Since students will share their assignments no matter what, just as well teach them how to do it right

Post-vacation behaviour among Danish surfers exhibits significant growth in knowledge-offering sites. The two dedicated “social homework-sites” studienet.dk and studieportalen.dk grew with 114 and 63 percent respectively. The offering of studienet.dk and studieportalen.dk is to share written asignments and general knowledge with each other, targetting students in schools, highschools and higher education.

With 15.000 respectively 49.000 visits both sites still have some way to go to reach pre-vacations levels, but then again colleges and universities haven’t started yet, and the schools allready started has only just begun. Written assignments are not really due yet.

The growth pattern is not, however, restricted to social homework-sites. Also denstoredanske.dk (a wikipedialike site enhanced with expert editors), bibliotek.dk (the central portal for Danish libraries) and euo.dk (the Danish Parliaments site on information about the European Union) shows larger-than-average growth rates on 24, 18 and 40 percent growth in number of visits, respectively.

You can find the data, methodology and background in “Digital view: Life on the Danish internet august 10-16 2009″, which I’ve just published.

Since students will share their assignments no matter what, just as well teach them how to do it right
Social homework-sites like studienet.dk and studieportalen.dk invariably sparks allegations of modern-day students transscribing reports without in any way reflecting on the substance, let alone learning from, the given assignment. The internet is widely feared as a vehicle for production of lazy and dumb students, who eventually will face severe difficulties when they are to perform real jobs in the real world, if not before.

To others the ability to gather and process information in order to answer specific questions is seen as the task sine-qua-non in todays societies. As transparence trancends into even greater areas of business, government and private institutions, the ability yourself to find answers to specific hypothesis becomes of uttermost importance it is argued.

Instead of continuing the rather fruitless discussion, note should be taken of the fact, that students today de facto are engaged in a wide variety of knowledge-sharing services, as the social homework-sites, the denstoredanske.dk and other wikipediastyle sites and genuine roadmap to information-sites like bibliotek.dk and euo.dk.

Some pupils no doubt cheat on their assignments. Most such hampering is however easily detected by teachers, and efforts should be directed to developing forms of assignments that stays clear of the worst tempting-to-cheat while at the same time encouraging students to engage in collaborative endavours into the world of open data laid bare by the internet.