Compliance in a Hyperconnected World

The simple/complicated domains are chock full of compliance mechanisms. These reflect an assumption that the key aspects of a generic decision context can be measured & monitored.

Compliance metrics usually measure factors that, in the past, have been correlated with achieving a specific goal (a clear cause-effect relationship may or may not be present). While some of these factors are measured outputs, they are often measured inputs.

These aspects of compliance have been much discussed, and are not the topic of this post, which was triggered by a slashdot posting about a student that faces expulsion from college for organizing an online chemistry study group. Although it appears that, at the very least, what was going on was suspicious, it still raised a question for me:

"How do the ethics of collaboration change in a hyperconnected world?"

In a face-to-face collaboration about homework, interactions can range from copying (unethical) to help that accelerates learning and is ethical (as long as it's not prohibited by the instructor, as it was in this case).

However, hyperconnected collaboration involves IT, and therefore inevitably spans multiple context instances, since the content of the collaboration lives on and can be applied in future contexts.

Implication: a collaborative exchange between two students that is entirely ethical may be seen as unethical if it is published to the entire class.

This is not a new issue, and I'm not sure there's really a specific answer to my question, but it highlights the fact that underlying much of our communication is an assumption that it will not be used IN EXACTLY THE SAME FORM in a future context (i.e., a human will often mediate re-use).

Although this assumption is trending toward being the exception (rather than the norm as almost all contexts are being at least partially recorded for future consumption), I'm not sure I'm seeing any fundamental cultural shifts yet that reflect that trend.

As for the college, I hope there's a renewed appreciation for the fact that input-oriented compliance mechanisms (how students collaborate in doing homework) are not nearly as valuable/enforceable as output-oriented mechanisms (test scores).