On blogging

I think I may have a problem here...

First thing I do when I arrive in the classroom is to write a list of assignments on the whiteboard, organized as Past Due, Due Today, Newly Assigned, and Due Next Class. This past Friday morning, I had finished posting the Past Due and Due Today items and was in the middle of writing the Newly Assigned blog post ethics topic when I had a bit of a brainwave.

The topic I had written down in my notes and on the syllabus was online file sharing. This subject is one of a handful used by most of the instructors in the department for ethics assignments. If you, like I, have been wandering around these here interwebs since the dawn of time, you will remember the whole Napster flap and resulting shutdown.

We are trying to get the students to understand that plagiarism and copyright infringement isn't ethical. I am pretty sure that, somewhere, buried deep in the dim dark corners of the college web site, is probably a disclaimer stating that if a student is caught using the college's technological resources to illegally download music files, the school will throw them under the next transit authority bus without blinking. Despite the warnings and threats of expulsion, incarceration, death, and dismemberment, students are students.

Enough said?

Which brings me back to the ethics assignment for this week. I was dreading facing another round of blogs posts wherein students attempt to claim that pirating mp3s is actually beneficial to the recording artist since it increases the band's exposure and that sells more albums and that the music industry really needs to chill out about the whole issue. As I was writing the assignment on the whiteboard, literally, as I was putting pen to melamine, I changed track, making a spur of the moment decision to have the students research the current status of the e-book market with respect to file sharing and e-piracy. I asked them to address the problems of consumers being locked-in to single content providers and digital file lending.

Upon questioning, most of the class was blissfully unaware of the existence of e-books, let alone the whole DRM issue and format war. It would have been nice if my students had had some idea that electronic books exist but on the flip side, now I know that they have to do actual research in order to address the assignment properly. This is good!

So, where is this problem which I think I may have?

It's in the blogging.

No, not their blogging.

My blogging.

You see, when I assign homework, I make a post on the blog I maintain for my students. Absentee students, therefore, have no excuse for not knowing what is due. Sneaky professor trek, I know.

If the class seems to have struggled with an idea during lab, the homework assignment post might be fairly involved, even to the point of becoming a step-by-step tutorial complete with screenshots. Usually, however, the blog post assignments have been short and straight-forward: one or two sentences to introduce the topic, a couple more lines outlining the ethical issue involved, and maybe a sentence or two about how to present their opinion. Wrap that all up with a due date at the bottom and there's an assignment post.

In my own defense (Chris back me up here), I had a short paragraph explaining the assignment and a few leading questions to get them started. I emailed a clipping of the post to Chris because she and I have been talking about e-readers off-line and I thought she would get a kick out of it.

Then I looked at the post again and thought, "Hmm, maybe I should expand upon this point, oh, and maybe that point, too." I started editing and revising and linking to some online references and posting pictures. Eventually, I wound up with a six paragraph, four image blog post containing over a dozen leading questions.

I am almost 100% positive that I spent more time on the assignment post than they will on their answers.

I think I may have a problem here...