As more and more students choose online courses either as alternatives to the traditional college experience or as a supplement, a lot of colleges have started to worry about how to prevent these students from cheating on remotely administered exams. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the U.S. Congress, too, is concerned about this and has added language into a part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act that encourages schools to fight cheating more effectively.

Technology

While the legislation will not pass until later this year, a number of schools are already looking at high-tech solutions to proctor online exams for them. The most sophisticated of them is the Securexam Remote Proctor, a small device which features a fingerprint scanner, microphone, and a video camera with a 360 degree view. In order to start an exam, students have to prove their identity by fingerprint and during the exam, while the microphone and video look out for anything suspicious like an unknown voice or movement on the camera.

While Securexam advertises its system as promoting 'integrity and convenience,' the device looks to be anything but convenient. It only works on Windows machines and only with Internet Explorer. Given how popular Apple's computers are with students, this clearly creates problems for a large number of students.

The Remote Proctor is currently being tested by Troy University and costs around $150.

Other programs, like Kryterion's Webassessor, use a somewhat simpler solution based on webcams and biometrics. Webassessor users human proctors that watch up to 50 students each and its software analyses a student's typing style and alerts the proctors if there is a change (like when somebody else has taken over).

Challenge Questions

Axicom Corporation, which is being used by quite a few universities for their online courses, uses personal 'challenge' questions to establish the identity of a student. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, these questions are based on data Axicom gathers from publicly available databases such as criminal files and property records (surely, nobody would want their friends to have to answer a challenge question about whether they were first arrested for arson in 1995 or 1997).

Privacy

All of these systems carry a good number of privacy issues with them, but they are also all relatively expensive. Then, of course, there are questions if cheating on online exams is even a real problem. As the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, most teachers in online courses rely less on major exams and more on projects and group work anyway.

Also, no matter what the technological solution is, chances are that an intrepid cheater will always find a way around this system. Should Congress decide to make systems like this mandatory, however, then we will soon see a whole new market open up and surely other companies will come up with more solutions. The question that remains, however, is if there ever really was a problem in the first place.

What is your take on this? Do you have experience with these systems? Do you think online students need to be monitored more closely?

Photo by Flickr user dcjohn.

Sometimes you just want to blow up your Flickr images. There's nothing better than a fullscreen display of your latest photographed memories. While Flickr's slideshow is great, you won't be able to stretch your images to fullscreen while viewing them. Well now that's about to change with Blow Up a Flickr web app.

Beautiful Images in Fullscreen Mode

Blow Up is aiming to offer "presentation quality for users and portability for developers." Using the Flickr API, Senior Interface Developer Jonathan Greacen has created a new viewing experience for Flickr users that may leave you wondering why it was never an option on Flickr to begin with. Blow Up allows your images to be seen in fullscreen mode while still maintaining your image quality.

The service is free and doesn't require anything put your Flickr username to get started. Other options include being able to download the Blow Up to display your Flickr images on your website. Blow Up all your images including the ones in your albums. However, for images that are set to private, Blow Up will not be able to grab them.

A New Type of Slideshow

Blow Up is a nifty new slideshow in the market of Flickr apps that serves up your images fast and easy. No password required, no downloads necessary. Just get in and get what you came for in fullscreen.

For anyone who uses multiple calendars, you know that one of the big issues that's being addressed by numerous applications is getting your calendars to sync up with each other. We've covered some solutions to this problem before, but we had not seen a truly integrated offering that allowed you to sync up a work calendar in desktop software with an onlne calendar without need of a third-party app of some sort...that is, until yesterday. It seems that Microsoft has finally given the people what they want and have provided a calendar sync tool that actually makes all of Microsoft's calendaring programs work together.

Outlook Connector Beta

The new tool providing this functionality is the latest version of the Outlook Connector public beta. This downloadable software works to sync Outlook's calendar with Windows Live Hotmail's Calendar with the Windows Live Calendar Beta. Such an integrated offering is a surprise considering that Microsoft is a company that's sometimes known for launching what are perceived as too-similar, parallel solutions (think FolderShare, SyncToy, SkyDrive, Mesh).

The previous version of this connector allowed you to sync email and contacts data between Outlook and Hotmail for free, but calendar sync required a subscription service. With this new version, however, calendar sync is now free and it includes the ability to work with Live Calendar beta. And because Live Calendar also supports calendar sharing, those shared calendars will sync back to Outlook, too.

For someone who uses an Outlook calendar at work, keeps a personal calendar in Hotmail, and perhaps has a shared family calendar in Live Calendar, this new sync tool will be incredibly useful. Whether you're online or offline, all your calendars are available from one place: Outlook.

The release of this connector is a great example of Microsoft's firm commitment to their S+S (Software + Services) architecture. They intend for software to be the hub for your activities with web services available as an additional layer. S+S combines the power of the internet with the richness that is still, as of today, found mostly in desktop software (although web software is quickly closing that gap). This is an entirely different mindset than what Google and other web companies are offering - in fact, it's just the opposite. Google Calendar, for example, will be implementing Google Gears which is software that makes a web app available offline and then syncs your changes when you connect to the internet again. The battle between these two similar, but opposing, methodologies will play out over the coming months. The ReadWriteWeb audience of early adopters and web developers tends to think the winner will be web apps in the end, but the truth of the matter is that it's still too early in the game for either side to declare victory just yet.

Of course, the missing piece to the Microsoft solution is the fact that Outlook (or any) desktop software isn't necessarily available on every PC that you own. However, considering their new Live Mesh platform isn't designed to just handle file sync, but is designed to handle application sync too, it's easy to see what direction they're headed. Microsoft is still betting on software - they're just using the web as a tool which makes everything work together more seamlessly than it did before .

Do you think S+S is a viable solution for computing's future? Or do you think today's web apps should be focused on implementing offline sync? Or can these two opposing agendas co-exist? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

You may remember a project called Enso, a software program developed by Humanized - the same folks who brought you Songza. The program is an application launcher which provides you with a different way to navigate and interact with your computer through the use of keyboard shortcuts and typed commands. As we noted before, Enso appears to have been abandoned by the developers who created it since they were snatched up to work at Mozilla. However, the software itself was open-sourced. But now, those same developers are using the concepts brought forth by Enso to create a whole new UI for Firefox called Ubiquity.

What's Ubiquity?

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/software/Ubiquity_For_Firefox_Is_Not_An_Add_On_It_s_a_Whole_New_UI';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';The Ubiquity project aims to solve problems involving today's web applications and how we interact with them. Atul Varma describes this on his blog:

Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it's difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox's UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems. The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don't scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they're running on; and Greasemonkey doesn't prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.

To solve these problems, they're developing Ubiquity which will let you apply textual commands (called "verbs") to whatever you're looking at on your screen.

As an example, say you found a typo on a friend's blog. Instead of copying and pasting the sentence into an email, you could use the Ubiquity UI to highlight the problem text then launch Gmail's compose screen with some default information already filled in (like "From the page Aza's Thoughts:) to introduce your email.

Atul also notes that the Ubiquity interface is currently activated via hotkeys, but that's just for the time being. Their ultimate goal is to have the program more deeply integrated with Firefox so it could be accessed from UIs that already exist - like contextual menus or the AwesomeBar.

To keep tabs on the status of the Ubiquity project or to download the code, you can visit their project page here.

Do you have an iPhone? Are you a blogger? Then you're going to love this news - there's now a WordPress app for iPhone available for download from the iTunes App Store. The software lets you update your WordPress blog from anywhere. We're not forgiving Apple for that MobileMe nonsense just yet, but we have to admit, this is pretty good stuff.

WordPress on iPhone

The new WordPress App for iPhone supports both WordPress.com installations as well as self-hosted Wordpress.org blogs that are version 2.5.1 and above.

The app includes the following features:

- Embedded Safari previews of posts
- Full support for tags & categories
- Photo support for both camera phone pics and library photos
- Support for multiple blogs
- Ability to password protect a post, save as draft, or mark for later review
- Auto-recovery feature recovers posts interrupted by phone calls

You can see WordPress on the iPhone in action in the video below or check out screenshots here:

More information can be found on iphone.wordpress.org where you can review the Frequently Asked Questions and/or report issues with the application.

To download this app from iTunes, click here.

Thanks to Digital Inspiration for breaking the news.

Yesterday, the big news for the identi.ca crowd was an answer to their wishes: Identi.ca is now supported in the AIR app Twhirl. Why is the support for this open-source Twitter clone so important? For one, it makes Identi.ca that much more of a useful service, but it also shows how quickly Twhirl can adapt to add the latest and greatest online communities to its service. More importantly though, Twhirl's support for Identi.ca means you can now tap into a full, real-time social stream all from one application.

The Real-Time Social Web

With the addition of Identi.ca, Twhirl now supports for four of the most important social streaming apps: Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, and Identi.ca. These apps are different than traditional social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo, etc., because they are, for the most part, about immediate interactions. Seeing tweets, "dents," shared social streams on FriendFeed, and even updates of your friends' recorded videos (perhaps the slowest stream of the bunch) is a much different user experience than when we interact with the large application-filled social networking platforms. Instead, the new social network is always on.

That "always on" feature is exactly why social media enthusiasts are dealing with "information overload" issues. Because we're somewhat addicted to these types of interactions, we're hesitant to log off for fear of "missing something." However, for the regular user, always on social networking doesn't have to be a source of stress - it just means that when you go online, socializing with others just becomes part of the overall experience of being on the internet. For today's digital natives this extra information stream isn't worrisome, as uber-multitaksers themselves, they're more adept at dealing with "noise," so this real-time social web is just another channel from them to tune in to.

Twhirl To Get New UI

As for Twhirl, by combining access to these four always-on networks, they're establishing themselves as the go-to application for all your real-time social networking needs. And although you might feel a bit overwhelmed at the moment - especially considering each app opens a separate window - it won't be that way forever.

Johann Romefort, CTO at Seesmic, and Marco Kaiser, Twhirl's creator, have both confirmed some big changes to the Twhirl UI. Specifically, they've said that their goal is to have all accounts in one window. This update will include a "(kind of) tabbed interface," says Marco.

That makes the most sense since FriendFeed is indeed "richer" as Johann says, which means that it should get its own tab. However, he tells me that Twitter and Identi.ca's streams will be combined into one stream. How much longer will you have to wait to see what these changes look like? The ETA on this update is before the end of the summer (which includes September, says Marco).

Conclusion

Once these streams because accessible from only one window, the value of Twhirl will skyrocket. Some people have trouble using Twhirl now because of the numerous windows required, so they simply use it for their Twitter needs. But with everything easily accessible from tabs, Twhirl will easily be the real-time Twitter client of choice, especially when you also take into account its other excellent features like built-in search (Twitter Search, formerly Summize), URL-shortening services, and direct posting of photos, to name a few. Killer app? Yes definitely....Unless you just don't care about the social web...in which case, maybe I can just direct you here.

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