Alec Couros, PhDUniversity of Regina

Academic Integrity and the Culture of Sharing

• Traditional views of and approaches toward academic integrity (AI).

• Rise of the culture of openness, sharing, collaboration and remix.

• How the shift informs our contemporary views of academic integrity, intellectual property, and (free) culture.

Outline

Academic Integrity != Plagiarism

Keywords: Text from top 10 Academic Google results, visualized using Wordle.

• “... the pursuit of scholarly activity in an open, honest and responsible manner. Academic integrity includes a commitment not to engage in or tolerate acts of falsification, misrepresentation or deception.” (Penn State)

• “... is a commitment, even in the face of adversity, to five fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility.” (CAI)

• “... means honesty and responsibility in scholarship. Professors have to obey rules of honest scholarship, and so do students.” (Oklahoma U.)

• “... is the cornerstone of University life and scholarly communities. Professional academics, depend on each other to work with integrity to continually advance our understanding of the world through the development and dissemination of knowledge.” (York U.)

Definitions from Universities

Definitions from Educators via Twitter

“Twenty-nine engineering students got 0, after professors caught them cheating on essays about professional ethics.”

“Cheating is not only commonplace but is also becoming increasingly sophisticated.”

“Developing a system of codes and hand signals, pre-recording answers and storing them in audio recorders”

creates a system where “students feel that education is less important than their grades”

“... the high rates don’t necessarily mean students in those programs are more likely to cheat. Rather, their professors may simply be taking cheating more seriously.”

“Students go to university for a higher education. They don’t go to be involved in a culture mistrust, a culture of guilt.”

“One hundred and forty-six students used the group to help each other with homework assignments.”

“Shouldn’t the teacher be reprimanded for hindering the ability of fertile and free-thinking academic minds to collaborate and learn and progress (in) the way in which they best see fit?”

“The online culture is outpacing the curriculum and education system. These students are smart and using the Internet the way it should be used. This is the future of education.”

Source

Statistical Overview

70%

15%

15%

Do Not Cheat

Will Always Try

May Be Swayed

Survey Results (rounded), Couros, 2000

• Students identified whether or not they regularly attempted to cheat. The majority reported that while they did not regularly cheat, their decision was swayed by the circumstances.

• Recent studies revealed that the Internet “provided more convenience to cheat and plagiarize. Web sites, e-mails, chat rooms, digital devices, and search engines all become tools for plagiarism and cheating.” (Hongyan et. al, 2008)

Why Do Students Plagiarize?

•Poor time management and research skills.•Lack of interest in the subject or low self-confidence.•Lack of knowledge or ability to write/research a paper.•Mistakes made in note-taking/research.•Others plagiarize and are not caught.•Laziness or blatant disregard for copyright regulations.•Over-emphasis of grades vs. learning.•Lack of knowledge of what constitutes plagiarism or AI.•Educators show lack of integrity themselves.•Pressure from family, competition for scholarships/jobs.•Culturally based attitudes toward ownership of knowledge.

Source: Penn State Libraries.

Paper Mills: Over 250 listed at Kimbel Library.

Traditional Approaches to Academic Integrity

•Virtues Approach•Develop and nurture students who do not want to cheat.•Model ethical academic conduct through faculty.

•Prevention Approach•Eliminate or reduce the opportunities to cheat.•Reduce the pressure to cheat.

•Police approach•Catch and discipline those who are caught cheating.•Develop strong deterrents.•Use strategies and tools to check for cheating.

Timeline of Traditional Approaches to AI

Formation of the Intention to Cheat

Act of Cheating

Academic Integrity and Character

Approaches

Preventative Approaches

Police or Detection Approaches

Source: Centre for Academic Integrity

Source: Centre for Academic Integrity

Source: Centre for Academic Integrity

Proactive Prevention Techniques

•Educators better understand why students cheat, and learn various, emerging forms of academic dishonesty.

•Students helped to better understand plagiarism and importance of citing sources.

•Assignment design: assignments made clear, topics changed often, citation/source innovation, focus on research/writing process, require oral reports, annotated bibliographies.

Rise of Openness, Sharing, Collaboration & Remix

cathedral vs. the bazaar

how we view collaboration

copyright vs. copyleft

how we view knowledge and creative works

The Hacker Ethic

• Distinguish between the original hackers and those portrayed in the media.

• Principles: sharing, community & collaboration, access, freedom of information, comp. for better society.

• “... essential lessons can be learned about the world from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and more interesting things.” (Levy, 1984)

Tensions

Opposing Forcesclosed vs. open

broadcast vs. conversationinstitution vs. individualhierarchy vs. network

centralized vs. decentralizedproduct vs. remix

planned vs. chaoticstatic vs. dynamic

push vs. pull

Virtual Counterpartstelevision vs. internet

newspapers vs. bloggingtelephones vs. skypesnail mail vs. email

roller rinks vs. social networkscourier vs. 3D copier

Adapted from Downes (2004)

Wesch on Numa Numa

• “Numa Numa” is one of the most viewed videos in history.

• Wesch’s explains the history of this Internet meme and brings light to how youth are connecting, remixing, synthesizing, and creating new knowledge.

Attribution via retweets

Attribution via trackback/ping

Attribution viaCC/Flickr

Attribution via wiki history

Attribution viavideo response

“It’s amazing to see how a loose federation of worldwide volunteers can get from here ... to here, in a couple of years.”

Udell (2004)

Openness and Academic Integrity

Understanding the Shift

• Students are now connected in ways that we struggle to understand, and in some cases, choose to restrict.

• Lessig, one of the founders of the Creative Commons, is an advocate of (re)creating, (re)use of content, to “say things differently.”

• Sharing and collaboration are necessary forces within a creative and free culture.

370 student registered 443 digital devices.

14 students brought desktop computers, 93 brought iphones/Touch devices.

Only 5 students reported landline service.

432 of 438 new students on Facebook, College group had 3225 posts before start of school.

Source: Academic Commons

Similar Values/Processes, Different Spaces/Tools

• Attribution is relevant and necessary, even in a “free” culture.

• How do we connect to learning preferences of students (e.g., mobile, personal portals, multimedia)

• What are acceptable forms of collaboration and sharing?

• Citation styles have evolved, but do we need a revolution to accommodate new forms of research?

Beware the “Creepy Treehouse”

“Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environment, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.”~ Jared Stein

• The Internet has created a knowledge ecology where we have moved from a few gatekeepers, to many human filters.

• The tools of social media simplify the process or reading, filtering, synthesizing, curating attributing, and sharing information.

• Still, difficulty lies in forming knowledge networks based on trust, while avoiding the echo chamber effect.

The Importance of Knowledge Filters

“Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable

to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to

sensations and cheap appeals.”~Trevelyan (1942)

Understanding Copyright, Copyleft & Openness

• Creative Commons and other copyleft licenses help give us access to quality tools, content, and other resources.

• Openness has the potential to transform our educational institutions in terms of access and quality of resources.

• Perhaps most important to AI, copyleft/openness gives us power to choose how we share, makes us interrogate when to do so, and provides an explicit mechanism for attribution.

The current era of intellectual property is waning. It has been based on two faulty assumptions made nearly three decades ago: that since some intellectual property

(IP) is good, more must be better; and that IP is about controlling knowledge rather

than sharing it. These assumptions are as inaccurate in biotechnology ... as they are

in other fields from music to software.

Source:Innovation Partnership

Why Do We Cite/Write? Core to Academic Integrity

• “... creativity is often distributed over multiple processes, times, places, and people...social creativity does not ‘reside’ in any single cognitive or personality process.” (Harrington, 1990)

• “... in the process of discovering, creating, or adding to an original act’s potential value, a social system enters into and becomes an integral part of the creative process.” (Harrington, 1990)

alec.couros@uregina.cahttp://couros.ca

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Videos:

- Wesch on Youtube

- Lessig TED Talk

- Udell Heavy Metal Umlaut

- Friedman on the Pencil

Photo and Video Credits (in order of appearance)