The changing milieu of research--increasingly global, interdisciplinary and collaborative--prompts greater emphasis on cultural context and upon partnership with international scholars and diverse community groups. Ethics training, however, tends to ignore the cross-cultural challenges of making ethical choices. This paper confronts those challenges by presenting a new curricular model developed by an international team. It examines ethics across a very broad range of situations, using case studies and employing the perspectives of social science, humanities and the sciences. The course has been developed and taught in a highly collaborative way, involving researchers and students at Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Brown University. The article presents the curricular modules of the course, learning outcomes, an assessment framework developed for the project, and a discussion of evaluation findings.
Monasteries were major contributors to the preservation of ancient knowledge about, as well as innovation in, hydraulic technology during the western Middle Ages. The form of monasticism adopted by the Carthusians combined eremitic isolation with limited communal life, and thus required that water be provided to individual cells as well as to other locations in the monastery. The Carthusian house of Bourgfontaine (Aisne), founded in the fourteenth century in northern France, featured technologically sophisticated water management, the topography of its site requiring a siphon-powered system. An elaborate series of surviving water tunnels led to a large springhouse and aqueduct that in turn ran 500 meters to the charterhouse. Study of archival and pictorial sources, as well as comparison with other excavated and surviving Carthusian houses in Europe, permits us to understand the larger context of the contributions made by Bourgfontaine to hydraulic technology.
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