A scientist-turned-business-leader acquaintance of mine once said, "In the workplace, they call it 'collaboration'. In academia, they call it 'cheating'." Preferring an environment where the free exchange of thoughts and ideas was actually encouraged, this scientist went into industry and hasn't looked back.

So I wonder what I'm to make of the case of Chris Avenir. To oversimplify, Ryerson University has told him:

• Study group wherein it's entirely possible that solutions for chemistry and math problems are freely swapped: Perfectly okay.
• Study group on Facebook, where it is demonstrably clear that no solution was traded, only helpful tips (as in any IRL study group): Expulsion-worthy!!

The incident is wending its way through the university's disciplinary processes. Honestly though, on the face of it, I haven't seen a judgment call this bad since I got that "B" in Interpersonal Communication a dozen years ago.

Of course, by the professor's logic, almost any distance-learning-based curriculum would be dismissed as "cheating", since it relies so much on online-mediated instruction and collaboration. That would be unfortunate, and a fairly dangerous precedent to set.

Over at WebProNews, Janet Meiners points out that the invitation to the group certainly sounds like cheating, though it apparently didn't turn out that way in actual practice:

It said: “If you request to join, please use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted.” However, members said they never posted solutions to problems on the site.

Some reactions from around the Interwebs:

• Dvorak Uncensored

  Could the faculty staff be a bigger bunch of Luddites? How embarrassing. If you are looking to study engineering, you might be better served by going to another University.

• Huddlemind Labs

  He was hit with 147 academic charges for his online study network… If he gets expelled, he could get a job with us anytime!

• User "TapeCutter" on Slashdot

  I would sometimes question the derivative works that I randomly judged as 'too similar'. The best reason I got was: "We are husband and wife, you want us stop talking about our studies."

• Isabel Lugo - God Plays Dice

  I'm not sure how I feel about the actual case in question. The "147 counts" sounds like trumped-up charges (and besides, how can they punish him 147 times?), but as some people have pointed out, certainly meaningful collaboration wasn't taking part in that large of a group. ... But I certainly am okay with the idea of people working in groups, both in classes that I'm taking and in classes that I'm teaching. Note that this is just my attitude towards collaboration in classes. My attitude towards collaboration in actual research is not well-formed yet.

Hat-tip: Jeremiah Owyang