Knowl. Org. 42(2015)No.5 J. A. Oravec. The Moral Imagination in an Era of “Gaming Academia” 316 The Moral Imagination in an Era of “Gaming Academia”: Implications of Emerging Reputational Issues in Scholarly Activities for Knowledge Organization Practices Jo Ann Oravec Hyland Hall, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater Wisconsin USA, <oravecj@uww.edu> Jo Ann Oravec is a professor of information technology in the College of Business and Economics at the Uni- versity of Wisconsin at Whitewater. She received her MBA, MS, MA, and PhD at UW-Madison. She chaired the Privacy Council of the State of Wisconsin, the nation’s first state-level council dealing with information technology and privacy. She is author of Virtual Individuals, Virtual Groups: Human Dimensions of Groupware and Computer Networking. She has written extensively on privacy, American studies, futurism, online reputational sys- tems, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies. She has held visiting fellow positions at both Cambridge and Oxford. Oravec, Jo Ann. The Moral Imagination in an Era of “Gaming Academia”: Implications of Emerging Reputational Issues in Scholarly Activities for Knowledge Organization Practices. Knowledge Organization. 42(5), 316-323. 24 references. Abstract: Many participants in higher education build academic reputations in conjunction with their research initiatives (and subsequent citations) along with their teaching efforts. An assortment of reputational considerations related to scholarly publication and teaching is emerging in part as a result of availability of various Internet search and analysis applications. Examinations of ghostwriting efforts, cita- tion circles, and dubious authorship assignments (such as “gift” authorship) are becoming easier to conduct even for individuals outside of the institutions involved. Although questionable publication and teaching practices have been reported for a number of years, the abil- ity to monitor what is going on in a wide assortment of academic contexts has just recently emerged with widely-available tools such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Ratemyprofessors.com. Forms of plagiarism have also been made more readily detectable through va- rious technological applications. This paper addresses ethical issues involved in these potentially-problematic scholarly practices. It also explores ethical dimensions of an assortment of transparency-related university, professional organization, and third-party initiatives that analyze academic activity. It frames the notion of the “moral imagination” in terms of specific efforts to “game” academics, initiatives undertaken possibly for personal reputational gain on the part of higher education participants or increases in institutional rankings. Received: 25 July 2015; Accepted 25 July 2015 Keywords: academic, faculty, gaming, research, productivity, higher education, transparency 1.0 Introduction The word “gaming” in the title of this paper has many couplings with information science and technology; in the paragraphs to come it will largely refer to efforts to influ- ence how research efforts and teaching reviews are dis- played to particular audiences and how various search and analysis programs (such as Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Ratemyprofessors.com) deliver results. Some of the practices discussed in this paper have generally met with strong moral indignation, such as the plagiarism of textual or graphic material; however, some defenders have emerged of these practices as well, for example, comparing plagiarism to the remixing of music and to oral traditions https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2015-5-316 Generiert durch IP '172.22.53.54', am 06.11.2023, 18:12:22. Das Erstellen und Weitergeben von Kopien dieses PDFs ist nicht zulässig.