Ok, I like the idea, but I have some questions that I think need to be addressed. I realize this is a psuedo discussion but I think we need to figure this out first in the interest of avoiding future problems. So here are the issues I have...
What do I own?
I don't know, I am not a
copyright expert. For original assignments, does the
university own the assignment? Are the problems in a textbook protected by a
copyright? Is stating the problem in our own words
fair use? What about my
homework, if I do it for a class and turn it in, do I retain
ownership of my work or does the university then own it? If they hand it back who owns it? I don't know these
things, I am just trying to think of all the problems I can...
Let's say I node the
solutions to all the problems I have in a class. What am I doing this for? Now, I like to have
example problems to study from, but is giving away solutions really helping
someone? I mean, for many topics many
universities use the same book, so your homework can quite possibly be someone else's
homework as well, and you could basically be doing their homework for them. While this is nice, are they really
learning to solve problems by
copying your work?
Whose solutions anyway?
In most of my
courses, the instructors hand out solutions after the
assignment. I would assume that is not my property to freely
distribute without permission. So should I node my solutions, which may be
incorrect? Can I reword the correct solutions legally?
How do I node it?
Most of my homework involves many
symbols and formatting that can't be done in html or
text easily. So how do I node it? E2 has not evolved to the point where I can attatch
PDF's or anything to nodes. I can do the best I can with
calculator syntax but that can be
tedious to enter. I could do it in
TeX, but even most of my peers have no clue what TeX is. I could do it in
MathML, but no browsers support it yet and E2 doesn't allow MathML
tags anyway. I could post the raw
postscript for the document, but that would be rather large and unreadible. For an
english paper this is not a problem, but for us
engineering/math types this is a big obstacle.
How can I control it?
While I like
sharing, and I do have one of my
essays on here already, I don't like the idea of people potentially using my papers for their classes. Sure, I could put a
statement up there saying that it cannot be reproduced without
permission, but who is that really going to stop?
So these are my concerns with this idea...