Harvard and Student Cheating

Read an article this morning that Dean Hammonds at Harvard has stepped down from her position (http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/28/us/massachusetts-harvard-dean/index.html?hpt=hp_t2).  If you remember, the cheating problem at Harvard was headline news a few months ago.  Cheating in a course on the introduction to Congress resulted in over 100 students to be dismissed from the college and others disciplined.

Cheating involved plagiarism and collaboration on take-home exams.  The topic of cheating has surfaced at our University too.  In an attempt to assist students to develop values that support honesty, I encourage them to use plagiarism detection software.  We have a site license for Turnitin.  Turnitin is also a feature that can be activated with Desire 2 Learn course management system.

My assessment is that part of the plagiarism problem (mostly not giving credit for the words and thoughts of others and citing the credit) is partly due to inexperience with scholarly scientific writing.  To impart my beliefs about values of not collaborating on individual work, I usually ask students to complete a statement agreeing to not collaborate on work designed to assess individual performance.  I also encourage students to collaborate (peer review writing of their classmates) on writing certain activities.

In the Harvard situation, email was searched to identify who had leaked information, although according to the article, the content of email was not searched.  The lesson reinforced with what happened at Harvard is one needs to have more than one email address.  School business email should be used only for business.  Of course, even if you have more than one email account, confidential information should be not be shared.  If information is  confidential and there is a need to share with those who need to know, a secure email system must be used.

Using the Messages App on the Mac

Chris Breen has a new posting about using Messaging on the Mac at http://www.macworld.com/article/2038838/getting-started-with-messages.html?page=2 

The article made me aware of features like Facetime, sharing files, and Bonjour/Google Talk that I have not used.  I have used messaging only for text messages.  If you have a Mac, consider reading the article.  You may find some new features, too.

EndNote Reference Manager and Apple iWork Pages - Lessons Learned

A student in one of the classes I am teaching is using Pages on the Mac. I encourage all of the students to use a personal reference manager, such as EndNote (our university has a site license for the software).  What I learned is that EndNote has limited menu features in Pages in comparison to those available in Microsoft Word. 

• There is no clear (have not found it yet) way to refresh the citations in a Pages document when changes were made to the citation in EndNote.  
• Even if the citation output style is noted as APA 6th, EndNote names the reference page as Bibliography in bold font face. 
• You cannot use Cite While You Write from within EndNote because it works only with Microsoft Word.  When you insert a citation using the Pages Insert menu, you are able to search multiple EndNote libraries.

When I installed EndNote on my Mac, it installed correctly.  The install did not work on the student's computer.  We did a Google search and found a plug-in to enable the install.  

The bottom line is that it is possible to do Cite While You Write using EndNote and Pages, but the function is within Pages, not EndNote. There are online resources to assist with the use of the install and use of EndNote for Pages.

Windows 8 and Word Starter - First Impressions

At Georgia College the family nurse practitioner (FNP) and doctor of nursing practice (DNP) students had immersion experiences to prepare them for graduate work.  Several of the students purchased new laptops with the Windows 8 operating system (OS) for school.  My first impression with Microsoft innovations was not good.  With Windows 8 OS it felt Microsoft and Bing had hijacked the computer.  I empathized with the students as they attempted to navigate to the different applications. 

Two students purchased laptops with Microsoft Word starter.  They said that they were misled by the computer sales staff believing that Word Starter would meet all of their word processing requirements.  Word Starter is a "teaser" app.  It will allow the user to do basic word processing.  I was demonstrating the use of EndNote personal reference manager with the new graduate students.  Our university has a site license for EndNote that is subsidized with the student technology fee.  EndNote will not load into Word Starter. Both the students and I learned from the frustrating experiences with the Microsoft innovations.