Michael R. Moore

“People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.” — St. Augustine

“One purpose of a liberal arts education is to make your head a more interesting place to live inside of for the rest of your life.”

– Mary Patterson McPherson, President, Bryn Mawr College

“My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood.”

– Goodbye Serenity,  12/5/2011.

“There is also a growing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem. A study, by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford, shows that Americans are increasingly living in areas that are either poor or affluent. The isolation of the prosperous, he said, threatens their support for public schools, parks, mass transit and other investments that benefit broader society.

“The poor do without and the near poor, at best, live from paycheck to paycheck. Most Americans don’t know what that is like, but unless the nation reverses direction, more are going to find out.”
— The Poor, the Near Poor and You

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.
– Susan Sontag, On Photography (180)

From The New Yorker: “The Promise”

An interactive portfolio about the civil-rights era, with contemporary portraits by Platon, historical photographs, interviews, and audio commentary by David Remnick, whose written introduction appears below the portfolio.

This piece, which combines audio, visual, and textual components of meaning-making, is my inspiration for a “multimodal photo essay” assignment I’m working on for my First Year Writing courses at DePaul.

Also:

• Henri Cartier-Bresson:The Great Leap Forward, China. 1958. (MOMA)
• Photo Essay (Wikipedia)
• Chicago Then & Now (Seeman)

I have recently queried colleagues at the American Library Association and academic librarians at two universities with this question: is there any evidence or data that suggests that there is more academic plagiarism now than there was, say, 15, 40, or 110 years ago?

Anecdotally, of course, plagiarism is one of the guaranteed fear inducers of contemporary academic culture.  Due in large part to corporations such as turnitin.com—whose marketing-and-rhetorical strategy seems to be that they can both diagnose the disease and provide the cure—the culture of fear, anxiety, and mistrust toward students is palpable.

At any rate, I have been unable to locate data or evidence that suggests there is more academic plagiarism currently than there was, say, 15, 40, or 110 years ago. If you know of any, could you send me a citation? mmoore46@depaul.edu.

Thanks!

Update:

An excellent source, with data — Student dishonesty and its control in college. William Bowers 1964 Columbia University, Bureau of Applied Social Research. New York, NY.

An excellent followup to Bowers: Donald L. McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevino: “Faculty responses to academic dishonesty: The influence of student honor codes.” Research in Higher Education (1993) Volume: 34, Issue: 5, Pages: 647-658.

And from generous posters in response to my query on a Chronicle of Higher Education article

• “parneet“: “I’d suggest looking up Dan Ariely at http://danariely.com“
• Keith Williams: “I haven’t yet seen surveys focused specifically on online courses. I’m sure they are coming” and links to – ”My journalism students conducted a survey on cheating last week and 65.8% of our high school students admitted to cheating before. Only 20.6% reported they hadn’t and 13.6% didn’t respond to the question.” http://edtechvision.org/?p=137
• “Eighty-four percent of students at a public research university believe students who cheat should be punished, yet two of every three admit to having cheated themselves.” http://www.insidehighered.com/…