According to Hack College, which broke the story, the 7cubed team skipped class and challenged themselves to create seven apps in seven days. Quick Cite took about eight hours to write and is the first app to be released. More are expected to be released in the future.

The 7cubed team acknowledges that the app isn’t perfect and would like to find time to schedule future revisions. It seems the catch is that it is apparently difficult to schedule the time for them to all skip class. The ability to effectively transfer citations between styles was mentioned as one area to improve. Another challenge may be the issue of bar codes only coming into use in the 1970′s. This may hamper the app’s effectiveness with older books.

As a real-life exercise, the 7cubed team has come up with a remarkably effective app in a short amount of time. Hopefully this will encourage other students and faculty members to develop more useful apps in the near future.

The goal of this category is to provide school administrator’s with easier access to school-focused applications. This new offering is aimed at helping solve some of the unique issues faced by education institutions. These include lack of financial resources, security for a customer-base that is under 18, and the ability to access current technology. Google’s new education category is designed to offer cutting edge collaboration tools.

Here’s a quick video explaining the category:

With the creation of the Education category, Google has highlighted two significant benefits for schools.

1. Access to cutting-edge tools
2. Easy Integration

With more schools embracing Google-driven, cloud-based platforms, integration becomes a breeze. GrockIT, Aviary, LearnBoost, BrainPop, and others have lined up to provide innovative tools for teachers and students. For schools usng Gmail for student and faculty accounts, adding these applications makes real sense.

Shawn and I have been working with our IT department to provide a more robust Google apps implementation for our school. We will share more of our experiences along the way, please share yours.

The professor, David E. Pritchard, led a research team that analyzed student performance in an online homework system called MasteringPhysics.com during four different semesters. The researchers were able to measure the time spent on each question and look for suspicious work patterns. If a student took less than a minute each answering several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. “Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically required, we infer that the quick-solver group is copying the answer from somewhere,” said the researchers in a paper due out today in the free online journal Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research.

Based on later surveys of the same students, researchers found that the culprits typically copied answers from friends, by logging onto a friend’s account on the system to copy work or by getting answers via e-mail or instant message.

For veteran teachers this is hardly a surprising revelation. The complexity of cheating and plagiarism schemes has increased with the rise of technology and ability to transfer information digitally. Cellphones and other devices have made cheating easier than ever, see The Cheating Heart for an overview. Furthermore, despite the education aimed at informing students about copyright and intellectual property, it is clear that generation y and future generations seem to have a different perspective regarding copyright.

While many would point to this as indicating the need for better detection systems, real success comes from successfully encouraging students to choose not to cheat. Restrictive access to technology and more robust detection schemes may seem appealing but lead to students and teachers engaging in a never ending cycle of trying to outsmart one another. This doesn’t mean ignoring cheating or giving it a free pass. In this Web 2.0 world, it does mean, demonstrating a better way and allowing students to make choices. If unethical, according to Professor Pritchard, these choices mean that cheaters will earn the scores they deserve.

In my next article I will outline three keys to building an environment supportive of ethical decision-making. Until then I’d like to hear your comments and observations.