Does the Left Hand Know What the Right One Is Doing? Teachers' Professional Information and Communications Technology Responsibility

• In Event: 60.033 - Challenges to Teaching Moral Education for Adolescents

Abstract

In the field of information and communication technology (ICT) quite often students have more know-how than their teachers. With all know-how of young people, ethical aspects often fade into the background in using ICT. Thereby a very important task of an ICT-teacher consists in ethical leadership. ICT-literacy includes teacher’s professional ethical judgment, beliefs and behavior – what must be differentiated from other domains (Nucci, 2001; Beck, 2006: Biedermann & Oser, 2010; Veugelers, 2011). Ethical responsibility in the field of ICT is not the same as in fields as economics or politics; probably it is less visible and less structured. This difficulty of ethical leadership in ICT did lead us to develop a specific instrument for measuring teachers’ ethical responsibility with respect of students’ and colleagues’ ICT competences. It includes the awareness that students (the left hand) often know more than teachers (the right hand). In this presentation we will (a) introduce the logic and scaling of the instrument, (b) present first empirical findings of ethical leadership in Switzerland, and – aiming the relationship of the left and the right hand –(c) examine correlations between ethical leadership of teachers and student ethical handling with computers (e.g. Cyber-Mobbing) (on school level).

The developed instrument is based on a work of Coclar (2012). In the framework of operationalization ethical leadership is divided in four dimensions.
The first group of items is dealing with “Scaffolding and counseling activities” concerning ICT ethics (e.g. “I am able to instruct the students about the consequences of unethical behavior in the ICT field” (e.g. cyber-mobbing and similar)). This first dimension thus contains a direct saying, convincing, or teaching relating to the moral consequences of unacceptable behavior with ICT (cell-phone, internet, Facebook, Twitter etc.). – The second group of items is called “Visionary ICT leadership”. The focus is the model character of teachers with respect to the networking power of individuals (e.g.: “In hurting the ethical principles in ICT I am able to realize necessary steps”). – The third dimension is called “cultural embeddedness of ICT ethics”. The topics here are regulations and punishments of students using unethical practices with computers (e.g.: “I do accept a meaningful punishment of students who misuse ICT for hurting other persons”). – The fourth group of items respectively expected scale deals with the topic of conciseness of teachers that every ICT-instruction includes ethical sensibilities. Teachers must have an overarching sense of fairness that helps to see the dangers and pitfalls of any ICT competence, especially if it is high developed (e.g.: “I strive for demonstrating the ethically right form of using an ICT technic to my students.

The paper is based on the random sample of the new comparative IEA-study ICILS (International Computer and Information Literacy Study) in Switzerland gathered data in 2013 from teachers in about 100 schools on the one hand, and about 3200 students in the eighth grade within these schools on the other hand. The release of first findings of ICILS will be in November 2014.

Authors

• Fritz K. Oser, University of Fribourg

• Horst Biedermann, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg