subramn@cs.utexas.edu (K. R. Subramanian) (03/19/90)
There seems to be objections to people asking for software or suggestions on the grounds of academic dishonesty. The advantages of communication of ideas and suggestions between different researchers and programmers over the network easily outweigh the disadvantages. Even if the said person was given the source code he/she still has the responsibility of getting it to work and tailor make it to his/her homework. In general, if there is some debugging to be done in this process, he/she will probably end up going through the entire program and in the process get some level of understanding of how it works. Isnt that the purpose of homeworks?? In my experience, I have found its a lot easier to write your own code to do small pieces of code writing. The time spent in staring at the other person's code, getting used to his/her style and sophistication in programming is not very small. K.R.Subramanian Dept. of Computer Sciences The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Tx - 78712.
pun@cui.unige.ch (PUN Thierry) (03/20/90)
As to the original posting by Ms. Dodd from Gallaudet College,
I agree with Eugene Fiume in seeing no essential difference between
paper and electronic information support. And .. everyone rapidly
finds out that basic knowledge is much more easily extracted out of
books than out of Usenet (at least in 1990).
In the courses I teach (*), whatever their level and the audience,
my goal is to train students to face "real world" situations.
This in particular implies that they have access to whatever
resources they can find, for homework as well as for examinations.
Since exams are personal and of limited duration, they have no
time to try out the net. But why not.
My feeling is that it is to the teachers to adapt to the changing
environment, rather than to students to be constrained by rapidly
obsolete rules. This necessitates careful thinking of examination
questions and of homework. My hope is that globally speaking,
training will be better as well as teacher's sweat production lower.
Thierry Pun, Computer Vision Group
Computing Science Center, U-Geneva
12, rue du Lac, CH-1207 Geneva SWITZERLAND
Phone : +41(22) 787 65 82; fax: +41(22) 735 39 05
E-mail: pun@cui.unige.ch, pun@cgeuge51.bitnet
(*) image analysis and synthesis, computer vision, introductory
computer science for biologists.