Joseph Duemer has been exploring 
cheating and writes
I want to think about the moral calculation most students make when they turn in a paper they downloaded or program their calculator with the formulas they'll need on a test. What I can't quite figure out is the extent to which academic cheating (the foreground, from my perspective) and public lying (the social background) are related.
Plagiarism isn't only a problem in academia, of course. The British Government recently was caught plagiarizing an intelligence report on Iraq.
My rationalization of student cheating is that students don't accept the premise that the goal of education is personal transformation. Students often see coursework simply as work. They believe that a person who comes back from a day of cutting wood is the same person who went out to cut wood in the morning. More sweaty, maybe, and tired, but otherwise unchanged. Similarly, they believe that after writing a paper or taking a class, they will be the same person, but now with a grade or diploma. They don't appreciate the potential of pursuing the work as an opportunity to transform their understanding of the task. If coursework is nothing more than work, then getting out of it is simply clever. Fairytales are full of stories of people confronted with unreasonable tasks who get out of them by being clever or with a magical helper, like the Miller's Daughter. (Although actually, as I look, I can't find that many. I thought this motif was particularly interesting and relevant. It reminds me of the story about the two students who go to a concert, are late getting back the next morning, and miss the test. They tell the teacher they were late because the car got a flat tire and back each other up on the story. The teacher agrees to give them a make-up exam, seats them in separate rooms, and gives them each a sheet with 2 questions, "For 1 point, put your name. For 99 points, which tire went flat?")
Beyond the fact that students see academic work simply as work, not as a learning opportunity, to the extent that academic work looks like a simple redoing of what's been done before, students feel like they're being asked to reinvent the wheel. Why write yet another paper on Chaucer when thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have already done so. (And many of them, having done it better than you ever could have.) It's one thing to cut new wood. Its another thing to move a stack of wood from here to there, when you can see that the wood just keeps getting moved back and forth, over and over again. Not only is academic work just work, it's stupid work that doesn't actually need to be done. It starts to sound like hard-labor at a prison camp, meant only to wear down the spirits of the prisoners.
When I taught my writing section I tried to create activities that were authentic and impossible to fake. My favorite was the methods project. Try to find a way to plagiarize that! The most striking thing to me was when I asked the students to discuss what they learned from doing the paper, how many of them rolled their eyes and said, "I needed to be more careful about how I write my methods" -- that was the truism they knew before they even started the project. I didn't hear students say, "I realized that I hadn't thought about what a living organism was and how to take a picture of one." In my opinion, that's what the real challenge was. Just below that was, "what factors can I control to minimize the differences between picture-taking session?" When I described the task to my dad, he said instantly, "I'd take a picture of a lichen." Now there's an organism that isn't going to change much from day to day unlike, say, "flowers", which are fairly ephemeral and are only part of an organism. (Of course, some people might argue that "lichens" aren't actually organisms, being a composite of fungi, algae, and/or cyanobacteria). That's the sort of thought, controversy, and depth a paper like this can elicit.
The other critical means I used for preventing plagiarism is having the students do their writing collaboratively in a wiki. This meant that I could see all of the intermediate versions of their papers and see if big chunks of polished writing came in from nowhere. Groups also tend to help keep individuals honest. Furthermore, by having each group choose a unique topic, it was "safe" for students to see each other's projects in development. And to learn from each other. A surprising number of the students didn't bother to look at each other's papers, but for the students who did, they were a wealth of ideas on how to approach problems and what approaches worked.
I recently got a small pot of money that I'm planning to use to replace my PDA. I have a Handera device now. Its been OK, but I was hoping to use a wireless interface with it and I find that it kills the batteries in minutes -- literally 15 or 20 minutes. Using 12 AA batteries an hour makes even the $4/hour wireless access at Javanet seem cheap.