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TOP STORIES FOR WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 02, 2005 Community College Extends IT to Farm Workers Internet Cheating Hits U.K. Testing DOS Attacks Okay in Britain Google Resumes Book Scanning COMMUNITY COLLEGE EXTENDS IT TO FARM WORKERS The West Hills Community College District in California is using a $447,752 distance learning grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to use technology to try to bridge the digital divide in the Fresno area. The area is home to a large population of farm workers and packing house laborers, many of whom speak little or no English. The Huron Technology Center offers a variety of distance classes to laborers for no charge. Many laborers whose first language is Spanish never learned to read and write that language. At the center, they can take classes in Spanish or English and can complete high school equivalency programs. Students have the option of pursuing their education beyond high school and can earn bachelor's degrees through the program. Alternatively, they can take selected classes to improve particular skills or classes that simply interest them for the sake of learning. Students can take advantage of the program at a number of locations in the area, and facilities are being upgraded to allow for video and audio conferencing with local universities, expanding the options available to students in the program. Fresno Bee, 1 November 2005 http://www.fresnobee.com/local/story/11424054p-12168021c.html INTERNET CHEATING HITS U.K. TESTING Examiners for British standardized tests are reporting increasingly obvious examples of cut-and-paste cheating on exams, a problem they attribute both to student behavior and to excessive help from instructors. For one exam in English, sample essays were widely known to be available online, and examiners found "some quite serious instances of blatant copying of material" in completed tests. A number of students evidently copied large sections of material from the Internet and simply pasted them into their exams, surprising examiners by the lack of any effort to disguise their actions. Tests are reviewed by schools before they are submitted to exam boards, which said the examples of obvious cheating not noticed by the schools were shocking. Schools are allowed to provide "scaffolding" or an outline to students to help organize their thoughts. In many cases, however, examiners reported finding student responses so similar that they were difficult to distinguish. According to exam boards, school officials are providing so much assistance to students as to constitute "a kind of mass plagiarism." BBC, 2 November 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4399590.stm DOS ATTACKS OKAY IN BRITAIN A British court has acquitted a teenager of unauthorized data modification and tampering with systems, charges stemming from a denial-of-service (DOS) attack that he allegedly launched against a former employer. The teen was charged under a section of the Computer Misuse Act (CMA), which was enacted in 1990. In the end, the trial hinged on the question of whether DOS attacks are a crime under the CMA, not on whether the attack had taken place. District Judge Kenneth Grant ruled that because the CMA does not specifically address DOS attacks, the actions of the defendant cannot be considered as violating any British law. Many in the United Kingdom have called for an update of the CMA to reflect changes in the past 15 years, and this ruling will add fuel to the fire for such revision. ZDNet, 2 November 2005 http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5928471.html GOOGLE RESUMES BOOK SCANNING After temporarily halting its book-scanning project in response to complaints from authors and publishers, Google has resumed scanning texts for its Print Library Project. The company has been working to convince copyright holders that the project does not simply constitute one huge copyright violation, but so far it has had little success. At least two lawsuits have been filed protesting the scanning, and groups representing authors and publishers continue to voice strong opposition to the program. Adam Smith, senior business product manager for Google Print, said that with the resumption of scanning, Google will focus initially on public domain books or those that are not in wide circulation. "We're starting with library stacks that mostly contain older and out-of-circulation books," said Smith. "That said," he continued, "we want to make all books easier to find, and as we get through the older parts of the libraries we'll start scanning the stacks that house newer books." Internet News, 1 November 2005 http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3560661 ***************************************************** EDUPAGE INFORMATION To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your settings, or access the Edupage archive, visit http://www.educause.edu/Edupage/639 Or, you can subscribe or unsubscribe by sending e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To SUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE Edupage YourFirstName YourLastName To UNSUBSCRIBE, in the body of the message type: SIGNOFF Edupage If you have subscription problems, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ***************************************************** OTHER EDUCAUSE RESOURCES The EDUCAUSE Resource Center is a repository for information concerning use and management of IT in higher education. 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