sundries, educational edition

With a bit of luck I booked a beach weekend for us at Spring Lake. Next year maybe we'll manage the big beach trip with other people. I'm just glad we're managing to fit this in with the season ending fast and us going to Chicago and Patty needing to prepare for comps. No firm date on her departure for Cardiff yet, but we have a general sense of it being around Sept. 20.

Speaking of which, she has questions about Cardiff and such-like.

I started Rosetta Stone for German last night. I now know the word for cat.

New items up at graduate_maria. You have through this weekend.

Plagiarism lines blur in the digital age. This article annoys me, because it's another case of "THE INTERNET IS EVIL!"

While I can buy that some of this happens because, as the article says, students have grown up with "information just hanging about online" without an obvious author; you know what else has happened in the last 20 years? People thinking they deserve to pass or get good grades in college classes no matter what fuckery they commit because they paid for it; and administrators wanting to show an awesome success rate and so disallowing professors from setting actual consequences for people fucking up. If people were not given second (and third and fourth and fifth and sixth) chances on assignments, failed in classes, and kicked out of schools for plagiarism people wouldn't goddamn do it.

The Open Source textbook movement - take that Texas!

Last night we sang to the cats:

o/~ Sneaky cat, sneaky cat,
What are you up to?
Sneaky cat, sneaky cat,
You're not a spy! o/~

The Piano in the Hallway is back in the hallway.