3.8 Consequences of uses of computing
Individual (moral), social (ethical), legal and cultural issues and opportunities
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Show awareness of current individual (moral), social (ethical), legal and cultural opportunities and risks of computing. Understand that:
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Teachers may wish to employ two very powerful techniques, hypotheticals and case studies, to engage students in the issues. Hypotheticals allow students to isolate quickly important ethical principles in an artificially simplified context. For example, a teacher might ask students to explain and defend how, as a Google project manager, they would evaluate a proposal to bring Google’s Street View technology to a remote African village. What questions should be asked? Who should be consulted? What benefits, risks and safeguards considered? What are the trade-offs? Case studies allow students to confront the tricky interplay between the sometimes competing ethical values and principles relevant in real world settings. For example, the Google Street View case might be used to tease out the ethical conflicts between individual and cultural expectations, the principle of informed consent, Street View’s value as a service, its potential impact on human perceptions and behaviours, and its commercial value to Google and its shareholders. There are many resources available on the Internet to support teaching of this topic. |