by Dave Tomar
Unfortunately, students have other ideas altogether about acquiring information. They find it themselves, they make it themselves, and they share it with each other.
In November 2010, a professor of strategic management at Central Florida University (CFU) made national headlines by using the widespread cheating in his course to create a teachable moment. A recording of Richard Quinn’s lecture, which has been widely viewed thanks to YouTube, shows an emotional professor reporting to a lecture hall of nearly six hundred students that he possesses “forensic evidence” demonstrating that roughly one-third of those who took the midterm exam cheated by studying an answer key from a publisher’s test bank that circulated among the students. Quinn criticizes his students in harsh terms for violating the university’s honor code and his personal standards of integrity. He proclaims in the lecture that “the days of being able to find a new way to cheat the system are over. They’re over.”
Cheating is everywhere, of course. The CFU numbers aren’t so surprising, really. But Quinn’s lecture also shows a critical misunderstanding of the conditions that have led to so much cheating, both in his classroom and in others like it around the country. In fairness to Professor Quinn, schools are capable of far more insidious things than failing to inspire their students. But if you’re trying to improve young minds, that’s still a pretty serious shortcoming.
CFU’s investigation of the event went on to highlight, among other things, how professors and students think differently about information sharing. Quinn’s highly personalized diatribe demonstrates his own understandable frustrations, but he doesn’t say much about what all this cheating really means. According to a 2010 article published by the website Inside Higher Ed, “the perception of exactly what happened leading up to the midterm has become a point of contention. What is clear is that some students gained access to a bank of tests that was maintained by the publisher of the textbook that Quinn used. They distributed the test to hundreds of their fellow students, some of whom say they thought they were receiving a study guide like any other—not a copy of the actual test.”
Not only is cheating everywhere, but the current generation also has a different view of what constitutes it. This is essential to understanding the CFU story. But here’s something else to consider: In a six-hundred-person course, and with a school-supplied course textbook, how much opportunity did Quinn really have to design an exam that worked for the needs and goals of his students? This is an issue not just of educational laziness, but of a failure to understand just how accessible information has become. I don’t know Quinn personally and I can’t speak to his philosophy as a professor, but his behavior in this instance is symbolic of a kind of educator. For our purposes, we will call this educator Dr. Microfiche. Just as the CFU students could not hide their reliance on the modern sharing of information, neither can Dr. Microfiche hide his ignorance. The hope is that incidences such as this might elucidate the error in his way of thinking. He is no longer a gatekeeper of information as he once was.
But one wonders if Dr. Microfiche truly understands the implications of what occurred in Professor Quinn’s course. What are his thoughts on the fact that two hundred cheaters in his class of six hundred presumably felt that they could benefit more by passing the class than by learning from it? It seems fair to assert that Quinn and his university sowed the seeds for this type of blatant disregard for the honor system by failing to create “a community devoted to learning.”3 When at least one-third of all students are proven offenders, it is the environment and not the individual that must explain itself.
Educators are at war with the Internet, whether they know it or not. Traditional educators are at war with the Internet even as they use it, embrace it, and channel their work through it. The Web doesn’t just open the door to clever ways of undermining the research process. It isn’t just a context in which the student is more comfortable than the professor. It is a capitalist free-for-all where the student has learned to be wholly independent, for better or worse.
The Internet is, as my friend Donovan Root phrases it, putting an end to the “monopoly on knowledge.” Donovan spent the ten years following graduation working in the finance industry and offering eerily accurate prophecies about the coming economic apocalypse.
Donovan’s position of prestige in the world of finance was achieved on the strength of his burning intelligence and an otherworldly geekiness where the computer is concerned. We’re the exact same age, but when I was in junior high, I spent my weekends setting fire to things and frantically putting them out for entertainment. Donovan was building computers from scratch and creating Web bulletin boards, then going outside to set things on fire. This was in 1992. Back in the days of the dot-com boom, Donovan was one of the Internet wunderkinds, a computer nerd version of Doogie Howser, the kind of kid rich adults threw money at with hopes of striking it even richer.
Donovan has been a witness to the great revolution from the inside. He explains to me that in his world of finance, as in the world of professorship and in the professional world in general, the exclusivity of knowledge has long served to validate the expert and his earning power. Before the Internet, finding information, building it into knowledge, and knowing how to learn and how to profit from it were all considered to be part of a special skill set. It would take a doctor to interpret the results of a blood test. It would take a stockbroker to tell you how your investments were doing. It would take a lion tamer to show you how to use a whip.
The Wikipedia entry on lion taming offers a brief definition but then links to the websites of more than a dozen of the world’s most famous or successful lion tamers. There are tutorials for how to become a lion tamer on eHow and HowStuffWorks. I also watched a horrible video on YouTube in which a Ukrainian lion tamer is mauled by several angry lions, which led me, inevitably, to a series of articles detailing how Roy of Siegfried and Roy was dissected by a white tiger with a lot of pent-up aggression. Ultimately, I was dissuaded from becoming a lion tamer, but assured that I could do it if I wanted to.
Frankly, there’s a lot I can do now without paying tuition, kowtowing to a professor, or sweating grades. The Internet has knocked over the ivory tower, and all its precious papers are fluttering in the wind. The cherished notion that knowledge may be obtained only by those with the time, the dedication, the inquisitiveness, and, yes, the financial means is no more. Whatever it costs to go online in your region, that’s how much it costs to learn.
It is human to absorb, integrate, and recontextualize. And today, it is expedient to do so. As I have sold off my alleged intellectual property to be claimed by others, I have become rich in knowledge, stamina, and patience, and without anybody’s help.
The powerful discretion of the ivory tower is not what it once was. No wonder academia hates Wikipedia so much. Collective knowledge is a threat to those whose jobs are based on singular knowledge. Students can get what universities are pitching for free. Donovan calls this the “disintermediation of the expert.”
The things that we used to need professors for, we can get on our own.
In the era of deregulation, of trade liberalization, of globalization, in an era when jobs are less about specialization and more about cost-effective commoditization, the deconstruction of claims to intellectual property is as easy as the deconstruction of international barriers. They’re all just ideas, anyway, all social constructs subject to change depending on how you were raised, the nature of your economy, and the ways in which you stand to benefit or be exploited.
Globalization and intellectual property are strange bedfellows.
On the subject of intellectual property, my friend Paulie always liked to quote Ecclesiastes 1:9—not that I would describe Paulie as assertively religious. He would say,
What has been will be again,
What has been done will be done again;
There is nothing new under the sun.
Paulie was an accountant with ten years’ experience at one o
f the Big Four firms. The gig wore him out. When the ax fell on him, it seemed like it was more a relief than anything else. Paulie was one of the most gloriously reckless partyers I’ve ever met. He was routinely the guy denied entrance into a bar, booted from a strip joint, or asked never to return to a casino. He has always been welcomed in my house.
A master of disguise, a Tasmanian devil in a mustache, and a Falstaffian character whose abandon struck fear in the hearts of more conservative men, he reminded me often that we have precious little control over our own ideas. To wit, Paulie had a tremendous wealth of intellectual property that he would dispense with seemingly little concern for context, audience, or pertinence. He was great company for a spirited or spirituous exercise in rhetorical combat. He was frequently correct but possibly crazy.
In conversation we have both wondered if such a thing as intellectual property even exists anymore.
We’re living in a time of mashups, of sampling, of co-opting, of file sharing. We borrow liberally until information and intellectual property are nothing but bits of quotable human ephemera, connected only loosely to their original contexts or creators.
Ray Charles knew nothing of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” when he sang “I Got a Woman.” And I’m pretty certain that the Southern Tones didn’t know that their song “It Must Be Jesus” would be adapted (by Charles) into an R&B chart topper about a man-pleasuring sugar mama way across town.
Online piracy, Wikipedia, social networking, and the supposed “knowledge economy” may not be simply new ways of looking at the intellectual property hierarchy; rather, they may be the tools of its destruction.
Historically, selling ideas has not just been a way of profiting from them—it has also served to enforce ideological class division: The person with the idea has something, and if you want it, you need to pay him.
The way Ethan and I viewed it, the Internet and paper writing had given us the chance to create intellectual property of economic value without anybody’s approval. Suddenly, for those without expensive credentials, for those possessing only the ability to generate intellectual property at will, the market had produced a great new opportunity.
And evidence suggests that even if my grandmother and Dr. Microfiche do ever come to truly understand the cultural implications of the Internet, they may be surprised to find out that their generations have been disintermediated.
There is indeed a generational divide where the Internet is concerned. But it has less to do with who uses the Internet than with how we are using it. It is deceiving to note that Americans over the age of seventy are the fastest-growing demographic of Web users.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that just 26 percent of Americans between the ages of seventy and seventy-five were online in 2005. As of 2009, that number stood at 45 percent. But the difficulty we’re experiencing in harnessing the Internet for the purposes of education is not about access or interest or the fact that your great-aunt Sally knows how to attach photographs to e-mails.
Rather, we’re experiencing a paradigm shift in the cultural treatment of intellectual property, and this shift is a direct consequence of how our generations variously use the Web. Sixteen percent of sixty-four- to seventy-two-year-olds download music online; 21 percent of baby boomers (forty-five to sixty-three) do it. For teens, the number is 59 percent; for Gen Yers, 58 percent; and for Gen Xers, 46 percent.
Similar trends emerge in the areas of social networking and blogging. Sixteen percent of baby boomers ages forty-five to fifty-four have created social networking profiles for themselves. Nine percent in the age group of fifty-five to sixty-three have done so. By contrast, 29 percent of thirty-three-to forty-four-year-olds, 60 percent of eighteen-to twenty-three-year-olds, and 55 percent of twelve-to seventeen-year-olds have created social networking profiles. Twenty-eight percent and 20 percent of twelve-to seventeen-and eighteen-to thirty-two-year-olds respectively have created their own blogs, whereas 10 percent of thirty-three-to forty-four-year-olds, 6 percent of forty-five-to fifty-four-year-olds, and 7 percent of fifty-five-to sixty-three-year-olds have done so.
So as much as the older generations are using their e-mail accounts and buying M*A*S*H collectibles on eBay, younger users are overwhelmingly contributing to the creation and replication of intellectual property online. And because the Web has become so dominant a force in so many facets of our personal, professional, and educational lives, these patterns suggest a disruption in mankind’s long legacy of inherently ageist hierarchical intellectual property gatekeeping.
The ways in which we use the Web for expression and the gathering of information have become inherently more communal, more collective, less accredited, and less consistent with the ways in which older generations have formed cultural bodies of knowledge. Democracy—with all of its wanton, inarticulate, and garbled constituencies—has seized our technology.
Oh, the informality of it all!
Students learn in a way for which many older professors have no frame of reference. Where Dr. Microfiche is concerned, Professor Quinn’s students are cheaters and beneath contempt. Where these students are likely concerned, Dr. Microfiche has no concept of the way his role as a professor should have evolved. The information-sharing tactics that Professor Quinn’s students employed to “cheat” on their exam are consistent with those they will employ in their future professions and in their pursuit of information in general. That any professor might refuse to accept a role in helping them to do this would be ignorant at best and sociologically regressive at worst.
I can’t tell you that the Internet is a trustworthy place. I can’t tell you that what intellectual property you’ll find there was created fairly and ethically. I can’t even tell you that simply using the Internet won’t make you a victim of identity theft. However, I would argue that there’s not a whole lot that anybody can do to change any of that now.
Professors are not police officers, and it is not their responsibility to make the Internet safe, or to protect students from the enormous wealth of garbage out there, or to protect themselves from it. But if it is the professors’ responsibility to help students learn, then every classroom should be equipped with the knowledge and will to help students navigate the evolving virtual space. To date, our educational imagination extends to the ideas of distance education, virtual classrooms, and digitized library catalogs.
The illusion of progress.
These are things that make schools more profitable and make cheating easier but do nothing to enrich the learning process as a function of Web use. The professor, the primary text, and the formal research process remain the main channels through which education is conveyed, and with even less personal attention.
As dinosaurs like Dr. Microfiche slowly go extinct from the profession, it will be incumbent upon the future leaders of higher education to evolve. They should not be gatekeepers or cops or censors but navigators. Professors want to be needed, and for the money we’re spending on school, we’d like to need them. The Internet is a pretty scary place, busting at the seams with neo-Nazi militias, cannibal cookbooks, and American Idol fan sites. Don’t tell us not to look at this stuff. Teach us how to use it. Teach us how to use Facebook responsibly, how to differentiate between sharing and stealing, how to engage openly in a discussion about the blurring of lines between these two acts. Don’t tell us not to use Wikipedia. We’re going to do it anyway. Show us how to read it, how to verify its claims, how to spot and debunk its errors, even how to correct it and contribute to its improvement.
These things that we perceive as opportunities, schools have treated as threats. If schools had seized these opportunities proactively, perhaps it would have been more difficult for me to exploit them. I never used a professor’s intelligence for help in doing the homework assignment for his class—I replaced him with the Internet. And my customers chose my help (that of some anonymous Internet person) over that of their professors. How they came to that decision is up for discussion.<
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But I presume that at least one factor is that my grandmother and Dr. Microfiche aren’t alone out there in their virtual disorientation.
After dinner and a game of Scattergories, my sisters and I left my grandmother’s house. I returned home to find Ethan working through an astronomy paper, with Beavis and Butt-Head on in the background. Ethan was clever when it came to the cosmos.
He passed me a pipe as I sat down and pulled my laptop from my bag. I opened it, logged on to the wireless network we’d been “borrowing” from one of our neighbors, and popped open the instructions for my current assignment.
“Asshole,” I muttered under my breath as I read them.
“What’d I do?”
“No, dude. This professor. Get a load of these instructions: ‘Write four-to-five-page explanatory paper that defines a concept or issue for your reader. Need clear and concise thesis statement. Have two outside sources to help define the topic and support assertions. Have two outside sources. NO online sources for this paper. Need copy of resources.’ ”
The student offered her own addendum to the set of instructions, which I also read aloud for Ethan’s amusement. “ ‘Let me know what will the paper going to be about, also dont write about, abortion, euthanasia, clothing or death penalty, yhose were not allowed by my teacher. TTYL.’ ”
For those who don’t communicate in Instant Messaging, that last part means “Talk to you later,” like I was one of her girlfriends and we had just made plans to get our nails done tomorrow.
I could forgive that, though. Hell, I probably could have used a manicure.
What I could not forgive was an educator, in this day and age, within the context of an institution of higher learning, denying the evolution of research, defying the logic that was apparent to the student, and preparing the student for a future of conducting research in 1912. “NO online sources,” said the professor.