V

Surveillance and (Dis)trust

Manifesto Points Covered

Figure 5.1

Introduction

The chapters in this part discuss two closely linked manifesto points that explore how teaching with technology requires us to attend to issues of surveillance, visibility, ethics, and trust. The relationship between surveillance and distrust is one that we explore throughout. Our argument is that practices of surveillance have the effect of reducing, rather than increasing, levels of trust between students, teachers, administrators, and technologists in higher education settings. For this reason, bringing these manifesto points together helps to shed light not only on the practices but the implications of surveillance technologies in higher education. These implications are felt even when the stated intention of the technology is something other than surveillance—for example, in plagiarism detection systems. It is the effects, not the intentions, that matter here.

Work on this part was written up and presented at the Networked Learning 2018 Conference, Zagreb, Croatia. Ross, J., and H. Macleod. 2018. “Surveillance, (Dis)trust and Teaching with Plagiarism Detection Technology.” In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Networked Learning 2018, edited by M. Bajić, N. B. Dohn, M. de Laat, P. Jandrić, and T. Ryberg, 235–242. Zagreb: Zagreb University of Applied Sciences.

In digital education practices, instrumental goals such as enhancement and efficiency, explored in different ways throughout this book, are often addressed through centralizing technology decisions that need to be understood in terms of visibility and surveillance. Drawing on Lyon’s concept of a surveillance culture (2017), we examine how learning technologists, teachers, students, and college and university leaders participate in, respond to, resist, and rework their own and others’ surveillance. We critique a commonly expressed assertion that surveillance technologies can be used benevolently (for example, by guiding students gently toward good academic practice or by helping teachers to identify struggling students). Instead, we suggest that these technologies act with and on already problematic conditions of digital visibility that are pervasive in the wider digital culture beyond the university and require critical and thoughtful responses from teachers within higher education institutions. Online courses are prone to cultures of surveillance. Visibility is a pedagogical and ethical issue.

We then move on to discuss how logics of surveillance are strongly at work in practices that attempt to regulate student behavior by subjecting bodies, as well as writing and other online activities, to algorithmic scanning and monitoring. These logics frame students as in need of careful monitoring to ensure that learning and teaching run smoothly. Routines of plagiarism detection, we argue, frame academic writing as a space in which dishonesty is rampant but preventable through technology, and by doing this, they intervene negatively in one of the most important sites of the student-teacher relationship: the production and assessment of student work. We use the term relationship here in a moral and intersubjective sense. It is a relationship of collegiality, of reciprocal care and trust among teachers, students, academic managers, technologists, and leaders. Where these relationships become risk averse and mutually suspicious, trust is lost and not easily regained. We argue that plagiarism detection is a key—because routinized—site within which the effects of distrust are surfaced.

Directing digital education toward more positive futures than the ones mapped for us by surveillance and distrust requires finding ways to resensitize ourselves and our students to the values we want to shape our teaching. We need to better articulate what forms of privacy students have a right to expect from their educational experiences, offering means by which students can voice their responses to surveillance cultures in higher education. Such issues need to be addressed at a strategic level within our institutions and the sector more widely. In our reviews of technology platforms and practices, we argue for the need to move beyond issues of compliance and functional requirements, and toward more engagement with ethics and the nature and purpose of the university itself.