February 15, 2015.

ETEC: 510

Design Project Proposal:

Instilling Ethical Learning in Young People in the Age of Technology

By: Diana Loewan, Collen May, Rebecca Skucas, Terry Tuck, and Pooney Yazdani.

The proper point of an ethics course is critical inquiry: not encouraging good
behaviour as such but rather inquiring into what should count as good behaviour

- Callahan (Maxwell, p20).

INTRODUCTION: Key Frameworks

Ethics can be defined as the moral principles that govern behaviour. In

the Oxford English Dictionary ethics and ethical are described as a set of moral

principles; morally correct, honourable; the study of morals in human conduct,

moral philosophy, rules of conduct recognized as appropriate to a particular

profession or area of life; moral action. In this design project, we will be

specifically focusing on ethics and ethical use of technology by students within a

participatory culture. We wish to assist educators to foster awareness and

knowledge of ethical values in young people, particularly as they engage in an

online environment. The goals for this project are to provide learners with

useable, current knowledge surrounding the incorporation of ethics and to

provide them with an enjoyable, thought-provoking participatory experience.

According to developmental psychologists it takes children about 12 years

to develop the cognitive structures that enable them to engage in ethical thinking

(Graber and Lieberman, 2015). Therefore we have chosen to focus the learning

objectives and activities of this project on students aged 12-13. This project is

designed to help educators and students together tackle some of the ethical

issues that are the most relevant to adolescents dealing with new media. As

Jenkins says in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, Educators

must work together to ensure that all young Americans... are socialized into the

emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers

and participants in online communities. (Jenkins, H. 2009) The design activities

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will be age appropriate and will be drawing from what James et al. call the most

salient new media issues of today: identity, privacy, ownership and authorship,

credibility and participation (James et al., 2009).

To ensure that our activities are developmentally appropriate for our

targeted age range we will be drawing from the research of moral psychologists

and their extensive work studying the moral cognitive development of

adolescents. Particularly of interest will be the cognitive developmental approach

proposed by theorists such as Piaget and Kohlberg. We will also be looking into

research literature on the cognitive-social and the information processing

approaches to moral development.

Supporting our premise that we should be teaching online ethics in

schools, we will continue to investigate current research regarding the education

of children about these issues and will discuss a few relevant points later in this

paper. Our assessment section is based on current research in formative and

summative assessment and incorporates elements of Blooms Taxonomy and

Biggs Taxonomy.

The activities in the project are design based around the pedagogical

model described by the New London Group and consist of works that include:1

Situated practice; 2 Overt instruction; 3 Critical framing; and 4 Transformed

practice. We will be creating case study scenarios in order to facilitate student

discussion and activity around the main ethical issues. Participants will be asked

to choose or develop an ethical solution to a problem within a case study or have

the option of suggesting an ethical course of action. Students will also be

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introduced to games and game creation website such as Quandary where they

can learn about ethics in a fun and interactive environment. Additional activities

influenced by the ideas of the Constructionist scholars, will have students

collaborating to design their own prezi (or a similar style artifact) to present ethics

to younger grades. We will have the students create a mashup as a member of a

group.

With learning objectives that are supported by research and activities that

are engaging to the learner, our design project will enable students to develop a

stronger understanding of some of the important ethical issues that they face

today.