On the curriculum this week at Toronto's Ryerson University: Introduction to Internet-Based Public-Relations Fiascos.
As with any good PR fiasco, you've probably already heard the story by now. An 18-year-old student named Chris Avenir has been charged with academic misconduct, threatened with expulsion and hauled before a disciplinary panel that will decide his fate.
His crime? He is accused of facilitating cheating by administrating a Facebook page called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions. (The Dungeon, apparently, is the name of a popular underground study room at the school.) Avenir's cardinal sin seems to have been a message he posted on the study group's home page, with the following exhortation: "If you request to join, please use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted."
- Do you think Chris Avenir should be disciplined? Answer the poll question at Globetechnology.com
The university — understandably enough — seems to have read this as an incitement toward the swapping of answers. Avenir's advocates say that no such thing took place on the site, and that the Facebook group was merely a virtual study hall.
Not having seen the page, I couldn't say which is closer to the truth (though, in my limited experience, a study group that didn't involve some swapping of answers isn't much of a study group). But I can say that the question is entirely moot: The damage has been done. In its zeal to uphold academic standards, Ryerson has instead managed to portray itself as an institution afraid of technology and the change it brings.
As I write, the jury is out on Avenir's avenir, but even if the school backs down, the news is already everywhere. The media, with its bottomless appetite for sentences featuring the word Facebook, pounced. The Internet, entirely predictably, caught fire. Reaction from all corners has amounted to a good old-fashioned pile-on: How could Ryerson's administrators be so dumb?
I don't for a second envy educators the task of adapting to technology. Google, Facebook and their ilk have been altering the eddies and currents of teacher-student interaction for years, in ways that are blindingly obvious (essays that have copy-and-paste marks all over them) and quietly troublesome (forget sleeping with the teaching assistant; what are the ethical implications of being Facebook friends with one?).
Still, a few rules of thumb ought to apply when a university tackles a new challenge like this. For one thing, don't overreact. Expulsion is a harsh punishment. It can take some effort to get expelled from university, a fact recognized by those who have failed to do so despite giving it a college try.
An overreaction speaks of paranoia. Cracking down on the use of a technology makes an institution look scared of that technology, which, in turn, seems to indicate either a lack of understanding, or an uncertainty about how to deal with it.
The other thing about overreacting is that it creates martyrs. The Internet loves a martyr, especially a martyr to the cause of the Internet. The stakes are only raised when said martyr is crucified for an activity that's increasingly commonplace: One in four Canadians is busy integrating Facebook into their home, school and work lives. Small wonder Avenir has become a cause célèbre.
But Ryerson's cardinal sin against Internet sensibilities is that its move is an affront to today's culture of information sharing. The university may be defending a principle of academic integrity, but it's also standing by a model of evaluation in which answers trump process.
The Internet is full of cheap, easy answers. If it's not Facebook, it's Wikipedia; if it's not Wikipedia, it's Google; if it's not Google, it's someone else by e-mail. And, as we all know by now, answers might be easier to come by, but process is still as hard as ever. Wikipedia won't marshal arguments into a coherent essay for you, and a Facebook group won't show your mental work as you grind through a math equation.
This isn't to say that the Internet doesn't pose real problems for academic honesty. But if the simple presence of a chat group dedicated to discussing a set of problems — even ones in which (gasp) the solutions to those problems might be mentioned — invalidates the exercise, then maybe it's the exercise that needs to be rethought.
Yes, Ryerson's spokesperson has gone on the record, explaining that they're all for using Facebook for "appropriate learning." But then, university administrators use the word "appropriate" as a pliant and inscrutable tool. It can mean anything. By landing so hard on what seems to be, at worst, a very marginal case of impropriety, Ryerson's administrators appear poised to impose a reign of "appropriateness" on their students' online lives.
The implication seems to be that, if the university hadn't made an example of Avenir, Facebook groups letting students discuss problems and compare notes would be sprouting up everywhere! And then what? Would this radically undermine the way classes are taught there?
I rather doubt it. The line between sharing information and cheating can be fuzzy, but the reality is that students with the best of intentions are going to keep sharing information more widely and publicly than ever before. It's up to educators to work with that trend, rather than struggle against it. Flailing against the future is always bad PR.
