I thought my idea of making all of my old student sites Editor’s Only in order to avoid kids trying to plagiarize from old assignments would work until I realized that our good friend Google not only points to pages, it also caches them.

I just know that this is going to be an issue at some point if it isn’t already. It’s not going to be that hard for one of my students to search for key words from an assignment and come across the answers posted by one of my students earlier in the year. Even though the site itself may not be accessible, Google will oblige by displaying the page as it was created, with all of the key search terms highlighted. Nice.

I don’t have many good options here, I think. I could change every assignment every time, but some assignments really can’t be changed in any appreciable way because of the content involved. I could do a Google search of one line from the answer to every assignment to see if there are any hits, but that would be far too time consuming. I could have kids hand in some assignments on paper and only do their reporting and beat work online, but that kind of defeats the purpose, at least in the way I envisioned this. I know I’m talking about maybe only 20% of what I do, but it’s still enough to get me thinking. (BTW, my original thoughts on this here.)

Publishing is a wonderful thing, but it also opens up many new doors for abuse. I’d love to say that it’s nothing to worry about, but it is. Right now, for many of the kind of read and answer questions types of assignments I give, I can’t be 100% sure that a student’s work is his own. Thoughts or ideas welcomed as always.

Ryan raises some really interesting ideas about the uses of RSS and trackback and how they might work in the classroom. The ultimate here from a teaching standpoint would obviously be an aggregated page of student work that was somehow sortable by either student or assignment or, preferably, both. Even more, it would be great to be able to comment back to student sites via the aggregator (which I think is something that Radio can do but not Manila(?)).

Even more, however, is the use of the aggregator by students to follow each other’s work. I alluded to this before when I was thinking about putting my students into smaller working groups, a plan I’m going to implement this week. The desired effect is to get students to learn from the process of others by tuning in more closely, and to give feedback in the collaborative group style. Not that they can’t just click through to the three or four sites in their group, but I’d like them to see how easy this new concept of information gathering is. I see them subscribed to the class homepage, 3/4 feeds of their workgroup, the NY Times and BBC newsfeeds, and a couple of feeds of sites that correspond to their beats. First stop every day will be the aggregator.

As always, I wish I knew more about the technology. When Ryan and Dale Pike and others say they want more control over the creation of the feed, my eyes start to glaze over. I probably should carve out some time to get half my brain around the whole RSS 2.0 thing since it sounds like it adds a lot of flexibility to the whole concept. Anyone read Ben Hammersley’s book yet?