'Turn it in': technological challenges to academic ethics

In this paper we explore the gritty terrain of academic dis/honesty as it is currently being reformulated through new technological affordances. We examine in depth the purchasing of technologically enabled plagiarism detection ‘services’ by higher education institutions in an effort to better understand underlying assumptions about epistemology, learning and cognition in a digitally (re)mediated ‘knowledge economy.’ In particular we argue that questions of intellectual property are today largely driven by new economies of knowledge privileging strategically self-interested individualism, and aimed at private accumulation of knowledge ‘capital’ whose exchange value drives a corresponding call for the policing of those boundaries. Such conceptions and motivations, we argue, promote a misperception that imitation and appropriation are no longer educationally ‘of value,’ and divert our attention away from far more urgent investigations into the ways in which new technological tools are changing what we know and how we know.