Is sharing always cheating? When is it just sharing?

A faculty member forwarded me an article about del.icio.us as a mechanism for cheating among students. The argument at the center of the article is that tools of collaboration can be used for cheating. That really isn't all that shocking. I'm surprised there aren't articles that focus on the thesis that "the voice" can be used for cheating. Some teachers are catching students helping each other with answers to problems.

It seems that in the scenario, the biology teacher must NOT have assigned the students to use del.icio.us, because had the teacher assigned its use, one would think that s/he would recognize that within the concept of "SOCIAL" bookmarking, students might share resources accordingly. So we have three students, who of their own accord are proactively using software to manage their resources. That sounds great!!!

But then the bad cheating student peaked at their resources and used some of the same.

This is where I'm confused. The only way I could see this as cheating is if the entire assignment was about the research process. In which case, the teacher should explicitly state the parameters of what is unethical and not representative of one's own work. I would hope that these kind of assignments do not occur very frequently.  I would hope that they are very rare in undergraduate coursework and that this does not occur in graduate courses, which are the two levels of faculty I advise.

• If the research skills are the point, why not ask students to write a detailed paragraph describing how they accessed their resources?
• If research synthesis is the point, why does the access to the resources matter?

The reason I find this topic so perplexing is that I'm not confident that all the people reading this article understand the technology described. They see "del.icio.us" and mentally file it away as a method of cheating. In fact, it could be a very helpful tool for aggregating student resources and showing the power of an extended network of resources.

To be fair, Mr. Jakes is very balanced in his assessment of the tool and notes the importance of teaching about the tool and cultivating its appropriate use.  However, the opening grab of the article is the meme against which I may have to do damage control.