Teaching Ethics in a World of Electronics

By Joyce Kasman Valenza

The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 18, 1999

How would your child feel if someone opened his locker and went through his personal things? Read the letter she just wrote to her best friend? Presented her "borrowed" term paper to the teacher as her own work? Spread untrue gossip about him all over the neighborhood? Took the paycheck she just earned right out of her pocket?

It may be easier for students to understand the effects of unethical behavior when they are presented with concrete scenarios. There are students who would be appalled by these scenarios but not hesitate to copy a piece of software, cut and paste an essay together, or poke around in the desktop folders of others.

Choosing Wisely

I've heard ethics defined as "doing good when no one else is looking." In the digital world, more often than not, no one is looking. So what can we do to inspire good citizenship in an increasingly digital world? Sometimes you just have to take time out to make the point. Ann Brachwitz, lower school computer coordinator at Germantown Friends School, recently introduced a four-unit curriculum to her fifth-grade students.

"Just because you can get away with an action does not give you the right to do it," she says in the course manual. That capability "does give you something much more powerful: the responsibility to choose wisely." Brachwitz saw fifth grade as an appropriate place to focus on instruction in electronic ethics. "These students are exposed to a lot of technology. More than half have e-mail at home. As 10-year-olds they've lived in the world long enough to understand what's expected of them in the real world. I wanted these students to go off to middle school with some basic concepts and values, without the excuse, "We didn't know there was anything wrong with that."

Four Areas of Electronic Ethics

Using skits and a variety of hands-on activities, Brachwitz's weekly sessions focused on four major areas of electronic ethics.

In Peeking and Privacy, student discussed the responsibility of computer users to protect their own work and leave the work of others untouched. Brachwitz asked students to compare reading someone else's journal to peeking in a file on the school's server. She asked: "What's the difference between having rules that we all agree on about privacy and having lots of locks and passwords to protect privacy?"

In an exercise to illustrate this point, students wrote one sentence about "a dumb thing" they did when they were little, and they saved the file on the server. They were instructed to open someone else's file, read it and trash it. Brachwitz then asked her students: "Was anyone upset or embarrassed that everyone else was looking at their writing? Were you, by any chance, watching when your file disappeared? Did that freak anyone out? How easy would it be to get your file back?"

In Creativity and Copyrights, students were introduced to the questions "Who owns an idea?" and "Why isn't software free if it is so easy to copy?" Brachwitz presented two scenarios of traditional plagiarism and asked students: "How are the rules the same for copying paper and electronic ideas?" Many of her students admitted to copying game software without thinking. After playing a cool shareware game, Digital Wipeout, her classes read an e-mail exchange between Brachwitz and the game's developer, now a college sophomore. The student described the hundreds of hours that go into creating a game and wrote: "Not paying for software is stealing. The long-term effect of people not paying for software is the programmers stop writing it. Then there's nothing left to steal. It is important that students learn the benefits of supporting software developers." Brachwitz noted that her students reacted strongly when they understood that someone was really being hurt. They quickly realized that many of their former practices had not been fair.

In E-mail Mania, students explored rumors and secrets as they relate to electronic communication. Brachwitz compared passwords to locker combinations to drive home the importance of protecting private files. The students were asked: "What are the problems with being able to spread rumors widely and instantly? How can you protect yourself from being accused of misusing e-mail. In a written activity, students listed the benefits and the potential problems of instant communication.

In Wild Wild Web, students were asked to consider safe ways to explore the Internet, comparing guidelines for Web safety and propriety with the guidelines they had been given for viewing television and movies. She led them to 'kid-friendly' search tools. "The Web, like the world, is full of choices," reads Brachwitz's manual. "Follow the same rules on the Internet that you would follow in a video store or library. There's good stuff to be found, but remember: On the Web, the "back" button is your strongest protection." Brachwitz illustrated her point with a mock Web site that simulated opportunities to explore and choose wisely and not so wisely. The site forced students to consider how they would react when faced with teaser sites that promoted hate, pornography and violence as well as sites that encouraged credit-card use and transmission of personal information.

Student Response

What did her students think of Brachwitz's ethics curriculum? "The kids have really enjoyed it," said Brachwitz who gets her feedback in the form of optional homework assignments. "The level of participation from kids who already have plenty of homework indicates that they're catching on to this. Their answers have been thoughtful and some of them have been funny, especially the consequences they suggested for offenders."

Brachwitz was impressed with student response to the unit. "Fifth graders are pretty idealistic and righteous. It is good to get them while they're still in the mode of agreeing with the values that the adults around them espouse. If they get the idea in fifth grade that there are some places to avoid, then those sites lose a little bit of their attraction later on."

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