I was prompted today by a morning show to checkout a website called LivePerson.com where you can be an online professional accessible to those needing your services. I thought, how cool, you could make a little money on the side, another way for me to market my services instead of just waiting for someone to happen upon my website.
It turns out, that most of the reviews I checked out indicated that these "professionals" are writing research papers and completing projects for students; literally writing programs for the computer programming students.
One alerting note is that a "professional" was accused by a reviewer of copying script from ANOTHER site and charging for it as if he had created it; keeping the reviewer in a loop of plagiary. . . that's what he/she gets right?
As indicated in a previous post, this generation of learners seem very "clicky", "wiki" and "copy/paste" oriented. (See post 2/17/09 "Technically Speaking . . .")
Shame on us. Shame on LivePerson.com for not filtering such actions. You can't control everything and everyone, but for goodness sakes, control the controllables. Have policy and procedures in place so that users know that you don't promote such actions.
Educators need to be aware of the world and resources available to learners and become filters themselves.
TIP:
Have students begin papers, scripting, programming, etc IN CLASS or SYNCHRONOUSLY as you observe and get a feel of their writing style and understanding of applications. Eventually you will develop a sense of the learners abilities and short-comings that will aid you in judging the authenticity of projects and assignments as they are completed.
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