Communication 2.0

Social plagiarism is fostered within acts of communication. What transpires in that communication can muddy the effort of institutions to assess students as individuals. This is a problem for institutions that has been repeatedly circled around in the present pages: the problem being to help students navigate their study-world such that the experiences of studying in a a social world does not compromise secure and favourable assessment outcomes. However the digital infrastructure that is the internet has added a volatility to communication that challenges institutional management.

It is natural to presume that the impact of new technologies on some human activity is to get it done ‘better’: faster, stronger, cleaner, etc. We perhaps do not understand innovation as re-configuring our familiar activities, rather than amplifying them. Things continue to get done but done differently. A few examples relating to digital technology and learning may illustrate this.

Taking notes is a very common study activity. One that might seem to be facilitated by personal computers. But there are studies suggesting that note taking on a computer is conducted differently to notetaking on paper: in short, that the impact of this new tool is not a simple matter of ‘expanded capability’. It may involve shallower processing of the material annotated. For instance, laptop-using students were found to be more likely to transcribe lecture material verbatim rather than re-framing it in their own terms (Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014).

Here is a second example of ‘sideways’ consequences of a technology. The lightweight, multi-function personal computer has facilitated more nomadic study patterns. This, in turn, has encouraged new designs for library learning spaces that accommodate these possibilities. They encourage informal and collegial exchange among students, although uncertain patterns of exchange that are relevant to assignment expectations (Crook and Mitchell (2012)). If the interpersonal dimension of plagiarism is judged an issue, then this example of technology re-configuring study patterns becomes relevant because of the way in which it more strongly socialises that study.

As is widely discussed in relation to conventional plagiarism, the annotating role of the personal computer coupled with the availability of digitised text creates strong affordances for copy-and-paste offences. Moreover, projects in school may have encouraged assignment composition that involves the intentional blending of already-existing voices – as in the cases of transmedia (Jenkins, 2010) and remix (Lessig 2008) projects. Similarly, the current enthusiasm for ‘digital curation’ (Yakel et al, 2011) may be too easily assimilated to a less considered cut-and-paste approach to exposition.

Some commentators argue that: “Immersed in such a digital world people can often fail to see their social and intellectual dependence on others. This can lead to an ethical blind spot when it comes to the attribution of ideas” Townley and Parsell (2004). So, the digital pasting tool may create a “product view of writing” (Ellery, 2008). Moreover, Ellery and others (e.g., Baruchson-Arbib and Yaari, 2004) have provided evidence that students perceive plagiarism from online sources as significantly less dishonest than similar offences from printed resources.

Finally, Wrigley (2017) suggests that academic composition in a digital environment encourages habits of ‘de-plagiarism’, whereby text is copy/paste into an essay and then ‘cleansed’ to avoid accusations of plagiarism (cf. Stapleton, 2010). If this is coupled with anonymous marking, then a phenomenon that might be termed ‘de-authoring’ appears. Technologically mediated trends of this kind can not all be directly linked to integrity lapses. But, arguably, they create the conditions that are de-stabilising an understanding of intellectual ownership: conditions in which the act of writing becomes detached from the identity of author.

These examples illustrate how new technology does not simply achieve expanded capability (in this case, for research and writing) but re-configures our relationship with the world (in this case, to text). This is an observation that is certainly relevant to the integrity challenge of conventional, text plagiarism: ‘information as property’ has become an alien notion to the current generation of students. The points made in this section highlight how digital tools afford new patterns of help seeking from textual sources – namely pasting with limited processing. But these points also relate to the practices of social plagiarism. Here the issue is whether the re-configuring of communication patterns by new technology also affords new and controversial patterns of seeking help – but via other people. This presents institutional regulation with a tension between, on the one hand, imperatives for the independence of assessed learning and, on the other hand, the celebration of “social scholarship” in the wider academic world (cf. Greenhow et al, 2019). This is a matter revisited in the following section.