How We Encourage Cheating in Education

I was watching a news report this morning about students using ChatGPT that asked whether this was considered cheating. That got me to thinking about how we encourage cheating in education..

Think about it: The purpose for education is to provide the student with the foundational knowledge they need to be successful in work and life. We all want to be successful, so cheating to get there doesn’t seem to me to be a very profitable endeavor. After all, at the end of the day you still have to know how to do things in order to be successful. I used to remind my nursing students of this all the time: If you want to be a good nurse you’re going to need to actually know what you’re doing. Cheating might get you through the class, it might even allow you to pass the licensing exam but the real test is whether you can function in the real world. It’s a hell of a lot less stressful to actually know what you’re doing when in an emergency than to try to wing it because you lack the knowledge to actually perform correctly.

Why I Think Crypto is Stupid

I recently read an article on Wired about Faruk Ozer, The CEO of Turkey’s biggest Cryptocurrency business. That article outlines how tens of thousands of Turkish people were victims of Ozer’s theft of their crypto wallets and all of their assets. The thing that stood out to me is how easy it was for him to simply download their accounts onto a thumb drive and be off with their money. In the wake of the crypto crimes of Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) and Changpeng Zhao (Binance) I fail to understand why anyone would trust their financial assets and future to something so easily stolen. Unlike banks, there is no FDIC insurance. Unlike stocks and bonds there is no physical document to show ownership. (Yes, I realize that most transactions exist in the ’ether’ but using a reputable trading house provides a level of safety that they are unlikely to steal your money.

My Thoughts on Competency Based Education

Competency based education has gathered quite a lot of steam over the last few years. Many universities now assert that they are competency based and promote this as somehow better than traditional education. In general, it seems that competency based education is a way of expediting the educational process whereby the student can move forward more quickly so long as the student can demonstrate competence in a subject.

I Don’t Trust Gmail. Here’s Why.

I have had an email address with Gmail for probably 20 years. I mean my email address is my name @ Gmail. No numbers, no weird abbreviations, no strange punctuations, just my firstnamelastname @gmail.com How long has it been since that was possible?

Three or four years ago I began receiving emails to my address that were clearly intended for another person with my same name. Their email was literally my email address! At first I thought it was just an glitch in the system. Later I thought perhaps they had simply mis-typed their name (maybe left out a letter or something) or had made up a name so that they did not get spam emails. However, many of those emails were for legitimate purposes – receipts from Tractor Supply or from their cell phone provider. What gives?

My Technology

A common discussion in any of the technology forums is which platform is better. Some argue that Windows is best, others that Mac is and others, still, argue that Linux beats them all. What is my take? Well… it depends.

###I am Operating System Agnostic

Truly, I am. I have all three operating systems in use in my home as I write this.

I started my technology back in 1984 or 1985 with a Commodore 128. It didn’t take long at all to capture my imagination and soon I was doing some Basic programming, playing games, writing papers, etc all on that little computer. I’m not sure my wife was all that impressed. But, boy, I sure was!