The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World

Some Random Thoughts on a Travel Tuesday

I am blogging from LAX today and there’s nothing like travel to give me time to entertain random thoughts.  So here are three random, end of the semester, travel inspired thoughts:

1. LAX replicates the city of LA.  The terminals and facilities are dispersed and more or less without a clear center.  Minneapolis Airport in contrast is centered around a gaudy food court and shopping mall with a nice observation deck that lets you look out and watch jets come and go.  LAX (at least the various terminals that I drifted through over this 8 hour layover) makes it pretty hard to watch the plains come and go and almost always involves a trip outside of a particular terminal to find important information like departure times, gate numbers, or even places to eat and chill out on a long layover. 

2. Students. I’ve been pretty lucky this semester.  I had a number of students take the time to send along little notes thanking me for the semester. These are so gratifying!  This semester I taught two completely revamped classes and a graduate seminar that threatened to devolve into a kind of pedagogical trench warfare.  Despite the challenging semester, it was energizing to know that students enjoyed their class and learned something!

3. What I read when traveling: Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker.  I’ve traveled enough this past year to have read almost every issue of the two monthlies.  I’ll also read William Gibson’s Spook Country (2007)). When I asked my Teaching Thursday readers what they planned to read over the holidays, I got one response.  This either means that we faculty need to do a better job of modeling our behavior or that the readers of our blog are unlikely (for whatever reason) to read books over break.

Dipping my Toe in the Public History Pool

Public history is all the rage these days in history programs.  To my eye, the interest in public history is an effort within the discipline of history to connect our work with a recognized group of jobs as archivists, public historians, and at museums.  On the one hand, this is good in that it recognizes that many of our students want to stay in the field of history, but do not aspire to academic positions.  On the other hand, this is part of a larger vocational trend in the humanities that we probably need to monitor.  While there is no reason not to embrace programs which hold forth the prospect of employment for our students, history as a discipline would be weaker if preparing future public historians became the dominant goal of history departments. 

In any event, since our department is looking to get more serious about its offerings in public history, I thought I'd make an effort to see how my work in Greece and Cyprus could contribute.  So in 2010, I am going to offer a small internship program in public history.  Below is a very, very rough fact-sheet on this graduate level internship.  As you can see, many of the details are to-be-determined, but I think it captures the core of what I'd like my internship to do. 

Public History Internship
SP2010

The goal of this internship program is to provide an opportunity to gain experience with a wide range of digital and new media applications that are becoming increasingly central to public history, museum management and outreach, archival work and archaeological curation.

This work will focus on a number of ongoing and completed archaeological and historical projects and tools.

1. Topos/Chora: The Photographs of Ryan Stander. This is a series of photographs and related essays from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The photographs will appear at the Empire Theater for the month of January and then in an online gallery. They will be accompanied by a series of reflective essays written by the archaeologists who participated in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. The goal here is to have something up on the web by January 15th and the gallery available for viewing by January 30th.

2. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: A Digital Museum. Since 2003, a team under the direction of Scott Moore, David Pettegrew, and me has been working at a site called Pyla-Koutsopetria on the south coast of Cyprus. This project has produced a vast amount of digital data ranging from video to podcast, photographs, text, descriptive data, maps, plans, illustration, quantitative data, et c. The goal of the Digital Museum is to present some subset of this data in a coherent way for the educated public. We have Omeka, online museum software, installed on a university server. This software can provide the base for our online museum.

3. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project: Data Curation. One of the most important aspects of any archaeological or museum work is the responsible curation of all forms of data. PKAP has recorded a substantial amount of both digital and paper data over the past 7 years. This data needs to be curated. The paper data must be prepare to be deposited in the university archives and parts of the digital data, to be uploaded to Open Context for digital publication. In many ways this curation project is the flipside of the project 2.

4. Lakka Skoutara: An Early Modern Site in the Eastern Corinthia. Since 2000, David Pettegrew and I have recorded descriptive and photographic data from the early modern site of Lakka Skoutara that documented the changes at this site as a result of a whole range of abandonment practices. These photographs need to be put together with textual descriptions in a way that is useful to scholars. This archive will become the online companion piece to a published article.

5. Ohio Boeotia Project at Thisvi, Boeotia. Over the past two years, I have slowly been digitizing the results of an intensive pedestrian survey project conducted between 1979-1982 around the village of Thisvi in southeastern Boeotia. It would be excellent to report the results of this project in a transparent way or to develop an online environment where this work can be highlighted and made accessible.

Goals and Priorities: To some extent, I will let you imagine a set of priorities for this list of tasks, and I certainly don’t imagine that you’ll get all these done. On the other hand, I expect that early on, we as a team develop some sense of priorities in how we plan to attack these various projects. It is important to emphasize that public history projects are almost always collaborative. That is to say that people work together to accomplish a particular task. We are going to work together as a team to accomplish the goals listed below.

Assignments and Responsibilities: Since this is an internship, I will not have a major writing or reading assignment. You should plan to dedicate 10 hours a week to working this internship. I will insist on weekly 1 hour meetings. These will include status updates and are not optional. In addition, you will be expected to maintain a public blog detailing weekly how the various projects are progressing. The goal of the blog will be both to keep you honest (as a team) and to make the progress of the various projects underway transparent to the various stakeholders both at the university and elsewhere. I will expect each participant in the internship to contribute a single blog post a week. It might be best to blog on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. The first assignment will be to select a blogging service.

Resources:

1. Digital and New Media Laboratory. At present we have a single PC, a Linux powered laptop, and a gaggles of very powerful Macintosh computers. Time in the laboratory should be negotiated with the various other users.

2. Published and unpublished reports from Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, Ohio Boeotia Project, and Lakka Skoutara (which was a part of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (EKAS)).

3. People. Consider me, my various colleagues, and folks on campus potential resources. When in doubt, ask questions. Part of a successful public history project is knowing how to get the information that you need.

Some websites:

http://omeka.org/

http://www.pkap.org/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_graduate/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_season_s/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/pylakoutsopetria_undergra/

http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2009/10/between-sea-and-mountain-the-archaeology-of-a-20th-century-small-world-in-the-upland-basin-of-the-southeastern-korinthia.html
http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/thisvikastorion_archaeological_project/

Teaching Thursday: Are You Running Out of Time?

I often have trouble communicating the notion of time to students.  For example, it is hard to convince them how long it will take to, say, write a paper.  The notion of a timed test is also a challenge as, without fail, a student will tell me that he or she ran out of time.  E. P. Thompson in “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” (Past and Present 2 (1967), 56-97) suggested that this is because students are one of the groups who still exist in pre-capitalist modes of production (p. 73).  Time and its accompanying “work discipline” have not extended their grasp to embrace the docile student body.  Instead, they proceed with their studies as artisans or crafts-people, taking every opportunity to enjoy life and then frantically working to complete piece-work goals.  This is even more challenging for an online class where the relationship between the overseer and the artisan is the most attenuated.  The only motivation, in this case, is the distant and somewhat mystical end of the semester.  This clearly will not do.  As part of our job is to complete the process of transforming our fun-loving artisan class into good capitalist automatons, I have discovered a simple trick to impart a sense of foreign (to them) urgency to my online class: a countdown timer.

This one doesn’t let you set the hours so according to this countdown timer, grades are due at midnight on December 22nd.  It doesn’t hurt to get them in early, right?

Created by OnePlusYou

Teaching (with Twitter) Tuesday

The Chronicle of Higher Education this weekend ran a story on Teaching with Twitter.  Aside from its appealing alliteration, the story presented two case studies of faculty who use Twitter in the classroom. One was from a consumer science class at Purdue and the other a history class at University of Texas at Dallas.  Both used Twitter as an official back channel for their classes providing students with another opportunity to ask questions, interact with one another, and archive these remarks (organized through twitter hashtags) so that students could return to them later.  The faculty members report more or less positive experiences from setting up these Twitter back channels, although the Chronicle story and the faculty members themselves admitted that there was some risk involved.  Students could, for example, use Twitter as a place to snipe at the professor or other students in a semi-anonymous setting.  On the other hand, Twitter could serve as a platform to engage students more fully in the classroom experience -- especially students who are too shy or reserved to speak out.

Longtime readers of my blog know that I experimented with Twitter in a graduate seminar.  In my experiment, I hoped to encourage the students to "read actively" and tweet their impressions of the various books as they read them.  These impressions could range from quotes to questions, visceral responses, or even complaints.  I had hoped that the Twitter feed would make the exercise of reading -- typically an intensely private, personal, and reflective time, into something that was public, social, and dynamic.  The goal was to break down some of the intellectual isolation (first year graduate) students sometimes experience when reading a challenging text and encourage them to formulate ideas while reading to break through the tendency to read a book passively. 

Using social networking applications to increase student engagement is an interesting example of how technology as technology can engage students in new ways.  My History 101: Western Civilization class this fall is relatively large (150 students) and meets once a week, at night, in a large theater style room.  The basic content driven lectures are available online (here).  The classroom time focuses on "primary source" texts (i.e. texts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages), recapping the major points in the content driven lecture, inclass writing assignments, testing various models for understanding the past, and informal question-and-answer sessions that focus, generally, on more difficult concepts.  I playfully refer to the classroom time as a live concert environment and the podcast lectures as the studio album.  While this can produce an exciting, improvised, and responsive environment, the class tends to become dominated by a relatively small faction (10%-20% (i.e. 20-30) students). 

Many of the students in the class are freshman from smaller high school who find the large classroom to be a very foreign and maybe intimidating environment. At the same time, as Monica Rankin points out, many students are comfortable with the social-networking environment native to Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.  The plan would be to use the familiar and more intimate environment of the social media to bridge the gap between the student and their classmates (and teacher) in the large lecture-style classroom.

Teaching Thursday: Some Practical Thoughts about Online Teaching

Cross-posted to Teaching Thursday.

Yesterday at noon, the Department of History here at the University of North Dakota, held a roundtable discussion on online teaching. We invited a group of experienced online teachers to join the round table from different fields. Mick Beltz (a regular Teaching Thursday contributor) from Philosophy and Religion, Bill Caraher, from History, Tim Prescott, from Math, and Bret Weber (another Teaching Thursday regular), from the Department of Social Work. The group focused on the differences between online teaching and classroom teaching. Moreover, the discussion was intensely practical. The Department of History, like many departments across campus, is exploring the potential and pitfalls of online teaching. The audience of graduate students and faculty enthusiastically engaged the panelists and the conversation spilled into the hall after the workshop was over.

I offer the following brief summary of the teaching roundtable and I encourage the conversation to continue in the comments section over on Teaching Thursday.

Bret Weber, of the Department of Social Work, offered a number of points which emphasized that teaching and learning need to be at the core of online classes. It's not just about the technology! And it's not an online class, it's a class online. To go along with this observation he stressed that teaching online must be interactive both between students and between teacher and student. The more the students interact with each other and the instructor the more likely they are to achieve the course's objectives. In fact, recent students have shown that the quantity of discussion posts, for example, correlates more strongly with learning than the quality of the posts. Finally, Bret emphasized that teaching online can be enormously time consuming in the course planning, set up, and the maintenance of an online class, but most importantly in terms of the amount of time that needs to be afforded all students especially during the early weeks of the semester.

Tim Prescott of the Department of Math emphasized the need for more steps in weekly assignments to make up for the lack of regular interaction. He said that this extended from actual content based assignments to the logistics of making sure the students set up proctored tests, completed assignments on time, and understood the basic mechanics of a class. Finally, Tim reinforced the difficulty of ascertaining whether a student understood complex material. Teaching online requires that we develop ways to ascertain how well our students are moving through material in the class so that our first indication of a problem is not a high-value assignment.

Mick Beltz, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, talked about how online classes followed a different rhythm from classroom courses. There was more weekly attention necessary to ensure that an online class functioned properly. The work also tends to be greater at the very beginning of the semester because the majority of assignments and activities need to be available to students at the first day of the semester.This different work rhythm sometimes made the workload feel more substantial than a classroom based course, which might experience hectic moments, like grading midterm exams, while requiring less daily attention. Mick also pointed our that online courses need to communicate the instructor's expectations to students clearly and regularly. Unlike classroom taught courses, most students will be unfamiliar with the online learning environment. The irregular schedule of online courses, the different forms of peer interaction, and a perceived distance between instructor and student would sometimes lead students to neglect online courses more than they would classroom taught ones. The result of this was more MIA students who drift away from the class and do not succeed.

I added that teaching online retained elements of very tradition instruction with its emphasis on lectures (as a formal means of instruction, information dissemination, and modeling of good practice). I also noted that the online environment is particularly suited to intensive writing because writing becomes the key means for interacting between the student and faculty member. Finally, I urged the group to embrace the panopticon of online teaching (with thanks to Mick Beltz for introducing me to the link between Foucault's idea of the panopticon and the online teaching environment). The online environment presents to the faculty member these decisively partitioned reports on student achievement on the computer screen. The students, on the other hand, can see far less of their fellow students achievements and, as Mick pointed out, tend to focus their interaction with the instructor far more than in a regular classroom where the physical presence of other students demands some, often non-verbal, form of engagement.

Teaching Wednesday: Teaching with PKAP Data

I've been asked a few times over the last few years about whether I use our archaeological video, data, and analyses in teaching. Since I've been out of the upper-level teaching racket for a few years now, I have to honestly answer "no". Every now and then, however, I hear from a colleague elsewhere who used some of the material that we made available on the web in their classes. This fall, for example, I heard from Laura Gawlinski at Loyola University - Chicago who used our documentary Survey on Cyprus in her introduction to archaeology class and passed along some great questions from her student regarding our methods and fieldwork procedures.

This past week, I've been helping Michael Fronda of McGill University to use PKAP's interactive map and documents from our website in his Ancient History Methods class. He graciously agreed to pass along the assignment and let me post it here:

HIST 450: Ancient History Methods

Fall 2009

Final Project

Assignment: You will analyze some of the archaeological data from the Archaeological Project (PKAP) and synthesize this with other historical information (from primary sources, inscriptions, coins, etc.) and modern scholarship, to draw historical conclusions about the Cyprus (especially the site of Koutsopetria) during the Roman (especially Late Roman) period. Your report should be 10 pages NOT INCLUDING bibliography, maps, diagrams, etc. It may not longer than 20 pages in total.

For this report, you MUST consult and make use of the following:

☞ The 2004 preliminary report from PKAP, especially any maps, charts and diagrams.
☞ The PKAP webpage (http://www.pkap.org), which has general information on the site as well as some photos, giving an idea of the landscape and topography.
☞ The PKAP online interactive map (http://www.und.nodak.edu/instruct/wcaraher/disk_PKAP.html). This is vitally important, since it contains information on the location of walls and other features discovered at the site (such as cut blocks, gypsum blocks, walls, etc.).

Some Background Information: Pyla-Koutsopetria is located on the southern coast of Cyprus, not far from the important ancient city of Kition (Citium; modern Larnaca). The main site lies along the sea on a narrow coastal strip. To the north are two very steep plateaus: Vigla (directly north of the main surveyed area) and Kokkinokremnos (to the northeast).

The project has surveyed much of the coastal strip (see the maps), but also the heights; we will concern ourselves mostly with the lower site. It is worth noting, however, that high densities of artifacts have been found on both plateaus; as well, Kokkinokremnos was the site of a neolithic-Bronza Age settlement.

The great majority of ceramic artifacts come from the Late Roman period, with later periods also represented (Medieval, Ottoman, Modern). The site was, however, probably occupied throughout antiquity.

A large area was excavated, revealing cut blocks, gypsum (a stone with a marble-like appearance, used decoratively) and a great many fragments of wall paintings. It has tentatively been identified as a church. A significant number of "features" are strewn about the site, including numerous worked stones, architectural features (stone door pieces, pediment fragments, marble revetment, gypsum blocks, etc.).

Answer these questions: Analyze the available data, focusing on the lower surveyed and excavated area. Look especially at the distribution of artifacts found: consider chronological, topographical, and typographical (ie, what sorts of artifacts) distribution. Consider also the geomorphological information provided. In your report, be sure to answer the following questions:

☞ What type of site was Pyla (small town, big city, fortress, resort area, industrial town, cult center, etc)?
☞ How do you explain the distribution of artifacts? Consider both historical processes and methodological considerations.
☞ What happened to the site at the end of the Roman period, and why?

I expect that you will:

☞ thoroughly utilize the online interactive map.
☞ consult outside sources, both modern and ancient. L'Année Philologique will be an important tool, no doubt.
☞ include a proper bibliography.
☞ try to impress me by utilyzing different research tools and integrating different sorts of evidence.
☞ write the report as a proper report--do not break it up into separate questions. Thanks.
☞ draw your own conclusions. I do not want lots of "maybes" and "could bes"--you have the data, use it as an ancient historian and say something about the site.

_______________________________________________

And for the record, I do know that Teaching Wednesday is nowhere near as alliterative as Teaching Thursday. Rest assured though that my inner poet will make a Teaching Thursday available tomorrow.

Teaching Thursday: Three Year College

Check out Teaching Thursday this week, where Joan Hawthorne, the University of North Dakota's Assistant Provost for Assessment and Achievement, considers Lamar Alexander's recent suggestion in Newsweek magazine that we should consider making a three-year B.A. program available for students.

Alexander's suggestion that university education could be completed within three years if universities used space and manpower more efficiently is appealing especially if it could be made to save students a 25% of their tuition. I am skeptical of his math however. Many faculty members work 9 or 10 month salaries that more or less coincide with their teaching loads. It would be necessary, most likely, to increase their compensation in a way that is consistent with their current contractual situation. So some savings would be lost on faculty and presumably staff salaries. Since students would be using facilities for approximately the same duration (that is to say for approximately 36 months of use, simply distributed over 3 instead of 4 years), the percentage of tuition that goes toward maintenance would not be cut in any substantial way. There might, of course, be some initial, perhaps even on-time savings as some facilities -- like residence hall or dinning halls -- could be shut down since the student body would be smaller.   

More significantly, however, the university is part of a larger economic system. As we watch unemployment rates push up over 10%, one wonders whether this very moment would be an ideal time to increase the American full-time workforce by releasing a cohort of able bodies, agile minded young go-getters into the economy one year earlier. In fact, a more intensive university experience would effectively withdraw the ability of college students to participate in the less formal, part time, and relatively unskilled economy that characterizes their employment throughout their 4 or 5 year degree programs and thrust them into the adult job market with expectations of full, formal employment.

Finally, it is interesting to note that Alexander celebrates the unique character of US Higher Education while at the same time arguing that we should be more like other, frankly, less successful models. Globally, the 3 year degree must be almost as common as the American 4 year model. These 3 year degrees tend to focus less on a broad-based humanities-centered education and more on practical, focused training in a given field. While in many ways these programs rely upon more robust secondary eduction systems, they nevertheless reflect a far less serious commitment to the breadth of education common to American universities. I'm all for tweaking or even "rethinking everything" about American higher eduction, but I am skeptical of any plan that involves modeling our university system on systems that we have already determined to be less successful.

In any event, don't just read my post, click on through to Teaching Thursday, and as Prof. Hawthorne asks "bring on the conversation"!

Teaching Thursday: Cheating and Byzantium

Just a short post today because I want to leave my loyal readers plenty of time to digest Mick Beltz interesting and important arguments about cheating over on the Teaching Thursday blog. That being said, I can't resist commenting on a recent article in the Weekly Standard (forwarded to me by Kostis Kourelis). This short article summarizes the arguments of E. Luttwak in his new book, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, and casts them in the light of U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy. Luttwak himself summarized many of the arguments in an article in Foreign Policy entitled "Take me Back to Constantinople: How Byzantium, not Rome, can help preserve the Pax Americana".

In the article, he suggests that the often-embattled position of the Byzantine Empire is a good parallel for the US in the 21st century. Like Byzantium, the US is surrounded by a variety of enemies using a wide range of tactics, with a wide range of political, military, and, ideological goals. Moreover, the economic foundation of the Byzantine state, like the US today, was often variable making long term strategic decisions difficult to implement (if not to contemplate). Luttwak's observations regarding the Byzantium represent another example of recent intellectual efforts to see Byzantium as a useful lens through which to view a post-Modern 21st century. (My favorite being J. Kristeva's Murder in Byzantium).

To get back to cheating, Luttwak argues that we can learn from the Byzantine's is that "subversion is the cheapest past to victory. So cheap, in fact, as compared with the costs and risks of battle, that it must always be attempted, even with the most seemingly irreconcilable enemies." Subversion is often seen as means to gain an "unfair" or at best, unseemly victory. It undermines the ethical nature of battle and threatens on fundamental grounds some of the most widely held arguments for just wars. The morally ambivalent (to our 21st century eyes) Byzantines (read: Oriental Byzantines) could get away which such practices, whereas the U.S. as practitioners of the "Western Way of War" must play by a more restrictive set of rules or run the risk of undermining the very values that justified military actions from the start. In other words, cheating in warfare is wrong.

More on Cheating at Teaching Thursday

Check out the latest posting over at Teaching Thursday. We're continuing the conversation about cheating in American universities with a thoughtful post on how changes in American society, particularly online culture have influenced how students value originality. Cindy Prescott notes that the tendency for bloggers, in particular, simply to parrot ideas (often without attribution) from other bloggers or more traditional news sources, is but symptomatic of a growing disrespect for original thinking in American society. While I'd quibble with Cindy's characterization of bloggers -- after many of the most successful and popular bloggers do offer unique perspectives on the world and often produce original reporting on events far ahead of traditional news venues -- I do wonder how the echo chamber of the internet clouds confuses the uncritical readers.

In many cases the lines of attribution and authority become blurred in open challenge to the exclusive practices promoted by a professional creative class. The idea of legally and economically defined rights to ideas (meant to defend the ability of a creative class to earn a living from those ideas) has earned the ire of more radical voices on the web who view the open copying, repackaging, and redistribution of ideas, intellectual products, and creative projects as a means of resisting capitalism's hold over creativity and complementary to radical critiques in the academy which argue for "the death of the author" and see creativity as no more than the fortuitous interplay of texts and meanings. And while it is too soon to say that these more radical voices are winning, it is striking that they have won some crucial battles. The slow death of DRM (digital rights management) protected music and the rise in open source, open content, and the various legal protections offered by the creative commons have all sought to establish new lines in the battle to protect creativity.

Of course, when pressed, many academics would say that the fight against cheating -- particularly using someone else's work without attribution -- is rooted in fundamental moral and ethical concerns. But it's also worth contemplating how much of our fight to preserve the sanctity of creativity derives from (more base?) economic motivations. These motivations, on the one hand, ensure that creative work in society is recognized (in order to be rewarded and sustained). At the same time, a naive pressure on originality and fetishizing practices of attribution and intellectual property runs the risk of paralyzing academic discourse. Proper attribution of ideas is a cherished practice that personalizes the intellectual and academic ecosystem, but it is rarely exhaustive and universal in tracing the roots of ideas and arguments. Scholars regularly make decisions as to how and sometimes whether to attribute fragmentary ideas, idiosyncratic readings of canonical texts, and seemingly well-known "statements of fact".

This is a long way from working to prevent the crude, basely pragmatic, and frankly un-ideological, cheating that takes place on most university campuses. But it does speak, to some extent, to the blurry moral and ethic grounds at the core of the discourse of originality in American culture today. I wonder how much these conversations have undermined our efforts to enforce academic honesty by laying bare some of the coarseness present foundations for our arguments.

Teaching Thursday: Cheating

Cross-posted to Teaching Thursday

The past few months have produced the typical batch of articles bemoaning cheating in American universities. From blatant acts of plagiarism facilitated by the proliferation of online materials to technologically assisted cheating on math and science tests, the popular press has decided that university life is overwhelmed by a culture of academic dishonesty.

I have my doubts, but I nevertheless recognize that academic dishonesty does occur more often than it should and, as a result, I spend more time tweaking writing assignments and changing tests and quizzes in recent years than I did before.

One issue that I put before my esteemed readers of Teaching Thursday, is what are the causes of this academic dishonesty? Is it the break down in civil society as some have suggested. Or is it simply a change in the values associated with higher education? What role do increased economic, social, and even political pressures put on students to complete their degrees successful and quickly? And do these pressures cause students to cheat? At the same time, has the current generation of university educators so fetishized originality that students are actually paralyzed by these expectations and driven to resort to profoundly unoriginal practices in desperation? Or has the culture of academic cynicism, post-everything nihilism, and radical relativism created such a confused moral zone in higher education that students lack the moral compass necessary to avoid cheating?

On the other hand, are cheating and plagiarism simply more visible now than they were before because we have better ways of catching students in the act? Search engines like Google (not to mention purpose built anti-cheating services like Turnitin) have made it easier to catch the most blatant acts of plagiarism and easier to check up on more subtle forms of unattributed "borrowing".

What role have recent changes in universities as an institutions and as university teaching and learning as practice played in presenting a different set of challenges to faculty committed to designing classes that thwart efforts at academic dishonesty? Online classes are particularly challenging in this regard even with established proctoring arrangements and the like. The influx of students from outside the U.S. also pose challenges, as the academic standards and practices vary considerably between cultures.

It is easy enough to write unique paper assignments that short circuit all but the most ambitious strategies, but what cost do we incur when we concoct these assignments. In other words, has cheating brought an end to the classic "Moby Dick" paper?

So, for the next few weeks (depending on the enthusiasm of our readers!), I invite contributions to Teaching Thursday's exploration of cheating.