Literacy in the Digital University

Critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology

Robin Goodfellow, Mary R. Lea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415537964
• eBook ISBN: 9781135108588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Literacy in the Digital University is an innovative volume bringing together perspectives from two fields of enquiry and practice: 'literacies and learning' and 'learning technologies'. With their own histories and trajectories, these fields have seldom overlapped either in practice, theory, or research. In tackling this divide head on, the volume breaks new ground. It illustrates how complementary and contrasting approaches to literacy and technology can be brought together in productive ways and considers the implications of this for practitioners working across a wide range of contexts.

The book showcases work from well-respected authorities in the two fields in order to provide the foundations for new conversations about learning and practice in the digital university. It will be of particular relevance to university teachers and researchers, educational developers and learning technologists, library staff, university managers and policy makers, and, not least, learners themselves, particularly those studying at post-graduate level.

Chapter 1

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Values, digital texts, and open practices – a changing scholarly landscape in higher education

Colleen McKenna and Jane Hughes

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Introduction

Digital technologies and environments offer many affordances in terms of texts and practices. Texts can be reproduced and distributed. They can be searched for and made searchable, and they can be fragmented, reconstructed, and curated. But what are the implications of this new textual world in terms of authorship, commodification, and intellectual property? What values are brought to bear in this writing, production, and distribution of digital work and how are conventional literacy practices being disrupted?

The role of values in higher education (HE) has a certain currency in the literature on academic practice. Macfarlane (2004) argues that the discourse on academic practice is largely concerned with competencies and skills and generally fails to engage with the ‘ethical complexities’ of HE teaching. Little in higher education is ‘value-neutral’ and yet conversations about the ways in which personal and professional values frame or inform practice are infrequent, particularly in relation to e-learning where the metaphor of the computer as ‘tool’ produces a veneer of objectivity devoid of human agency. (Goodfellow and Lea 2007 offer a compelling critique of this metaphor.) In the field of higher education studies, the exploration of values and ethics in the academy is gradually gaining purchase, with Harland and Pickering (2011) addressing values in HE teaching. However, neither Macfarlane nor Harland and Pickering consider values within the digital domain, nor (with a few notable exceptions, to be discussed below) can the topic be found in much of the literature on e-learning or digital literacy.

In this chapter, we consider values – particularly in relation to power, control, and trust – as functions of digital writing and publishing. We discuss different ways in which values are embedded – whether recognizably or not – in practices that have grown up around digital texts. In the first section we consider the conflicting impulses within the HE sector of, on the one hand, the Open Education movement and its commitment to sharing academic resources and opportunities, and, on the other, universities' increasing interest in branding and commodification. In the second section, we explore plagiarism detection software (PDS) and the values implicit in its use. In particular, we consider the way in which practices surrounding PDS construct both the student-teacher relationship and a particular model of student writing predicated on texts as products. Finally, we discuss new forms of authorship resulting from distributed, ephemeral, and multi-voiced texts. Specifically, we ask whether digital authorship subverts conventional print-based literacy practices.

Throughout, we are informed by an academic literacies paradigm, a theoretical framework which views writing as a social practice (Lea and Street 1998). An academic literacies approach enables us to think about issues of power, context, and identity in relation to digital literacy, with an emphasis on practices (Lea and Street 1998; Lillis 2001; Ivanič 1998; Goodfellow and Lea 2007.)

Open Education

Open Education illustrates a values-led approach to educational practice as well as an instance in which tension between old and new models of providing access to higher education might arise. Values underpin this movement, and principles of transparency, shared development, and equality of access inform the open practices that have evolved over the last 20 years. The Open Source movement shares development of software transparently with a community that creates, offers feedback, and engages in further development. The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement (see Martin and Mackenzie in this volume for a discussion of its development) applies similar principles to learning, opening up courses, and releasing learning materials via social networks and institutional, national, or disciplinary repositories. Alongside this, work towards supporting learners, providing credit for study, and embedding open practices in mainstream academic practice is ongoing. There is not yet a clear picture of how resources are being reused: ‘Something, but not enough, is known about who reuses what’ and ‘Almost nothing is known about the how and the why of reuse’ (JISC OER Impact Study blog 2011b). Investigating reuse and repurposing (for example, Lane 2012 and Pegler 2012) is an ongoing effort.

These developments have unfolded in an increasingly marketized HE environment (Hemsley-Brown and Oplatka 2006; Molesworth et al. 2009) in which universities seek to trade on their brands and there is pressure to commodify courses and materials. These aims may appear incompatible with open educational values such as sharing, benefit of a common good, and widening access, but universities have engaged in open practices in order to promote their brand; by releasing open resources they can showcase teaching by ‘star’ academics with a view to attracting students. In doing so they give away some, but not all, in the same way that a free software application may require users to pay for more advanced features. The discourse around institutional OER adoption in the UK (for example in the JISC OER InfoKit 2011c) has tended to foreground reputational gains but in the wider Open Education movement values are more visible, as in the OER University's wiki description of itself as ‘rooted in the community service and outreach mission’ and the Hewlett Foundation's aim to: ‘Equalize access to knowledge for teachers and students around the globe through Open Educational Resources’ (Hewlett Foundation Values and Policies).

Reputational gains such as increased visibility and more frequent citation of publications are also claimed for individuals (Downes 2007). However, personal and professional values are also being shown to play a role in motivating academics to write and share open texts (see Martin and MacKenzie in this volume). Masterman and Wild (2011) found some evidence of an association between an academic's holding ‘open educational’ values and being disposed to engage with OER. Interviews with teacher-creators of OERs by Hughes and McKenna (2012) tend to support this position, with interviewees speaking persuasively about the values that inform their practices:

It [Open Education] just seems a very natural extension of the fact that if through my whole teaching career if anybody had wanted to use my handbook or teaching materials or anything, they'd ask me and I'd always say ‘yes’.

This interviewee felt that OER authoring and publishing enabled her to participate in an education ‘movement’ whose values she already embraced. The digital dimension of Open Education meant, however, that her texts could be shared much more widely and they were formally ‘attributed’ to her, so what had been a part of her ‘everyday practice’ (after Lea and Stierer's ‘everyday writing’, of which more below) was now formally recognized. Another interviewee in this study suggested that participating in Open Education had a transformative effect upon her practice and allowed her to articulate values, particularly within a professional context in which there were competing values in operation. For example, she spoke of using Creative Commons (CC) licences to signal publicly her values: ‘I have a colleague who always puts a copyright notice on every slide, so I've started putting the CC logo on my slides. It has had an impact on me’ (Hughes and McKenna 2012). So, early research into Open Education is suggesting that it offers colleagues an opportunity to realize and/or publicly enact their values.

Moving beyond these examples, to look at academic practice as a whole, a concept particularly relevant to the creation of digital texts is that of the ‘open scholar’, who is according to Weller (2012c: 3) ‘almost synonymous with the “digital scholar” so closely aligned are the new technologies and open approaches’. (Conceptions of digital scholarship are examined elsewhere in this volume by Goodfellow and by Jones.) Weller, as Goodfellow (this volume) indicates, fits the ‘open scholar’ profile he sketches. He contrasts ‘open’ with ‘traditional’ scholars, describing the latter as ‘exclusive’, available only to students registered on specific academic programmes, publishing via access-controlled print media. ‘Open’ scholars, on the other hand, will create open resources and share outputs, do open research and comment openly on other people's outputs, build and contribute to a network, evaluate and adopt new technologies for professional use, and support open learning. Formal publications will be in open access journals but the open scholar will also produce a variety of informal publications such as podcasts, tweets, and blog posts, often engaging the audience by mixing the personal and professional in these texts. Weller does not claim that digital scholarship has replaced traditional academic practice. However, he presents a convincing picture of diversifying practices that might be considered in relation to the Open Education literacies framework proposed by Martin and MacKenzie in this volume. One might also ask how – or whether – these changes are reflected in the disciplinary practices to which students are exposed.

This leads to a consideration of authorship, which is explored more fully in section 4. Developing open resources involves negotiations around the rights of the creator; a CC licence asserts rights as well as granting them. The inclusion of ‘attribution’ – acknowledging the author or creator – in all CC licences implies that this is a fundamental value. However, as already stated, our knowledge about reuse and repurposing of open educational resources is still limited. The vision of an OER community in which a text will repeatedly be reused, changed, and shared again raises questions about who the author is and perhaps also about other kinds of creativity that might need to be acknowledged. For how long in the lifetime of a resource will the notion of an original author be meaningful? Do we perhaps need to acknowledge the kind of creativity that Weller points to, that of someone who makes no changes to a text but finds a new context for its use? Again, how does reuse and remixing relate to students' textual practices and to the academic values they are asked to embrace at university?

The aspects of being digital that support open educational practices may also be the ones that increase concerns about student plagiarism: digital material that can be found easily via a search engine and downloaded. In both cases, too, the provisional nature of digital texts is important: they are easy to change, copy, dismantle, and reassemble. In relation to both Open Education and plagiarism, the value issues are around authorship and particularly attribution – the rights of the author and what the finder feels able to do with the found material. As we have suggested here, the Open Education movement makes explicit the values embodied in its practices; however, in the use of electronic plagiarism prevention/detection systems values are less explicitly articulated, as we explore in the next section.

Plagiarism: systems and practices

Probably nothing conjoins technology, texts, processes, and values more sharply and contentiously than the use of plagiarism ‘detection’ software (PDS). In this section we will consider several studies that have explored the practices that are evolving in conjunction with plagiarism detection systems as well as the implications of the routine scanning of student texts for evidence of copying. These implications include:

• potential changes in the relationship between student and teacher, especially in terms of academic trust;

• the increased sense of writing as a product;

• the reframing of the understanding of plagiarism from the student perspective; and

• a view of writing which demonstrates little awareness of texts that are multimodal, hypertextual, or dialogic.

Conversations about plagiarism are fraught even without the presence of technology. Discussions on the topic tend to be characterized by accounts of fraud, transgression, control, immorality, and dishonesty, with rather less attention paid to the writing practices of novices including those writing in new languages, educational contexts, and subjects (Zwagerman 2008; Hayes and Introna 2005). Furthermore, discourses on plagiarism often fail to acknowledge the complex nature of student writing development and the ways in which disciplinary, linguistic, and national contexts can play a role in perceived plagiarism (Gourlay and Deane 2012; Hayes and Introna 2005). Rather the nuances tend to be elided and the more simplistic equation of ‘plagiarism = cheating’ obtains, often with little recourse to the complexities of entering a textual conversation with other scholars.

Of course, these issues are magnified when PDS becomes an integral part of writing and assessment practices in universities. Arguably, a range of values features in decisions and assumptions surrounding the use of such technologies, yet these often remain unarticulated. However, evidence is emerging that the introduction of technology into the process would seem to lessen the awareness of the complexities around writing and plagiarism, reducing an understanding of plagiarism to the technical act of copying text (Introna and Hayes 2011; Lea and Jones 2011).

One value that is foregrounded by the use of PDS is that of trust between teacher and student and between institution and student. Academic literacies research has shown that student writers operate in a nexus of regulation and power held by tutors, institutions, and disciplines (Lillis 2001; Lea and Street 1998; Ivanič 1998). The practices growing up with the introduction of PDS into the assessment process are likely to intensify these power differentials as Zwagerman suggests, with trust and dialogue between students and teachers one of the early casualties:

… plagiarism detection treats writing as a product, grounds the student-teacher relationship in mistrust, and requires students to actively comply with a system that marks them as untrustworthy … Surveillance technology … reinforces rather than interrogates social roles and power differentials, as if they are natural and immune to scrutiny.

(Zwagerman 2008: 691–2)

Zwagerman's extended critique of PDS is strenuous and compelling. In the extract above he labels such software ‘surveillance technology’ and elsewhere he draws on Foucault and a broader discourse of surveillance, to demonstrate how such technologies and practices construct the reader/writer or student/teacher or even student/institution relationships in terms of control, power, and distrust. As other observers have noted, requiring students to submit coursework to a third party for detection of plagiarism before a copy even goes to their assessor undermines any sense that students are to be trusted as writers and valued members of the academy. However, our broader point is that issues of trust, control, and surveillance are at best implicit in the practice of plagiarism ‘detection’. Our experience is that these values are not discussed or even acknowledged but that rather the introduction of technology lends an air of objectivity and neutrality to proceedings – such that, a process by which departments, faculties, and institutions require all students to submit all assessed coursework through a detection system is increasingly and unquestioningly seen to be part of the practice of assessment, with little or no debate about what values are being communicated to students and indeed teachers

Additionally, it appears that this integration of PDS into the assessment process reframes the concept of plagiarism for students (Lea and Jones 2011; Introna and Hayes 2011). Students in Lea and Jones' study not only had a diminished sense of plagiarism as being solely about copying text (rather than a failure to attribute ideas), they also saw it as a quantifiable act; they believed that they were ‘allowed’ a certain amount of plagiarism. In the example below, two students (at a prestigious university) discuss plagiarism with a researcher:

Don: What is the extent to which we're allowed to plagiarise, 17% or something?

Mark: No, it's just like 20%, but I mean that's all with just the bibliography or literally a couple of words which they highlight and you just ignore that, but obviously if you've got a paragraph then …

(Lea and Jones 2011)

As Lea and Jones go on to discuss, these students view plagiarism as largely about copying text. The use of the word ‘allowable’ suggests an ignorance of the definition of plagiarism: they ‘show no broader understanding of why one might want to avoid plagiarism … or any wish to explicitly acknowledge whose ideas and words one is drawing upon. For them, plagiarism has been reduced to a technical issue of percentages of reproduced text.’ (Lea and Jones 2011: 389) This flattening of the understanding of plagiarism means that even the most basic ideas of writing within a community of scholars and acknowledging their contributions seem not to have been grasped.

It would seem from this exchange that the introduction of technology into the process has led to an abdication of responsibility on the part of both the student and the teacher. The technology, by default, becomes a sort of arbiter of what is allowed and the whole practice becomes understood as being about percentage of copying rather than one of attribution of ideas. How can we expect students to enter into disciplinary conversations if they fail to understand the basic rules of such engagement? Yet, as Zwagerman and others have suggested, the practices that are developing around these technologies are at risk of normalizing this diminished understanding of plagiarism.

Another of Zwagerman's observations that is worth further examination is his objection to the product-oriented construction of academic writing. In the above example, essays are recast as digital artefacts to be uploaded to a plagiarism detection system (the arbiter) for scrutiny. So, processes and drafts become subjugated to technology and product in this appr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Series editors' introduction
• Introduction: literacy, the digital, and the university
• 1 Values, digital texts, and open practices – a changing scholarly landscape in higher education
• 2 Researching academic literacy practices around Twitter: performative methods and their onto-ethical implications
• 3 Crossing boundaries: digital and non-digital literacy practices in formal and informal contexts in further and higher education
• 4 Emergent practices for literacy, e-learners, and the digital university
• 5 The literacies of ‘digital scholarship’ – truth and use values
• 6 Beyond ‘the social’: digital literacies as sociomaterial practice
• 7 Posthuman literacy in heterotopic space: a pedagogical proposal
• 8 Open Content Literacy: a new approach to content creation and collaboration?
• 9 Digital literacies as situated knowledge practices: academics' influence on learners' behaviours
• 10 Academic literacies in the digital university: integrating individual accounts with network practice
• 11 Text-making practices in online writing spaces: from research to practice
• 12 The digital university: a concept in need of definition
• 13 Control and the classroom in the digital university: the effect of course management systems on pedagogy
• Bibliography
• Index