Title: Teaching Ethical Reflexivity in Information Systems: How to Equip Students to Deal with Moral and Ethical Issues of Emerging Information and Communication Technologies.
Abstract: 1. INTRODUCTION A problem that education in fast-moving technically oriented fields such as that of information systems (IS) faces is that the state of the art at the time of teaching tends to be obsolete by the time of graduation. The apparently ever-increasing speed of change and development renders this problem consistently acute. There are different possible answers that educators in IS can give to this problem. On the one hand they can attempt to keep their material up-to-date in the hope that the half-life of the technologies they teach is still relevant at the point of transition of students into their post-educational position. On the other hand, one can try to teach less variable principles that are likely to remain constant over time. A typical debate of this sort revolves around the question which programming language(s) to teach IS students. The one position would hold that students should learn programming languages they are likely to encounter in organizational practice. The other position is to teach the fundamentals of programming, possibly using legacy languages that are useful to understand principles, even if they are no longer used outside of educational environments. These two positions do not have to be contradictory, and a common aim is to combine them, to teach general principles using current tools. While the two positions thus do not have to be mutually exclusive, it seems to be widely accepted that education in technical subjects, just as education in general, needs to equip students with the ability to continue educating themselves. There are broad expectations that long-term employment in the same role will become less and less common, while technical, organizational, and social change will continue to speed up. If it is thus the task of IS education to provide students with skills to react variably and appropriately to problems and challenges that may not be visible yet, then IS educators need to ask themselves how they can know what the skills are their students are likely to require. The present paper takes this question as the point of departure to explore one specific area of IS education, namely that of ethics. Ethics is a conceptually difficult area, being related on the one hand to everybody's individual life-world, to socialize and internal experiences of what we believe to be right and wrong. At the same time ethics refers to several millennia of philosophical discourse. While it is easy to observe numerous ethically relevant phenomena arising from the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that are directly relevant to the field and practice of IS (e.g. privacy in social networks, ownership of content and software, changing relationships due to computer mediated communication, ...) it is not always easy to determine why these are perceived to be of ethical relevance and how they are to be evaluated. This paper therefore starts by developing a framework for ethical issues in IS and shows that these have a significant tradition in the IS literature. The subsequent section will describe a research project aimed at identifying ethical issues that are likely to emerge in the medium term future (10 to 15 years). This project explored likely emerging ICTs and it then investigated and evaluated the possible ethical issues that can reasonably be expected to arise from these technologies. This description of ethical issues then leads the paper back to the question of education. The paper advocates the view that there are a number of interlinking policy and organizational activities that need to be in place if we are collectively going to be in a position to proactively engage with such emerging ethical issues. Education is one core aspect of this. The paper will argue that IS scholars and practitioners need to understand that ethics is a beneficial and pervasive aspect of any society and that it is in their interest to engage with it early. …
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 15
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