SkepTech: The house that TurnItIn built

Educators have been at the sharp end of generative AI, smartphone, and gamification technologies since their advent.

Whether educators wanted them to or not, they have reshaped important classroom realities.

Yet at the same time, these technologies have been accompanied by relentless hype and breathless enthusiasm. Advocates claim that ed tech has the potential to radically improve educational practice.

And even if we don't believe these claims, we are asked to be "realistic": we must use these technologies to prepare today's students for tomorrow's world. 

The Skeptech online speaker series is a forum for everyone who has doubts about these claims. We will welcome a selection of leading scholars from around the world to challenge the hype and to invite us to question these technologies more carefully.

Join us, and add your own voice to the mix.

The House that TurnItIn Built

Although panic about students relying on “AI” to cheat is presented as a new threat to learning and to academic integrity, it’s actually part of a much older story, one that stretches back at least three decades when the Web itself was viewed as a plagiarism machine. This talk will examine the history of TurnItIn, created in 1994 by a graduate student at the University of California — not just the way in which fears about plagiarism were used as a marketing device to sell the product to schools and universities, but the way in which the product undermined students’ ownership of their own academic work, how it has shaped the way in which students and teachers alike think about writing — and importantly, encouraging students to use more technologies in order to try to “pass” the TurnItIn test of authentic authorship. Although the technology of TurnItIn was not a “large language model,” there’s much to learn in its history — its pervasive adoption throughout higher education and integration with other core pieces of ed-tech — about how “AI” constrains rather than enables the production of knowledge.