A Randolph County, North Carolina teacher commented on one of my recent ethics posts, and brings up an interesting and frustrating aspect of teaching the ethical use of information to our students. The educator writes…
As a middle school technology teacher who teaches ethics my biggest problem is when I tell a child that downloading or copying materials (songs, dvds) is wrong, they say my parents do it and they say it is ok. Although I read them articles where parents are fined, it doesn’t change their minds. What if there are groups in society that don’t acknowledge the validity of your ethics?
Quite frankly, I’m not sure how to respond to this. My initial reaction is that I believe that this will change, just like I believe that parents will become more savvy about their children’s use of computers and networks. However, that won’t happen by itself.
In my opinion, information ethics is not a technology issue. It isn’t even a library/media issue. It’s a literacy issue and should be taught in every grade and subject, by every teacher, every day. It’s basic!
Any comments?
Dear Dave —
I am glad you are optimisitc because I am not there yet —
I 100% believe the information ethics needs to be taught in every class by every teacher and administrator so that is not only 1 person who is holding the “Ethics sign” high when others are knocking it down.
At my past school, one of the “favorite” teachers was bragging at times about his internet “free” use of songs/movies/etc and when I talked to him about it — he said it was no big thing and blew me off. And since he was the favorite teacher who was teaching “fun” — and I was the teacher teaching them ethics – who do you think they listened to?? As with parents as well —
It was an uphill battle and though I never let down — I know I was not heard or even noticed.
But if it was a unified force with all teachers teaching the same — perhaps the voice would be heard,, and acknowledged, and repected.
Remember, I am not as optimistic as you (yet) and I cringe sometimes when I realize the students we are teaching today will be making decisions for us when we are in our 80’s and 90’s. And that (at times) scares me very much.
thank you for a good blog thought today –
I know I shall be bouncing ideas about it all day.
Jennifer Wagner
This system has rejected my comment five times – just testing
http://www.downes.ca
You can delete this one if you want
Test
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=65
Sorry about the extra comments – what’s the length limit set at, two sentences? Sheesh…
I give up. My comment is at
http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2006/08/ethics-and-codes.html
And because 3/4 of your readers won\’t follow the link, what I say, in a sentence is: downloading can be seen as ethical, the problem is that ethical codes presuppose that ethical questions are settled, but thy are far from settled, consider, for example, linking policies and the impact of corporate connections, neither of which are considered in the code that was proposed earlier. (p.s. either I can’t read, or your captchas often do not match what is displayed)
I think it’s a less a case of parents and teachers being unethical and more of a case of simple ignorance. I recently explained to a teacher who showed a DVD of Dead Poets’ Society to all of her English classes that she was very likely guilty of copyright violations. She wasn’t knowingly breaking the law; she just didn’t know any better.