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Chapter 1 Misbehavior Online, a New Frontier in Higher Education: Introduction

Misbehavior Online in Higher Education

ISBN: 978-1-78052-456-6, eISBN: 978-1-78052-457-3

Publication date: 27 January 2012

Abstract

Universities are increasing hubs of digital activity; much commendable, some reprehensible. It is dismaying that in some learners' minds the divide between them is murky rather than clear. Today's students are largely digital natives born into computing and its venues. In many colleges, during orientation the preponderance of incoming students use their new college e-mail accounts to enable in Facebook, etc., easy online communication with others in the institution. Unlike past decades when a student might be handed flyers or read postings on poles and walls, today's students are in a maelstrom of social media, and other new technologies that students are socially pressed to use. In her book Ruling the Waves, Debora Spar suggested that cyberspace is like a frontier town, a place where there are “not a lot of rules or marshals in town” (Spar, 2001). People online often feel relatively unconstrained, creative, and innovative. At the same time, chaos, disorder, nefariousness, and just plain “bad behavior” are rife. New technologies foster the sense of a new normality. Yet just because it is now possible to act in new ways through new technologies does not make those ways acceptable.

Citation

Wankel, L.A. and Wankel, C. (2012), "Chapter 1 Misbehavior Online, a New Frontier in Higher Education: Introduction", Wankel, L.A. and Wankel, C. (Ed.) Misbehavior Online in Higher Education (Cutting-Edge Technologies in Higher Education, Vol. 5), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2044-9968(2012)0000005003

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limited