Mitch Parsell

Technology and Academic Virtue: Student Plagiarism Through the Looking Glass

Plagiarism is the misuse of and failure to acknowledge source materials. This paper questions common responses to the apparent increase in plagiarism by students. Internet plagiarism occurs in a context – using the Internet as an information tool – where the relevant norms are far from obvious and models of virtue are difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to find. Ethical responses to the pervasiveness of Internet-enhanced plagiarism require a reorientation of perspective on both plagiarism and the Internet as a knowledge tool. Technological strategies to “catch the cheats” send a “don’t get caught” message to students and direct the limited resources of academic institutions to a battle that cannot be won. More importantly, it is not the right battleground. Rather than characterising Internet-enabled plagiarism as a problem generated and solvable by emerging technologies, we argue that there is a more urgent need to build the background conditions that enable and sustain ethical relationships and academic virtues: to nurture an intellectual community.

Pernicious virtual communities: Identity, polarisation and the Web 2.0

The importance of online social spaces is growing. New Web 2.0 resources allow the creation of social networks by any netizen with minimal technical skills. These communities can be extremely narrowly focussed. In this paper, I identify two potential costs of membership in narrowly focussed virtual communities. First, that narrowly focussed communities can polarise attitudes and prejudices leading to increased social cleavage and division. Second, that they can lead sick individuals to revel in their illness, deliberately indulging in their disease and denying the edicts of the medical profession. I specifically examine illness communities centred on the now defunct Multiple Personality Disorder. I highlight these potential problems and point to some technologies that may help combat them.

Homelessness as a Choice

Abstract It has long been assumed that homelessness is a personal choice. As a choice, homelessness is embedded within debates about deviant behaviours and problematic pathologies. The “homeless person” is either making calculated and immoral choices to be homeless, or they are perceived to be powerless agents who lack the capacity to exercise choices. Rarely has it been adequately explained, however, what choosing homelessness means and how people who are homeless make sense of their choices. The structural and individual circumstances that situate and make choices meaningful require robust consideration. Drawing on ethnographic research with people sleeping rough, this article unpacks and illuminates some of the hidden complexities that underpin choices to be homeless. With an objective of retaining people’s sense for autonomy, the article contributes to the field by arguing that choice can be understood as an expression of agency and a commitment to a “normal” identity.

Peer review of learning and teaching in higher education: international perspectives

1. Introduction: The Place of Peer Review in Learning and Teaching Judyth Sachs and Mitch Parsell.- PART 1: Theory.- 2. Collaborative Peer-Supported Review of Teaching David Gosling.- 3. A Practical Model for Conducting Helpful Peer Review of Teaching William Buskist, Emad A. Ismail, and James E. Groccia.- 4. Leadership: A Cultural Perspective on Review as Quality Assurance versus Quality Enhancement Jemina Napier, Mehdi Riazi and Christa Jacenyik-Trawoger.- 5. Climates of Communication: Collegiality, Affect, Spaces and Attitudes in Peer Review Trudy Ambler, Meena Chavan, Jennifer Clarke and Nicole Matthews.- 6. Six Questions Michael Hitchens.- PART 2: Practice.- 7. Peer Review as Quality Assurance Wendy Kilfoil.- 8. Peer Review for Distance Educators: Two Case Studies Andrelyn Applebee.- 9. Peer Review in a Foundations in Learning and Teaching Program Marina Harvey and Ian Solomonides.- 10. Peer Review of Teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Amy Goodburn.- 11. Implementing Departmental Peer Observation of Teaching in Universities Maureen Bell and Paul Cooper.- PART 3: Conclusion.- 12. Was Moses peer reviewed? The Ten Commandments of Peer Observation of Teaching David Spencer.- 13. International Perspectives on Peer Review as Quality Enhancement Mick Healey, Malin Irhammar, Wendy R Kilfoil, Judith Lyons and Trudy Ambler.

The cognitive cost of extending an evolutionary mind into the environment

Clark and Chalmers (1998) have argued that mental states can be extended outside an organism’s skin. In response to some worries about the availability, reliability and portability of such extended resources, Clark (2005) offers a set of rough criteria that non-biological objects must fulfil to legitimately ground mental states. One such criterion is that the information retrieved from these non-biological sources be (more or less) automatically endorsed. But Sterelny (2003, 2005) has persuasively argued that the extended sphere is epistemologically opaque: a domain of contested truth and deliberate deception. As such, retrieving information from this domain requires the deployment of social guards for the information to remain reliable. But deploying such guards would seem to endanger endorsability by increasing cognitive load. Here I demonstrate that deploying social guards does not increase cognitive load if the guards are implemented in a highly distributed connectionist economy or off-loaded to the external environment.

Virtual Communities of Enquiry: An Argument for Their Necessity and Advice for Their Creation.

In this article it is argued that communities of enquiry can and should be developed in courses delivered online. These communities make the most of the available technological resources and overcome some otherwise daunting challenges faced in online course delivery. Indeed, asynchronous tools like discussion boards offer a range of benefits for the creation of such communities that are unobtainable in the traditional classroom. Further, the authors also point to some simple measures that have been found to be successful in helping to create net-based communities. Finally, they draw on recent empirical evidence to demonstrate that online communication tools can, if appropriately employed, offer unique benefits for the creation of learning communities.

Content-sensitive inference, modularity and the assumption of formal processing

Performance on the Wason selection task varies with content. This has been taken to demonstrate that there are different cognitive modules for dealing with different conceptual domains. This implication is only legitimate if our underlying cognitive architecture is formal. A non-formal system can explain content-sensitive inference without appeal to independent inferential modules.

Introduction: The Place of Peer Review in Learning and Teaching

At a time where accountability and transparency are dominant rallying calls from governments and students alike to improve the quality of teaching in universities globally, the language and processes of quality assurance, audit and quality enhancement are now a central element of the lexicon of both university managers and teachers. The common aspiration is to improve the quality of student learning outcomes through a systematic approach of data collection, analysis and decision-making. The challenge for universities is how to do this. This volume presents one approach that is gaining acceptance across the world, namely peer review of teaching. This monograph draws on contemporary theory and practice to provide guidance for the development and implementation of peer review of teaching.

Williams syndrome: dissociation and mental structure

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic disorder that, because of its unique cognitive profile, has been marshalled as evidence for the modularity of both language and social skills. But emerging evidence suggests the claims of modularity based on WS have been premature. This paper offers an examination of the recent literature on WS. It argues the literature gives little (if any) support for mental modularity. Rather than being rigidly modular, the WS brain is an extremely flexible organ that that co-opts available neural resource in a highly dynamic manner to cope in the world.

Steven M. Platek, Julian Paul Keenan and Todd K. Shackelford (eds), Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience

1. An overview of the fundamental principles of evolution—natural and sexual selection, adaptation, and fitness—as applied to the study of cognition; 2. An examination of neuroanatomy through the lenses of ontogenetics and phylogenetics; 3. Reproduction and kin recognition; 4. Spatial cognition and the evolution of language; 5. Self-awareness and social cognition; and, 6. The ethical implications of evolutionary neuroscience.