On Course: Academic Honesty

In this chapter Lang addresses the important issue of academic honesty and in particular plagiarism.

The most interesting fact in the chapter is the ubiquitousness of cheating - Lang cites that surveys show that 47 percent of graduate students have cheated in the past year.

Having taught a three hour session on scientific integrity followed by a one page assignment where I caught 33 percent of the students subsequently cheating/plagiarizing this is a topic I'm particularly interested in.

There is lots of useful advice here, trying to make assignments unique, use electronic measures to detect plagiarism and of course making it clear to students what you take plagiarism to be.

In particular the advice to not take matters into your own hand and deal with things yourself but instead use the university's procedures for dealing with misconduct is excellent, there is no easier way to get yourself into serious trouble than taking matters into your own hand.

What I would have like more of however is advice about dealing with the system, in particular when people are resistant to admitting plagiarism has been detected because it is a hassle (this happened to me, people thought I was just making a big deal about a small assignment).

Call for Papers: E-Learning in Dialogue: Innovative Teaching and Learning in Philosophy and Religious Studies

Thought this might be of interest to the readers of ISW.

Subject: First Call for Papers- E-Learning in Dialogue: Innovative Teaching and Learning in Philosophy and Religious Studies- Leeds/York (exact venue tbc)- 14-15 March 2008.

Dear Colleagues,

An early date for your diaries.

The Higher Education Academy, Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies (PRS), is organising an international two-day Conference on 'E-Learning in Dialogue: Innovative Teaching and Learning in Philosophy and Religious Studies' to be held in Leeds/York (venue tbc) in 14th-15th of March. Academics in Philosophy and Religious Studies, who are interested in enriching their practice through innovations in technology-enabled teaching and learning in Philosophy and Religious Studies, will find this two day event a most creative and fruitful way to meet other academics with experience in this area and exchange views with them on ways to enhance and apply, embed and enhance e-learning in their discipline.

The Conference will include presentations and lectures from leading figures in e-learning in the Humanities (from UK and other European countries), who will present both traditional and pioneering approaches to e-learning. There will also be specialised workshops for a hands-on approach to e-learning and to confront the challenges of transferring a traditional approach to dialogue in the humanities to a VLE platform and other forms of e-learning.

Dialogue has been frequently discussed as a major challenge for e-learning in the humanities (and especially philosophy). The innovations presented at the Conference will attempt to challenge this myth and they will present creative and novel ways of applying dialogue in teaching and learning, building on the existing use of dialogue as a teaching and learning strategy in the humanities and religious studies, which has a history of more than 2000 years, starting primarily with Socrates in philosophy and Buddha in religious thought).

All philosophical and religious traditions are welcome and there will be co-operation with and contributions from other Higher Education Academy Subject Centres. We would also like to extend the invitation to attend this conference to teachers in primary and secondary education. Interested researchers and practitioners of e-learning in the humanities, who would like to present their work and provide a platform for exchange of ideas in avant-garde and state-of-the-art innovations, are most welcome to contact Dr. C. Athanasopoulos, 'Costas', at the PRS Subject Centre (c.athanasopoulos@leeds.ac.uk,
costas@prs.heacademy.ac.uk) and send their proposals for papers/workshops (deadline: end of January 2008).

There will also be a prize study case competition for academics using innovative e-learning in PRS, the prize for which will be presented at the Conference.
More details about the Conference and the prize competition will be posted by the end of July 2007 on the Subject Centre website.

With best wishes,

Dr. Constantinos Athanasopoulos- 'Costas'

E-Learning Project Officer

I will probably be going to this since for me it is relatively local, it would be good to hear if other ISWers are interested and might be attending.

Modelling Behaviour: Teaching Broadly and Essay Setting

Thanks to Michael for inviting me on board, it is a pleasure to be here.

This post really follows up on one of the points made by Michael in this post: The teacher and the researcher.

It is common for introductory philosophy classes to be broad survey style classes. There are good reasons for this; we want our students to be broadly grounded, to have a chance to taste different aspects of philosophy and so on. However a consequence of this, as Michael pointed out, is that introductory and indeed other undergraduate courses in philosophy rarely go into any great depth. This often carries over to the specific lectures, so one week in a philosophy of religion class you may cover the argument from evil, the next the ontological argument. The upshot of this is that a lecture can often look something like this:

Proposition X
Argument 1 for proposition X
Why Argument 1 fails
Argument 2 for proposition X
Why Argument 2 fails
Argument 3 for proposition X
Why Argument 3 fails
Argument 4 for proposition X
Why Argument 4 fails
Conclusion: None of these arguments for proposition X work

Yet when we set essays we often, although not exclusively, ask students to concentrate on just one argument. Even if we do not specifically ask them to focus in the question, we usually argue that there is little point them giving just an overview of the area instead they should focus on a small part of that area since that is all they can cover well. The essay that gives 101 arguments for a proposition with little depth or critical analysis, philosophy by bullet point, will usually not do well.ral point is illustrated by this quote from the excellent The gene How to Plan a Philosophy Paper by Jeff McLaughlin, Thompson Rivers University.

“Choose a topic that is ‘do-able’.

Essay topics like "The philosophy of Aristotle", "What is Truth?", or "Science versus Religion", are far too broad. When thinking about your topic it is better that the "pool be small and deep, rather than wide and shallow". That’s a murky metaphor but basically it means don’t bite off more than you can chew. You don’t want to touch on fifty different and disjointed points and say nothing substantial about any of them (or you run the risk of writing a ‘too-long paper’). Instead, you want to pick a manageable topic that allows you some room for an in depth exploration of the particular issue. Are you keen on the topic of euthanasia? What aspect? Voluntary vs. Non-voluntary? Active vs. Passive? The role of non-family members as decision makers? Consideration of potential negative utilitarian consequences of a newborn euthanasia policy? Narrow your focus and develop your exploration of it.”

But there is an obvious disconnect here, while we insist to our students that good philosophy is focused and in depth, we model precisely the opposite when we get up in front of them and teach. It doesn’t seem too far a stretch to think that some of our students knowing that we are philosophers who are teaching philosophy, will probably get the impression that this is how philosophy ought to be done. Then they are likely to get a rude and disheartening awakening when, following the pattern of what is done in class they do badly in their assignments.

I’m curious to hear whether people broadly agree with this analysis, and what if anything they do about it.

I personally try and make it clear to my students that when I am covering huge swathes of material in a short time in a class that I am not doing philosophy, I am teaching them about others who did philosophy. I try and make this clear by occasionally doing philosophy in class, although I usually keep this for the tutorials, trying to make them focused on one or two aspects of the lecture not the whole. Likewise in the talk I give them about essay writing I make the point that lectures and course books perform a very different function than an academic paper. And what we are usually looking for in an essay is much more like an academic paper (not to the same standard of course) than it is to a course book or a lecture.