Technology and Academic Virtue: Student Plagiarism Through the Looking Glass

Abstract

Plagiarism is the misuse of and failure to acknowledge source materials. This paper questions common responses to the apparent increase in plagiarism by students. Internet plagiarism occurs in a contextusing the Internet as an information tool -where the relevant norms are far from obvious and models of virtue are difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to find. Ethical responses to the pervasiveness of Internetenhanced plagiarism require a reorientation of perspective on both plagiarism and the Internet as a knowledge tool. Technological strategies to ''catch the cheats'' send a ''don't get caught'' message to students and direct the limited resources of academic institutions to a battle that cannot be won. More importantly, it is not the right battleground. Rather than characterising Internet-enabled plagiarism as a problem generated and solvable by emerging technologies, we argue that there is a more urgent need to build the background conditions that enable and sustain ethical relationships and academic virtues: to nurture an intellectual community.

Table of Contents

“…But according to the Office of Research Integrity, "the number of institutions responding to allegations of research misconduct has grown steadily from 1992-2001 and is expected to continue to do so" (Rhoades, 2004, p. 11). Conrad, 2006;Howard, 2001;Maruca, 2003;Puka, 2005;Townley and Parsell, 2004). Organizational approaches to academic misconduct should take into account the organizational tensions and societal forces that complicate the work of students and faculty (Barnett and Dalton, 1981;Hall and Kuh, 1998;Howard, 2001;Whicker and Kronenfeld, 1994).…”

“…In cooperative cheating, students attempt to help themselves while helping others through the sharing of resources (such as old papers, lab reports, and examinations), divvying up the work required on assignments, and working together on independent assignments. The spread of the Internet and the infusion of technology on college campuses has also been cited as a major contemporary force shaping students' academic conduct, faculty roles, and organizational responses to academic integrity Townley and Parsell, 2004;Ward, 2003). The moral panic surrounding student cheating intensified significantly toward the end of the twentieth century as online capabilities expanded and the use of the Internet proliferated among students.…”

“…One institutional facet thought to shape student and faculty (as teacher and researcher) conduct is the competitive marketplace (Bok, 1990;Townley and Parsell, 2004). Faculty perceive a great and mounting pressure to publish and produce results for the institution that can be measured by a dollar figure, and students perceive a similar pressure to produce "perfect" pieces of academic work .…”

“…Over a thirty-year period, the number of students who self-report engaging in unauthorized collaboration has tripled (McCabe and Bowers, 1994), and more recent studies have found that students and faculty rate copying from the Internet without attribution as a less serious form of academic misconduct (Levy and Rakovski, 2006;Robinson-Zañartu and others, 2005). These studies suggest that technology has precipitated disparate and complicated conceptions of legitimate or ethical academic practices (Townley and Parsell, 2004;Wilson, 2004). Vaidhyanathan (2004) argues that changing conceptions of knowledge, information, and legitimate academic work are a result of "peer-to-peer technology" that offers "a fuller realization of knowledge and power for the common good" because millions of people take from the storehouse of knowledge (p. 21).…”

Virtual Communities of Enquiry: An Argument for Their Necessity and Advice for Their Creation

“…[13] There are worries about blogging, if it does not include an interactive dimension that is the mirrorimage of the benefits of open communication in a CoE (see Townley & Parsell 2004. As our claims herein are restricted to the building of online communities via dialogue we will not consider blogs, which due to their individual nature in the first instance, can at best serve as catalysts for dialogue.…”