I couldn't let this one pass by without comment.

    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...)

    It's no secret - I don't write enough on my own. Someday I'll overcome my perfectionism and take a more relaxed, casual attitude towards writing. Hopefully soon.

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

    This is simply an all-around good idea - probably one of the better ones I've come across. And it came from a grade 12 student, too. A year from now, 10 high schools across Toronto will be outfitted with solar panels and windmills to generate electricity, with the surplus being sold back to the province.
    When the government drops the ball with education (as it has a history of doing in Ontario), public schools generally fall to the bottom rung of the upward-mobility ladder. This encourages the affluent middle-class peons to pull their children out and stick them in private schools where wealth and entitlement run as rampant as social anxiety disorder. While these childrens' grades are being inflated, their parents' money is no longer being siphoned through fundraising drives into the holes that property-tax revenue can't fill.
    Public schools can just accept that they're on the losing end in this vicious cycle, or actively take steps to provide for their students. And I don't necessarily mean by putting MBA graduates in the principals' offices, or by requiring each school board to hire a 'Business Supervisory Officer' to oversee insidious and exploitative private-sector partnerships.
    Let the schools compete. Let school boards accrue capital. Show students the profits. Help them think like the winning class of this historical moment. Maybe they'll feel pride. Maybe they won't feel the need to send their kids to a junior rotary club.
    Oh, and helping the environment doesn't hurt either.

    I went to a forum on post-secondary education this evening, hosted by the King's Day Students' Society on my campus. The guests were Darrell Dexter, Francis Mackenzie and Jamie Muir. The structure was as such: each official gave a five-minute opening remark, followed by two minutes rebuttal, followed by 90 minutes of questions from the floor (mainly King's students). I was somewhat disappointed that Dexter didn't manage to engage the crowd, though it was ironically amusing that the Liberal premier - forbidden from speaking about his party's platform - came across as the best speaker.
    Anyway, what I found particularly interesting about the evening was the question period that followed the half-hour of embarrassing squabbling between the Tory Minister of Education and the NDP's premier. The themes ranged from hypothetical and historical tuition freezes to the feasibility of their outright abolition; from federal and provincial government funding models for universities, to known issues of deficiency in social welfare and student loan models; even to such trivial issues as taxation on textbooks and sources of funding for infrastructure maintenance. Though I learned quite a bit from the questions and answers themselves, what I found most startling was what wasn't asked.
    It seemed that both the students and the officials had an unspoken understanding of the postsecondary institution funding model as a strictly-government enterprise: universities get funding from the province, the provinces get equalization grants from Ottawa, etc. However, the federal government and provinces also run the student loan programs, and they do so with public money only. If I had the time to stand in line by a microphone, I wish I had the chance to ask this in front of a room full of students that really didn't seem to realize that nothing should be taken for granted:
    "When I graduate this year, I will have spent in excess of $35,000 on tuition and books alone. Though I'm lucky that not all of it was borrowed funding, I will have amassed a considerable debt. Now, from my perspective, it's obvious that this debt will be paid off by the money I make from my employer. What doesn't make sense to me is, if we're such a socialist democracy, and if we openly admit that our educational policies are made based on the notion of education as training for work, why don't government officials make the link between private enterprise and student funding? If private enterprise is the institution that benefits the most from our education, why don't we see more investment in students on their part? It seems to me that the most logical, practical step to take would be to have the funding for student loans come from a pot to which private enterprise is forced to contribute as a gesture of faith in its investment. I invite the three officials at the podium to tell me how this proposal is flawed, and defend the sanctity of big business in the face of the painfully-clear relationships between enterprise and education that I've just underscored."
    Of course, it wouldn't have come out so articulate. Shame.