App-centric Students and Academic Integrity: A Proposal for Assembling Socio-technical Responsibility
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App‑centric Students and Academic Integrity: A Proposal for Assembling Socio‑technical Responsibility Theresa Ashford1 Accepted: 15 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Academic integrity (AI) is a complex problem that challenges how we view action, intentions, research, and knowledge production as human agents working with computers. This paper proposes that a productive approach to support AI is found at the nexus of behavioural ethics and a view of hybrid app-human agency. The proposal brings together AI research in behavioural ethics and Rest’s (1979) four stages of ethical decision-making which tracks the development of moral sensitivity, moral judgement, moral motivation and finally moral action combined with insights taken from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This framework, bluntly named the Academic Integrity Model (AIM), positions AI as an effect of an entangled hybrid of human-technology actors moving through distinct but related steps towards ultimately mobilising (un)ethical learning behaviours. This model highlights the importance of developing socio-techno responsibility in students and suggests that approaches to address academic integrity performances such as contract cheating, collusion and plagiarism should include considerations of the complex nature of appcentric students. Keywords Actor-network theory · Academic integrity · Behavioural ethics · Socio-techno responsibility · App-centric generation
Background Supporting and assuring academic integrity is a bewildering problem in higher education which in its most salient form is about advancing knowledge and understanding. Fundamental and alarming questions emerge when we imagine what happens when advancing knowledge is not advancing at all or worse, borrowed or stolen? And equally, what happens when graduating classes do not understand the degree’s content and intellectual qualities of thinking due to poor academic practices or cheating. Arguably academic integrity is one of the most important features of a University’s agenda and therefore merits more research and the mobilisation of a wide variety of theory, philosophy, and perspectives. This paper offers insights from a field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that proposes that * Theresa Ashford [email protected] 1
School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, Queensland, Australia
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in combination with technology based (plagiarism software) and knowledge based (academic integrity modules) solutions we must shift how we view and address students and their technology, in particular, app mediated practices. This shift involves viewing the configuration of ‘student’ and ‘academic performance’ differently; it requires in imagining the app-student. Considering the constitutive value of non-human agents and environments on human action is not new (Bruun & Langlais, 2003; Latour, 1994; Law, 1992). Bruun and Langlais’s work explores the theoretical history of the embodied nature of action in depth and clearly
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