Ethics Website Designed for High School Students Taking ITGS

Introduction

The International Baccalaureate (IB)is an international curriculum offered to students aged 16-18. The course itself is of two year's duration and is both externally and internally examined. At the present time, there are approximately 1200 schools world-wide registered as IB centers. One of the courses offered is called Information Technology in a Global Society (ITGS). The focus of this course is twofold: technological applications and ethics. The IB provides a syllabus but the teacher creates the course.

While the students easily master the technological topics and applications, the ethics component is difficult, largely because students don't think about technology as having an ethical component and they relate all decisions made to themselves and their friends. Although there are several texts on the reading list, many of the examples are geared towards university students rather than younger students. Based on our studies in ED852, I thought it would be a good idea to use the Internet to locate actual cases that could be used as discussion items. Additionally, a search of the Napster archives served as an actual case study that the students could relate to given that most of the music listened to by the students here in Saudi Arabia is actually copied from others because youth music is not accepted by the religious groups here.

To help the students get beyond their own thought processes, information from the text was introduced to offer a procedure to help them analyze each ethical case. The process has four steps:

1. Understanding the situation;
2. Isolating the major ethical dilemma;
3. Analyzing the ethicality of both alternatives in the previous section through (a) consequentialism; (b) rights and duties; and (c) Kant's categorical imperative; and
4. Making a decision and planning the implementation.

The web site is designed to provide an overview of ethics by referring to a ThinkQuest site that was also designed in 1999 by some high school students for an international web-design contest. After the brief introduction, the four-step process mentioned above is illustrated and explained. After that, the case study of Napster can be used. Although I have a .wav file of a student explaining his opinion about Napster, I could not upload that file to the website. In addition, there are several ethics resource sites available as well as some case studies that deal with particular issues represented in the syllabus, i.e. computer fraud, privacy, etc.

I will begin using this site with current students within two weeks and plan on expanding the site to include options for the second year students as well as expanding it to include most components of the course.

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