Hitch-Hiking across cyberspace

“This is your Captain speaking so stop what you're doing and pay attention. First of all I see from our instruments that we have a couple of hitchhikers aboard. Hello whoever you are. I just want to make it totally clear that you are not at all welcome. I worked hard to get where I am today and I didn't become captain of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a taxi service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have sent out a search party, and as soon as they find you I will put you off the ship. If you're very lucky I might read you some of my poetry first. ”

Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

I love Hitch-Hikers Guide, because it speaks to me on so many levels. I used the Vogon Captain monologue because it reminds me of some of the behaviours I see online when students work collaboratively. Or .... when they don't, and simply live off the back of other people's hard work. It is not hard to understand the reasons why some students get really hacked off when they work hard to contribute meaningful and considered contributions to a wiki or online discussion group only for others who haven't contributed to also take credit. That's sometimes the problem with group based collaborative work.

In some user groups and online circles, this practice is called 'freeloading' or free riding - essentially hitching a lift at the expense of others. In paper form, using someone else's ideas without their permission or without acknowledgement of the source is referred to as plagiarism. It's a practice that in education world we call 'academic dishonesty.' It's is generally frowned upon in academic circles and can be punished severely. Plagiarism is fairly clear cut, but freeloading on someone else's ideas in the virtual or online world is more difficult to detect. It's not quite the same as plagiarism, because students are not actually copying the work of others, they are taking the credit for it. Freeloading in a collaborative group is often hard to deal with, and although tools such as wikis have tracking devices to show who contributed what and when, many tutors do not have the time to go into these records to check.

Often though, the tutor doesn't need to do anything, particularly when the group decides to police itself. When the members of a group detect that someone is not 'pulling their own weight', they soon tend to get a little resentful. The same applies to virtual learning groups. The wiki is a great tool, but it has a lot to answer for. I have seen students fall out big-time over issues that involve ownership, lack of contributions or disagreements about who wrote what. It has even been known for some students to be ejected from a course for persistent episodes of freeloading (not by me I hasten to add - I tend to read them my poetry instead), in much the same spirit as the Vogon Constructor Ship Captain intended to be the fate of the two stowaways in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I want to continue along this road in tomorrow's post, talking about some of the psychological principles - the reasons some students try to hitch-hike across cyberspace.

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