They have created a blog that is intended to garner questions in advance of a class, which will be offered this coming Winter Term at Stanford - Topics in French Literature, Philosophy, and Humanities. There are a fixed number of posts, which are in effect a set taxonomy for questions. Anyone can post a comment, however, and in this way ask a question of Michel Serres, which he intends to answer in the class -- and online (for the benefit of those not attending Stanford this winter).The categories are Philosophy, Metaphysics; Religion, Theology, History of Religions; Critical Theory, Linguistics, Stylistics; Culture, Ethnology and Anthropology; Psychology, Human behavior; History, Economics, Law and Civil Rights; Science, history of science; Arts and Aesthetics

(via Sarah Lohnes, and the CET Social Software Users Group listserv)

May 13-14, 2005
Annenberg Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Call for Participation

http://www.annenberg.edu/ssaw
(Submission Deadline: March 31, 2005)

Tools for collaboration and communication have proliferated in
academia. Students and professors regularly communicate via email and
mailing lists and course materials are commonly made available via the
web. Students regularly use instant messaging and cell phones to

Rising incidences of plagiarism in undergraduate work and how it's facilitated by internet paper mills is getting a lot of attention these days. One thing that frequently escapes these observations, however, is what effect this focus on policing is having on teaching.

One of the most innovative uses to date of the Google API is a free service called GoogleAlert. It executes Google searches daily, and returns hits to the subscriber. The default delivery method is an email digest, but canny bloggers can choose to receive an RSS feed instead.

Creative Commons has recently established a developer community in a brilliant move to make it easier to find cc-licensed content. They posted a series of tech challenges, a wish list of features to be fulfilled by enterprising volunteer coders. The coolest new feature is a Mozilla extension called mozCC that enables the browser to recognize cc licenses. It was devised by Nathan Yergler (blog: Law of Averages) in just a week or two.

Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin colleges are co-sponsoring a one-day conference on
plagiarism on 15 October 2003 at Colby.

Part of a Mellon grant to develop an instruction program to discourage the
occurrence of plagiarism among undergraduates, the conference, "Information
Ethics and Academic Honesty," provides a forum to discuss the global issues
of plagiarism for higher education. By bringing together faculty,
librarians, technologists, administrators, and students from a range of
schools, this event seeks to provide multiple perspectives on the ethical,

Despite continued dissent over the implications and potential harm of a Creative Commons education license, it appears that project lead, David Wiley, will make an official recommendation in the next week or so. (Read on for the license details. I will bring any concerns voiced here to the cc.edu mailing list.)

The Creative Commons is investigating the idea of a license explicitly for education. The project lead is David Wiley, the learning object pioneer from Utah State, and the matter is currently under discussion on a CC listserv.

New, free systems available from Middlebury (Segue) and Stanford (CourseWork).
Both are participants in the MIT OKI standards initiative.

A dedicated group of coders from Middlebury College has for some time now been developing a MySQL/PHP Course (alt:Content) Management System available to all under an open source license. Alex Chapin demonstrated Segue at a November NITLE meeting at Middlebury.

A website that provides term papers for a fee to would-be plagiarists has a section from which one can download papers on Ethics. The irony doesn't stop there. One of the papers is entitled "Academic Dishonesty and MacIntyre's View of Virtue". 5 pages, $50 USD.