Sorry for the long absence, folks. As I mentioned before, I was away at a conference and I’ve been spending the better part of the last couple of days trying to get caught up on that pesky day job. It ain’t easy.
While it doesn’t seems like I’ve missed much of anything on campus, I thought I’d go ahead and post this Chronicle of Higher Ed article/blog post a student of mine sent me just now: “Student Punished for Facebook Group Starts $10-Million Lawsuit.” Here are the opening paragraphs:
A Ryerson University engineering student punished for his Facebook study group has started a $10-million class-action lawsuit against the Toronto institution.
Chris Avenir faced 147 charges of academic misconduct two years ago for his Facebook group, which let engineering students “discuss/post solutions” to homework problems. The course stipulated that students had to conduct independent work. Mr. Avenir faced expulsion, but a faculty committee ruled he should instead receive a zero for one assignment and a disciplinary note in his file.
Most of the comments (so far) support the student and the value of these kinds of study groups, and quite frankly, I do too. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to encourage this kind of collaboration, discussion, and group work on these different kinds of problems. I mean, don’t we want “real” engineers to work together on problems? And wasn’t this kind of collaboration been common long before Facebook was around?
