Last week I was extremely pleased to see that Mike’s press for more information on Turnitin.com was getting some rather public attention from the Gazette. Unfortunately the responses to concerns thus far have been less helpful than I’d hoped. The quotes in the article responding to student concerns are really a shame. That being said, It’s not unheard of to have a person’s quotes taken way out of context in the Gazette, so I still had some benefit of the doubt out there.
That benefit of the doubt has been eroded though. When Mike pursued some pretty basic and previously public information on turnitin.com at Dalhousie, he was met with a pretty heavy hammer. His request found its way all the way up to one of the Vice-Presidents offices and was dealt a more than slightly disapointing response.
Some positive things have happened as a result of this however. The fact that Mike had to ante up $25 to get to the information he needed, he opened it up to anyone who wanted to know anything about the system. This ended up broadening the scope of the FOI request quite significantly and brought out some great questions from Mike’s audience.
Also, for those interested, I’ve not yet received any response to my question sent on March 9th. That’s still only 16 days so there’s still time for a response.
Dalhousie, Turnitin.com
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1 mike // Mar 28, 2006 at 3:04 pm
They didn’t end up charging me the $25, but they are technically still permitted to charge me anywhere from $25 to thousands of dollars, depending on how much they charge me to ‘retrieve and copy’ the information. I could, under the act, be compelled to pay them by the hour for their time. I think I have made a pretty good case for why I should not have to pay.
A member of the university staff told me during an off-the-record conversation that the “wheels turn a lot slower” in a university than ours do when we start poking about an issue like this. They don’t know how to handle these inquiries because they so rarely get them. That made some sense to me - questions like ours take time because everyone expects everyone else to have the answers, and it takes a while to realize no one really knows, and even longer to pick someone to go figure out the answer.
That said, I sent my letter in December and still haven’t heard back. Chop chop.