Digital media & integrity

This reseach cluster develops the ideas canvassed in a recent IJEI special issue on digital technologies and educational integrity  (vol 6 no 2) co-edited by Christopher Moore and Ruth Walker.

We will consider how changes in technologies used by teachers and learners – both in and out of educational contexts – have impacted on our understandings of educational integrity. We ask questions about the integrity of the educational enterprise itself: just as the expanding research and writing capacities of digital media have complicated notions of authorship, so too does the increasing reliance on technologies in educational settings complicate expectations about the open or gated nature of educational institutions. However, it is not so much the digital technologies themselves, but how they are used, regarded, implemented and positioned by institutions, that offer a new twist to our interpretation of education as both 'borderless' and 'gatekeeping'.

The open-ended term ‘next media’ may prove useful to frame further thinking about technology and educational integrity: what will come after education workers have wrestled with current pressures to change and adapt to the new? Can we find continuity in our scholarly activities when new technologies continue to emerge and encroach on our everyday teaching and learning practices? How will our academic identities and activities be impacted by the fading of the distinction between online and offline activities, and the blurring of the division between the professional and personal? Will digital technologies challenge or strengthen the core values of academic integrity? At the moment, attitudes to the incorporation of technologies in education - or acknowledgement of the different literacies they might call upon - range from recalcitrance and suspicion to excitement and stimulation.

Rather than play a reactive game of ‘catch up’ – as has happened with issues surrounding intellectual property law or the administrative procedures around the use of information technology services – it is important to encourage the development of curriculum, teaching and learning practices, digital literacies and policy frameworks that will flow across multiple platforms, be they embedded in online learning management systems, social networking sites or virtual environments. An educational integrity for the change that is inevitable with next media is about contributing to a discourse of integrity between peers, between teachers and students as well as between the institutions that incorporate, as well as being embodied by, practices of integrity

Please contact the research cluster convenor if you would be interested in joining this research cluster, or if you have a particular sub-project you would like to discuss.