Forget blaming it on the dog, thanks to Amazon students have a 21st century excuse for lost homework. When Amazon foolishly yanked 1984 from thousands of Kindles, Justin Gawronski’s electronic notes for a summer assignment became useless.
Now a class action lawsuit has been filed that seeks punitive damages for those affected by the deletion as well as an injunction that forbids Amazon from improperly accessing Kindles in the future. Granted, after the fallout and subsequent Bezos apology, there probably wasn’t much risk of Amazon crossing the line again. Still, I agree that Amazon had this coming.
Again, the fact that Orwell’s 1984 is at the centre of all of this controversy is one of those delicious coincidences that is impossible to ignore. [Trading Markets]
Daniel
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 2:53 PMYeah, how ironic that amazon has gone into people’s devices and deleted such a title. (I actually had no idea what kindle was until now, so i assume that’s what happened). Either way, it’s still pretty coincidental.
Mark Pennington
Sunday, August 2, 2009 at 7:18 AMDon’t know about the validity of this lawsuit, but there is an important issue re: the validity of homework, in general. I have an idea to share re: homework.
On back-to-school night last year, I made a deal with their parents: I said, “I won’t assign grammar or essay homework, if you will supervise your child’s reading-discussion homework.” Every parent made positive comments about this approach to homework. Few parents at the intermediate, middle, or high school levels want to or know how to supervise written work. Supervising their child’s reading is something that parents support and perceive as valuable.
Here, in a nutshell is the homework plan: Students read for thirty minutes, four times per week. Parents grade a three-minute discussion of each reading session. Students lead this discussion with reading comprehension strategy discussion prompts. I got a high degree of buy-in from parents and students. I flesh out this homework program much more on my blog at Homework That Makes Sense.