I saw this short article about students in the UK outsourcing their IT homework assignments to India.  Thomas Lancaster, a Birmingham City University computing lecturer, has led the effort to catch these cheaters.

I first hear about this last October when Fred Looft, head of the ECE department at WPI told me he received an email from a professor in the UK saying he suspected a WPI student might be cheating this way. Allegedly a WPI student had posted a project inquiry on one of the job boards and his academic email address was the tip off.

I think that email Fred received must have been from Lancaster.  Fred said he had “a talk” with the student and the project inquiry was withdrawn. 

Clearly cheating should not be tolerated.  But I also shared a different opinion with Fred. 

What if students posted programming projects online, not to have them implemented, but to get an estimate of the cost and effort required if they were implemented?  Actually, that’s not completely fair to the freelancers and vendors that might respond. So why not have them manage small projects for a few hundred dollars with global programmers? 

I think we ought to start teaching our students how to manage programming projects as well as coding them.    

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Location-based Services or LBS is predicted to be the next big thing in mobile applications. The new Google Android mobile platform support it as well as the new iPhone. There’s no telling what new GPS-based mashups we are likely to see.

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Here’s a good article that gives you an overview of the new OpenSocial standard from Google. Eventually, developers should be able to write applications that access social network connections of users from multiple social networking websites. Noticeably missing from the list is Facebook at this point in time.

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This article in CIO magazine seems to think so. Rather than a platform for entrepreneurs to create new products Google Apps may be positioned as a big company productivity enhancement tool.

Maybe. The article reports resistance from IT departments that consider Google Apps more of a consumer product.

Maybe it is best used as an easy way to prototype your new web application. If you don’t mind using Python. . .

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In the last few weeks I attended high school and college graduations for two of my children and then my own 30-year college reunion. For the graduates, it is a scary and invigorating time for looking ahead and setting new goals (right kids!?). At my reunion it was a time of looking back over the past. For me looking back included some regrets, some things I would rather not remember and poor recollections of people and events, alas, that I have forgotten (you’re getting old Dad!).

Most goal setting exercises also recommend you look back, but from the perspective of several years in the future. For example, imagine you are three years in the future and looking back at your life with a great deal of satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment. Then ask yourself, “What are the things that happened to make you feel that way?” These are then the goals you should aim to accomplish – new home, new relationship, new business, whatever.

How about you? Have you set good goals for yourself and your software business? In 2011, will you look back and say you accomplished all you set out to do?

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