Webcheats on notice in Australia Australian IT says three Australian universities have joined a consortium offering webbased plagiarism checks on all student essays and submissions and are deploying software to scan student essays....Each will pay between $US13,000 ($21,000) and $US25,000 for the annual service using US Turnitin software. [LISNews.com] 1:31:43 PM     [comment []];[]

Digital children grow up To today's children, media convergence is not a hot new idea; rather, it's just a matter of course. Children have come to expect interactive media formats, much to content providers' joy. San Jose Mercury News as referenced in the ASCD Smartbrief for April 24. This article focuses on the business aspects of media convergence, but what about the educational implications? 1:25:41 PM     [comment []];[]

Winners? One of the articles in the latest issue of Biblia's Warrior Librarian Weekly is about the books nominationed [sic] in the Books for Older Readers category for the Australian Children's Book Council (CBC) Book of the Year Awards. Biblia is pretty harsh in her assessment of these books, but she's also pretty witty, as usual. 12:47:14 PM     [comment []];[]

Getting Personal in an Online Course: Listening to Voices When we were talking with the Math Adjuncts here at OU the other day, there was a clear sense that using the Internet to do teaching was something "impersonal." There was a strongly voiced fear that any efforts to teach online - either in conjunction with a regularly scheduled class or in a fully online environment - would result in something impersonal. This was exactly the word used (and used over and over again): impersonal. [Xplana] This is a really good essay on engaging personally with students. The author points out that an online course need not be any more impersonal than a book. "Books are disembodied voices. And we don't have a problem with that, right? To me, voices matter much more than bodies." Food for thought. 12:07:36 PM     [comment []];[]