Reading my copy of the November 2008 issue of American School Board Journal, I had to laugh in shared frustration with this contributor author:

For years, textbook publishers and public school officials have worried about the rising cost of textbooks. And now they’ve inadvertently passed on those costs to me–and other parents of school-aged children. I realized what was happening the other day after watching my son print out page after page of PDF files that his teacher had posted online.
Source: Del Stover, The Leading Source

Why do we persist in putting PDFs online–often simple MS Word 1-pagers–instead of simply copying-n-pasting the content into a Moodle, a wiki or a blog? The answer is tough to swallow but I heard it just today from a teacher:

I don’t know how to copy-n-paste.

Is copying and pasting such an outlawed activity in schools (e.g. plagiarism off the web) that we’re not modelling that anymore?

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