A first-year student at Ryerson University faced an academic misconduct hearing this month for alleged 'cheating' over Facebook. Chris Avenir was 'caught' moderating a study group for students enrolled in a chemistry course.

    When did this become a crime? Students at most universities (including Ryerson, I know for a fact), have department-endorsed study rooms where students come and go at will, swapping notes and exchanging solutions. This is virtually the same thing.

    Thankfully, Avenir wasn't expelled, but in what I view to be a gross injustice, he was given an F on an assignment and a note in his permanent record, stating he was disciplined. And they're touting this as a huge victory for students at Ryerson, because he could have faced 147 counts of academic misconduct instead.

    There is a huge problem here, and it doesn't have to do with cheating online. The problem is that Avenir's chemistry professor insisted that students work independently.

    The expectation that students work on their own, in a vacuum, to solve problems and complete assignments belongs to a model of learning that became obsolete in the 19th century. No student is an island anymore, and nobody gets anywhere meaningful in complete isolation.

    The professor, and likely the entire Faculty Appeals Committee at Ryerson, belong to an era where independent work was still valued. They also belong to an era where talking pictures were all the rage, computers were giant machines that filled entire rooms and took 5 hours to perform calculations on punchcards, and people still paid typists by the page to run off copies of their theses.

    See a problem here? These people have no business shaping educational policy at a 21st century post-secondary institution. Their values are out of place, and so are their conceptions about education.

    If anything, the 21st century will be all about collaborative learning and problem solving. It will be about groups of students working together, pooling all their resources, to tackle problems an entire order of complexity higher than any of them could solve alone. Good educational policy should reflect this. It should encourage students to ask each other for solutions, not penalize them with draconian policies when they're caught doing what they've been doing for at least 2 decades already.

    In an era where one of our world's foremost minds has no qualms about posting his life's work online, and calling on mathematicians, physicists and particle theorists to read, refine and augment it, you would think that a few stodgy professors at a university claiming to be at the cutting-edge of applied sciences might want to rethink their stance on collaboration.

    They're probably too busy trying to open an email attachment in WordPerfect format.

(By the way, thanks, CBC, for the wonderful site re-design, that offers no formatting-stripped print option. I guess I missed the memo when this became acceptable practice for reputable online news sources...)

    Leopard has been a huge step forward in a lot of ways for me - it's made me an even more efficient and effective computer user. But something has been bothering me consistently ever since I upgraded months ago, and it concerns the usability of iCal version 3.

    I use iCal on a regular basis, both as a schoolteacher and a university student. On Tiger it was extremely easy to create events and access / edit information related to them. I'd often have to make changes to the time of an event, or its recursion settings, or its notes. If the event drawer was visible, changing any of these things involved at most two clicks.

    In Leopard, however, not only do I need to double click on an event after it's been created to view it, I next have to click on the 'Edit' button, and then click once more on the element I wanted to change. In addition to all these clicks, the event editing callout never appears in the same place twice, which means a different mouse motion is needed each time. These features violate a number of interface design principles - recognition over recall, consistency, flexibility & efficiency of use, and user freedom.

    Conversely, the events drawer seems to me to be an excellent interface design decision: it allows users to access events in the same way, in the same location, in any view; it merges viewing with editing in a convenient and intuitive way; it doesn't cover up other events in neighboring cells during viewing or editing; and it offers a much more spacious area to display event information.

    As far as interface design goes, it's obvious to me that the better event editing interface is in iCal on Tiger. I'm sure there are even better solutions out there, though I don't pretend to know what they might look like; nevertheless, I'm convinced that what replaced the event drawer in Leopard is a step backward for usability. Using iCal has become a frustrating chore, and an uncharacteristically unpleasant step in my workflow. Please bring back the event drawer and its intuitive design, or alternatively, an even more innovative interface.

    Ever since I switched to the Mac platform, working on even the most mundane tasks has become a pleasure. The only real exception is when I'm in the iCal environment.

    I hope that, in the future, I won't need to qualify this statement. Thank you for all the work you've done to make my life easier. Keep up the innovation, and thanks for reading.

    Best regards,

    Ari.

    For now, here's something I wrote for my technology methods class, in response to the following discussion question:

    I could take this opportunity to go off on institutionalized unions, for fragmenting the labour force within the same industry by selectively representing labourers. I could point out the fact that we're living in such an affluent society that even the so-called working class can afford to hire someone else to do its bidding. Heck, I could even point out the similarities between what's going on here and the active recruiting of American soldiers from urban ghettos to fight on behalf of the upwardly-mobile American middle class. But I'm sure you get the point.

    You know, just out of disgust, I think I'll tip my hat to the developers here. If these carpenters are too lazy to man their own pickets, would you want to hire them to build your low quality, cookie-cutter subdivision? I sure wouldn't. Lazy carpenters.