may use for-fee services such as iThenticate that programmatically try to detect Internet-based plagiarism, students can still turn to services such as Student of Fortune.

Student of Fortune allows freelance “experts” to answer questions for a fee. For example, a student may ask a question on mechanical engineering, offering $1.25 for an answer.

One solution to this is to re-think assessment, which unfortunately usually means smaller class size and better teaching, as well as the desire to put learning above research, enrollments, and other institutional needs. Assessment starting at day one, assessment through in-class participation as well as one-on-one meetings, homework with essay assignments, etc. Or whole-reliance upon in-class exams, which I think is a step backwards.

On the other hand, maybe it’s OK for students to “cheat.” How much different is asking a friend for an “explanation” than asking Wikipedia or someone on-line? And, using tools such as iThenticate, forcing students to re-write something into “their own words” is part of the learning process–just like reading the book and putting the authors words into “your own words.” Isn’t it much the same?

Expanding upon that, how often in the average university graduate’s life is one forced to replicate the critical thinking blindingly demanded of them from their professors? I rarely do multiplication on a daily basis! In our media-blinded, un-thinking, un-critical society, isn’t it more important to understand the need for critical thinking than to actually perform critical thinking?
Like Soylent Green, the problem isn’t technology, “It’s people!” We are both the problem–and the dubious product.

(On a side note, it’s interesting how my eye was drawn to the quotable “sound bytes”–and that words said strongly, no matter how true, “deserve” quoting.)

Update (092506): Students Rebel Against Database Designed to Thwart Plagiarists (Washington Post)

Bluebook Citation to Wikipedia

Sometimes I anally use Bluebook citation in my school notes. So when I pulled a quote from Wikipedia regarding a case, I needed to cite it. Wikipedia provides guidance on this:

Bluebook Citation to Wikipedia

Wikipedia cites the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology for this template:

[Signal] Wikipedia, [article], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[article] [(optional other parenthetical)] (as of [date], [time] GMT).

The citation for this entry would be:

See Wikipedia, Bluebook, http://en.wikipeida.org/wiki/Bluebook (as of Aug. 30, 2006, 12:22 GMT).

To get the timestamp, you should use the latest revision date and time, obtainable by clicking on the “History” tab at the top of the entry’s web page. The first timestamp is the latest, and therefore the one you should use.

(I just anonymously edited the Bluebook entry, fixing some typos in the citation. )

Wikimania 2006 – Kahle v. Gonzalez

This past weekend, my buddy Adam and I attended Wikimania 2006 at Harvard Law School. We mostly went to sessions on education and wikis because we are working with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and their librarians on integrating new technology into the library and the curriculum. But we also caught Brewster Kahle’s plenary presentation on the work he’s been up to.

Kahle founded, among other things, the Internet Archive. His goal these days is “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Part of his platform engages U.S. Attorney General Albert Gonzalez, in a suit seeking declaratory judgment, particularly against the Copyright Term Extension Act (“CTEA”).

Kahle is working on building digital libraries of all available human knowledge. In his way is the CTEA that is blocking his publishing of books written between 1964 and 1978. Prior to the CTEA, these books would be public domain in 2004. But the CTEA extended their copyright, regardless of the will of the copyright owners, for “effectually perpetual” terms. Civil Complaint for Declaratory Judgment, Kahle v. Gonzalez (Civil Case No. 04-1127).

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URL Shortening for Legal Citations

Working on a corporate memo, where I’m citing to online resources, I had the problem of URLs stretching too long in the cite–and overall just looking way too ugly.

For example:

http://www.barometersurveys.com/production/barsurv.nsf/vwAllNewsByDocID/F5482EED2EBEE435852570F1006D236F

Too long. And too ugly. So I wondered about URL shortening services, that would change that behemoth into something like this:

http://thnlnk.com/barometersurveys/080406/0000002145

Or perhaps better:

http://thnlnk.com/barometersurveys/SOX.and.Private.Companies/StE

Here, we have a URL that will permanently locate the underlying document, “citing” the domain name of the document (barometersurveys), as well as the date accessed (080406) or a description of what the link contains (“SOX and Private Companies”).

Has anyone else run into situations where URL shortening services were used and accepted or rejected?

Note: I wrote ThnLnk, and while there are other URL shortening services out there, ThnLnk is the best for many reasons besides being from my intellectual loins.

Traditional Art and Patents

“Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Resources, Folklore and Gender was the subject that attracted some 100 participants, mainly women from local indigenous and rural communities, to a two-day seminar held in October in Río Hato, Panama. They came to analyze their problems and successes as producers of traditional handicrafts; to learn which intellectual property (IP) tools could help them protect and market their products; and to benefit from the experiences of other indigenous communities in exploiting IP. With cheap imitations undermining sales of traditional handicrafts, the seminar, organized by WIPO in cooperation with the Industrial Property Registry of Panama and with financing from the Inter-American Development Bank, proved to be a timely event…”

Panama: Empowering Indigenous Women Through a Better Protection and Marketing of Handicrafts

Female empowerment remains an important goal around the world. Education is essential to this goal. Without knowledge of what feats are possible, and how to accomplish those feats, women remain unaware of their potential and without the tools to realize it.

This article reminded me of my personal experiences in western Turkey, where I lived for two years during my early teens while my father worked for NATO. My family came to appreciate Turkish art, including copper and gold pieces, scarves, and carpets. My mother began to collect the carpets as individual pieces of art, as one would paintings, with the goal to represent as many Turkish villages as possible in her collection. The key was that each village incorporated signature characteristics into their carpets, making the work unmistakably identifiable to connaisseurs, or even to young American amateurs like me. These characteristics include particular colors, such as the deep red in a carpet from Yagcibedir; shapes, such as the ubiquitous octagon in rugs from Kars; and knot size, like the very tight knots in Hereke rugs.

My family bought carpets through two very different means. First, we could visit one of our trusted (male) dealers in Izmir, and sip our fresh chi with sugar cubes served as carpet after carpet was tossed on the floor in front of us for our appraisal. While this method was undoubtably the most efficient, we did not realize the value of the carpets and the stories behind them until we learned that we could visit the villages where the carpets were made.

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