13 Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education-TOJDE July 2015 ISSN 1302-6488 Volume: 16 Number: 3 Article 2 TURNITIN? TURNITOFF: The Deskilling of Information Literacy Professor Tara BRABAZON Education and Head of School of Teacher Education Charles Sturt University, AUSTRALIA ABSTRACT Plagiarism is a folk devil into which is poured many of the challenges, problems and difficulties confronting higher education. This article investigates how software -Turnitin in particular- is ‘solving’ a particular ‘crisis’ in universities. However, I investigate how alternative strategies for the development of information literacy offer concrete, productive and imaginative trajectories for university staff and students. Keywords: Plagiarism, intellectual integrity, information literacy, higher education. INTRODUCTION Most of us when explaining what digitization, computing, the internet, web and read write web have added to our lives respond with verby nouns: Ø efficiency, Ø productivity, and Ø connectivity Some may describe the rapid delivery of information. A few may even recognize an expansion of knowledge. What is rarely mentioned and one of the causes of this efficiency is that an array of functions in our daily lives are now automated and displaced from patterns of conscious decision making. From spelling checkers to the defragmentation of discs, from predicting our search terms in Google through to remembering our interests when we visit Amazon, we move through life in a bubble of predictability. The assumptions of efficiency and productivity block the realization of how we fill each day with tasks that did not exist twenty years ago. We also normalize, rather than medicate, bizarre online behaviour. Examples include those who insist on showing how clever they are by CCing an email to half of Yorkshire, managers who reply to serious issues on their blackberry or users of Twitter who think they are being clever and witty, rather than xenophobic trolls. How these learned, deskilled but increasingly automated behaviours link with learning is a key question. I have lived through the impact of digitization as a student, teacher and head of department. When I enrolled at the University of Western Australia in Perth in 1987, the library catalogue had just been digitized, and the word plagiarism was not used at any point during the degree. Yes, there were whispers about academics ‘using’ the work of their dissertation students. Compare this situation to our present. I run inductions for new students, and have done so since 1997. Each year, plagiarism has crept further and further up the orientation agenda. Picture this scenario. Students work hard to gain entry into university. They are finally free to open a new chapter of their lives. I watch them arrive on their first day in higher education, anxious to meet new friends and are excited about the future.