Well right now I am the only person working on this project full time. I, Aseem Badshah, am the Founder and President of Scriptovia.com and a freshman at the University of Washington. Two years ago I founded Scriptovia’s proof-of-concept ThinkEssay.com. In addition, I worked as a high school intern and consultant with the Microsoft Corporation for more than a year. At Microsoft, I was a program manager developing internal tools, as well as program manager and marketer for a project called Scenario Voting – a tool that allowed the Windows Vista test team to collect satisfaction data from the millions of beta testers. You can get in touch with me on Facebook , by emailing aseem@scriptovia.com, or by calling (425) 445-8731.

The reason I say “we” is because the organization is currently very horizontal. We have consultants all over the world working on various projects for Scriptovia. We also have a few students at the University of Washington who are helping out as well as mentors/advisors from all over the Puget Sound area. Without these people Scriptovia wouldn’t exist.

We are always hiring and looking for motivated and talented people to come on board and help out as founders, employees, interns, or consultants. We are especially looking for both web designers and web developers. Check out our careers page for our latest job postings.

This is the first question that comes up when talking about collaboration with respect to education. Scriptovia.com takes a strong stance against plagiarism and cheating. It is NOT an essay mill or a cheating site; it is a service that allows students to advance their own work through collaboration and the sharing of ideas. Content is on the internet and in libraries; Scriptovia is not doing anything different by putting student’s content in a centralized place.

Scriptovia.com goes to great lengths to educate its users about plagiarism – that it is ethically wrong and that users can incur serious penalties if they are caught plagiarizing. Some students may not understand what it means to plagiarize. Scriptovia.com explains what the difference is between collaborating and plagiarizing. It instructs them how to properly site references in their work and how to correctly use Scriptovia.com so that they don’t accidentally plagiarize someone else’s work.

In addition, documents on Scriptovia.com are presented in HTML form within the browser. This allows services like TurnItIn.com to crawl all of our documents and track plagiarism against them.

In the end the responsibility is on the student not to plagiarize.

Scriptovia.com is a new website that is dedicated to help students learn from each other through collaboration and sharing. Basically, Scriptovia is a Web 2.0 application that will allow students to share academic documents in an online community, much like YouTube to video or Flickr to photos. Students will be able to look at other students’ schoolwork in order to use an example to do their own assignments. For example, a student can look at another student’s essay to see how it was structured, what resources were used, and get topic ideas, or students who are in similar classes can share notes. Students will also be able to post their own documents in order to get a constant flow of feedback from fellow students in the community. The site will give students an opportunity to work in a collaborative environment much like adults in the 21st century workplace, while helping them to identify where the line is between collaboration and plagiarism.

Our Mission is to increase students’ productivity and depth of learning by providing them with a means to learn, share, and collaborate with fellow students in a virtual environment. We would like to see Scriptovia become the number one online education portal, the website that every student comes to before they start their schoolwork for the night.

One of the great aspects of Scriptovia is that it has so many different uses. Every student will have a different experience and different way to take advantage of all the features. To that end, I will be posting detailed use cases of how the website can be used. Look for posts that begin with “Use Case.”

Welcome to the official Scritovia blog. We have been hard at work for about 5 months now working on Scriptovia.com. It has been an incredible experience and I expect the story to continue to amaze and entertain for years to come. So what’s the point of this blog? To tell that story and create a two way conversation with our customers and the rest of the blogosphere. I hope YOU will become an active part in this conversation and help with our venture into the online “web 2.0” space. Check back for more and I would love to hear from you in a comment or email: aseem@scriptovia.com.