Since I was having such miserable results with SafeAssign, I finally posted a question to one of our college's listserves about the status of Turnitin. Within a day, Turnitin was again offered as a content link within Blackboard - yeah! Now we have a choice -- go with Turnitin, which has a wonderful database collection so that my students can check the status of their quotations and paraphrases, or go with SafeAssign, which has a miserable database and fails to come up with any matches. Now, if students could just elect to have their paper matched against other Internet and electronic database sources instead of also having their paper copied into Turnitin's own database, we'd have the whole intellectual property situation solved and more students and teachers could use the product without feeling that rights are being violated. For me, the benefits of Turnitin -- for both teacher and student -- still outweigh the potential intellectual property rights issue; it will be nice to see what finally happens with the lawsuits so we can move on.

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.