Re: [tlug] The Great Mistake is thinking OOo is different [was: Why Vista Sucks]

["SL Baur" <steve@example.com>]

On 4/11/08, tlug@example.com <tlug@example.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 12 April 2008 13:35:48 Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>> As an educator ...

> I think that cut-and-paste has had both positive and negative effects on essay
>  quality.  I do not blame the negative effects solely on cut-and-paste,
>  however, as I think they reflect a change in culture and decrease in the
>  quality of education.  As for the positive effects, consider how such
>  functionality eases the burden of revision.  Students in a writing class
>  learn to make multiple drafts of an essay, and cut-and-paste allows them to
>  alter the order of sentences or paragraphs very easily.

He's put his professor's hat on and you missed the point.  In the olden days,
students had to rehandwrite stuff they found to plagiarize their homework.
Nowadays, they just cut & paste web pages they've found (and the instructor
can google the text to see where it came from when he gets suspicious of
the origin and that's what he's talking about here).

My first introduction to that came in a 7th grade social studies class when
a certain brainless student copied verbatim an encyclopedia entry for her
essay and the teacher was too illeducated to figure that out.  He gave her
special credit and had her read her paper aloud to the class.  A friend told
me, "Hey!  She copied that straight out of the encyclopedia.  I read that too!".

Later in life, my father (Professor in the Accounting Department at the local
University) used to use me as a sounding board while he was making
decisions about what to do with students he detected cheating on tests.

-sb