Thankyou

[cazie]

Would just like to thank those that gave me great help and advice on my question about civil war it is greatly appreciated!

Those who took great delight in their attempts to offend with their spite and sarcasm i can only say bless ya what nice lives you must lead

[shammydodger]

Cazie

I hope you are not including me as one of those meant in the second part of your post. As a former teacher, I know how difficult it can be to offer advice without overstepping the boundaries into doing the work for someone. I was attempting to help by pointing you in the right direction without doing precisely that. Others, I know, will have been of more overt help. I'm glad that you found the help that you desired. :)

[alfiebrady]

Can I just ask you cazie, was it a homework question that you were asking?

[WaldoMcFroog]

I'm sorry. It's just that in my day you had to do your own research or it was called cheating. I'm just old, I guess.

[waimarie]

Hi Waldo, it seems to me that cazie was doing just that, research. What else is research except investigation by looking and asking questions??

[jake-the-peg]

It's irrational I know but I think people (myself included sometimes) get a bit offended when somebody posts what appears to be an assignment question with no explanation or preamble so:

"What were the causes of WWI" is likely to get a less positive response than " I've got an assignment on the causes WWI and I'm a bit stuck can anybody help?"

[jno]

Yes, I think asking people for help is legitimate research. In fact I wish I'd had a resource like this in my student days. Of course a good teacher would give this sort of advice - but not all teachers were good. It seems to me Waldo that often the first step is the hardest - trying to get an overall grasp of which way the answer will go and sorting out the salient points from the less relevant ones. Cazie got that sort of answer and would have gone on (I hope) to answer the question in detail himself/herself. I think that's fair enough. And saying thanks is nice too.

[WaldoMcFroog]

Sorry, but I disagree that it was research. It wasn't 'Have you any suggestions where I might look for the information to answer x?' but 'What is the answer to question x?'.

Very different. One supposes that the requester will assess the found information and synthesize a response from relevant information, the other gets other people to determine relevance.

Put it this way, if you did what Cazie did in a university paper and were found out, your answer would categorically be disqualified.

Google is a very powerful tool and it would be simple to amass a range of sources very quickly.

[jake-the-peg]

So asking for peoples input is cheating unless they put it on a web page and you find it on Google?

What if I'd written an article on this and gave her a link to it?

What if it wasn't an article but an example answer to an exam question?

I think you may be in danger of tying yourself in ethical knots here Waldo!

[WaldoMcFroog]

I don't feel I am, Jake!

I'm currently preparing a masters dissertation, so am pretty well up on the plagiarism and unauthorised collaboration guidelines, and this would definitely breach them.

[jasperthomas]

WALDO

So long as Cazie didn't take your answers personally and took the support she got from others, she will have found it useful !

[jake-the-peg]

Surely it would only be plagurism if it was reproduced pretty much verbatem without acknowlegement.

Perhaps that's the crux of the matter, you assumed that that would be what would happen and I assumed it would not?

[WaldoMcFroog]

It would be the unauthorised collaboration that would do it, rather than plagiarism.

[jasperthomas]

Waldo

If your doing a Masters degree there must be an element of Research involved Cazie is looking for Information to assist her with a problem, getting on your high horse about her approach is rather sad.

[WaldoMcFroog]

I'm terribly sorry to have upset you with my harst comments, Jasper.

[jno]

this does raise interesting questions about education Waldo...

I recall from my schooldays three or four of us would regularly get together to do French translation, haggling over what would be the best way of saying something in French. Sometimes we'd disagree with the consensus translation of a particular phrase and stick with our own preference; but in general we'd hand in translations that were about 95% identical.

Our teacher hated it; he'd threaten to fail us, or assure us we'd fail external exams because we 'weren't doing our own work'. (In the end he didn't; we all passed and became useful, law-abiding, responsible and well-paid citizens, except me.)

He seemed to think education was some sort of monastic exercise in self-reliance. We thought we were learning the value of collaborative effort... and learning French, which was presumably the object of the exercise. I still think he was wrong. Sitting in a schoolroom or a library is just one way of learning things. Asking the opinion of others is another - it's what we do often enough in real life, after all. (If it's not what we do in exams, so much the worse for exams.)

Discuss.

[shammydodger]

Jno

Hmm, I know what you mean. There is nothing wrong with groups getting together and discussing subjects, answers etc. It is all part of the educational process. Where a teacher ought to draw the line (and I did this several times) is when it is quite clear that 2 or more pupils/students have collaborated so closely that their answers are word-for-word copies, including the bits that are wrong. A pupil needs to be encouraged to present work in their own words, not the words of a fellow pupil (whether or not that fellow pupil is deemed to be brighter.)

[jno]

why so, shammy? If correcting one pupil who's got it wrong will teach her/him how to get it right, why wouldn't the same correction teach them all? You're hinting, perhaps, that one person did the work and in return for cigarettes (or whatever is currency these days) simply let others copy it. I can't defend that, except in terms of market forces, but it's clearly not what cazie was up to here.

But in cases of genuine collaboration, such as I was involved in, we'd simply have accepted that we were all wrong, and learnt accordingly. Again, this simply reflects real-life situations: sometimes, you're all wrong, and you all learn from your mistakes. Regrettable, but not unethical. My intention was never particularly to 'present things in my own words'. It was to learn. If others did it better than me, I'd try to learn from them.

[WaldoMcFroog]

My feelings are much the same as the physicist Richard Feynman's; Checking the following link and start at the paragraph "Mr. Feynman asked a similar question...":

http://www.thenanotechnologygroup.org/index.cf m?content=120

That's what I feel is happening here and why education should be about testing an individual; it is supposed to teach you how to learn in addition to telling you what you should know.

[jno]

Waldo I think there's a distinction to be made between science (and mathematics), disciplines that involve observation and deduction, and artier subjects (such as French or history) that depend on flakier stuff like language and interpretation. cazie wasn't asking anyone for a formula to measure how fast a ball rolls - though I suspect if that had been the case, users would have provided it without a second thought. The original question seems to be asking for a steer in the right direction, and that's what was provided. I'm startled that this could be thought of as improper in any way. Did you never ask your mother for help with your homework?

[shammydodger]

Jno

No, I wasn't hinting anything of the kind. One of the surest ways a teacher has of measuring how much a pupil has understood the work is to read their own words. That is more difficult to measure when one receives verbatim copies and, ultimately, makes it harder to identify and rectify weaknesses. I see nothing wrong with groups getting together, brainstorming, explaining to each other etc. Indeed, it ought to be encouraged, not only for the purely educational aspects but for the social aspects, too.