Recycling or academic development

Abstract

Educators argue about uploading students’ projects to the Internet. Does this support plagiarism or the opposite, preventing copying and enabling the development of student projects? Do students recycle old projects? Or do they go further by using their colleague's experience and learning. In our presentation of the project "Science Activities Database", we will discuss this dilemma. During a course in science education at the Kibbutzim College of Education, students prepared and presented a project of scientific activities as "a learning center". They uploaded their projects to a personal web site linked to the main course web-site. The projects included digital pictures of their activity center, instructional guidelines and general objectives of the center. The students who created the site were proud of their product and of the fact that it was available on the web. Students who participated in the following courses found the database as a helpful resource for their primary research and as a source for deriving ideas. Students were exposed to their colleagues' projects and used them to improve and better their own work. Since the course was taught by five teachers in eight groups, the database served as a tool for the teachers to view work done in other teachers' classes. A primary evaluation was conducted, and it seems that the campus benefited from the documentation on the web. According to our experience and the students' evaluation it prevented plagiarism and initiated progress.