So, the mysterious strings of digits that I wrote about the other day seem to be part of a class assignment from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Students are being asked to go read and comment on blogs, and the random digits are individual student identifiers.
This makes sense given the form and content of the other comments, and makes me sorry we live in a world where my first guess regarding this was that it was some sort of con. But, you know, I was led there by gigabytes of email from ersatz Nigerian widows.
I would, however, like to send one message to whoever it is at the University of Pretoria who’s assigning students to do blog comments, which is this: It would be a good idea, in future, to send a courtesy message to the authors of the blogs you’re sending students to, so we know what’s going on. And it would be a good idea, in the future, for the students leaving these comments to clearly identify that this is what they’re doing. That way, I won’t spend weeks deleting people’s homework.
It’s not clear how much follow-up there is to any of these comments, so I’m making this a top-level blog post in hopes of getting more attention. If you’re coming here to leave a comment for school, please state that clearly, and also pass along the message to the professor who assigned this. Next time, give me some advance warning, please.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1OmkKbI
So, the mysterious strings of digits that I wrote about the other day seem to be part of a class assignment from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Students are being asked to go read and comment on blogs, and the random digits are individual student identifiers.
This makes sense given the form and content of the other comments, and makes me sorry we live in a world where my first guess regarding this was that it was some sort of con. But, you know, I was led there by gigabytes of email from ersatz Nigerian widows.
I would, however, like to send one message to whoever it is at the University of Pretoria who’s assigning students to do blog comments, which is this: It would be a good idea, in future, to send a courtesy message to the authors of the blogs you’re sending students to, so we know what’s going on. And it would be a good idea, in the future, for the students leaving these comments to clearly identify that this is what they’re doing. That way, I won’t spend weeks deleting people’s homework.
It’s not clear how much follow-up there is to any of these comments, so I’m making this a top-level blog post in hopes of getting more attention. If you’re coming here to leave a comment for school, please state that clearly, and also pass along the message to the professor who assigned this. Next time, give me some advance warning, please.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1OmkKbI
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire