Our English department is undergoing Program Review right now, and I'm the chair of this "enjoyable" activity. Anyway, our committee has been going over the program review questions and deciding how to present the material to the rest of the faculty. One of the questions has to do with goals for the next three to five years. I wonder what the department would say if one goal would be to have all on-campus composition classes offered only in computer classrooms. If we believe that computers assist students in the writing process, then are we doing about 50% of our students disservice by not giving them the opportunity to take a writing class in a computer classroom? I'd be interested to know how many colleges in the country ONLY offer writing classes in computer classes now. I'm sure there are faculty who have never taught in the computer classroom who might have cow at the thought of teaching all future classes in such an environment.

Well, after a day or so, the SafeAssign feature of Blackboard suddenly came to life and began providing reports on student papers. The results, however, left something to be desired when compared with Turnitin.com. Here's the main use for me as I see these "plagiarism detection" tools: I simply want students to be able to look at their reports and see any matches that might have been made to the sources that they're using in their papers. If the match is exact, the student needs to make sure that he or she was quoting. If the student was "paraphrasing" that information and it was a match, then some revision is clearly needed with that "paraphrase." Also, if a paper comes up with a ton of matches to different sources, that may also signal to students that they're using way too much info from outside sources in their paper. So, I see SafeAssign as more of a teaching tool like grammar check than something to catch cheaters. But how good is the product when about 75% of the papers in my Comp 1 class came back with 0% matches even though the papers contained quotations and paraphrases from electronic sources? My conclusion: SafeAssign has a very limited database selection in comparison with Turnitin.com.