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[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Answers to review questions in "Beginning XSLT": C
 Chris, I certainly agree with you here, Wendell. I would never want to throttle the interplay on this list in any way: the help this list has given me and many others is invaluable, and I would particularly single out Jeni Tennison and yourself as two examples of people who have been extremely helpful, to me personally as well as to the XSLT community as a whole. I guess my concern was that posting of answers to questions in a (at least potential) textbook would lead to that textbook becoming less valuable, and thus it would hurt Jeni's book's value. I'm afraid students (and their professors) do have to take some responsibility. If this list were explicitly directed and managed in support of someone's formal curriculum, I could see the reasonableness of our agreeing to observe such restrictions. As it is, I think the benefits of Lars' and Jeni's efforts in public outweigh the costs. (Especially since the cost cited is merely hypothetical and based on the idea that members of this list should be responsible for "too large a temptation for some less scrupulous student". Poor thing, unable to resist!) Yes, students and teachers have to take responsibility as well. For my classes, I've always tried to come up with questions that weren't in the books, and which I haven't asked in previous years (some frats are known for keeping files of papers from previous years, etc.). That may be easier for classes in my academic field (literature), where there is a potentially close to infinite number of questions that could be asked. And of course you're absolutely right that the bottom-line responsibility is the student's. One quick anecdote: I had a pair of students once who turned in the same paper at the same time: somehow, they must have been assuming that I didn't actually read their assignments, I guess. They didn't do too well in my class. Nevertheless, however, the amount of effort and time that is required to come up with new sets of questions (let alone new editions of textbooks) is often hard to justify against the small remuneration paid to the teachers of the world, and if it were my textbook, I'd want to maintain its value for as long as possible (even if that time is measured in Internet time). If Jeni doesn't feel that way, of course, it's her call: it's her textbook. I guess I would suggest that working with specific questions that come up in the process of working with XSLT is always fair game: this list is an invaluable resource for those (like me) who need such assistance. Even someone working on an assignment who needs help getting past one specific problem seems fine to me -- that's what TAs do anyway, of course. It's just the idea of answering all of the questions in such a way that a Google search could find them for that budding plagiarist that strikes me as likely to reduce the value of Jeni's book. If Jeni doesn't care, it's OK with me, but if it were my textbook, I'd rather answer this particular sort of question off-list instead. In any case, I don't want to belabor the point. Students have been finding ways to avoid learning for a long time, and answering a few questions on an email list won't change that. I leave it to your own senses of what's right. Another $0.02 worth. (In place of the nickel's worth of lecture on how the plagiarist is really robbing himself. :-) I could give you that lecture too! ;-) Cheers, Wendell --Chris ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Texterity ~ XML and PDF ePublishing Services ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Loschen, XML Developer Texterity, Inc. 144 Turnpike Road Southborough, MA 01772 USA tel: +1.508.804.3033 fax: +1.508.804.3110 email: loschen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.texterity.com/ XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list 
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