Do Teachers Accept the Challenge of Responsible Handling of New Technologies? Teachers' Professional Information and Communications Technology Responsibility

• In Event: Some Engage, Others Don't: New Directions on the Development of Teachers' Professional Ethos

Abstract

Introduction and Research Questions
Interactive media play a central socialization in the world of young people in the 21st century – Hugger (2010, p. 21) speaks from a “Digital Youth”. As a result of this handling students often have better skills in using new information and communication technologies (ICT) than their teachers. But it has to be raised to question if this advance in knowledge and handling goes hand in hand with ethical behavior – in using ICT young people quite often take a back seat with respect of ethical aspects. Therefore the introduction to ethical handling of ICT is an important task of a teacher. These considerations did lead us to develop a specific instrument for measuring teachers’ ethical responsibility with respect of students’ and colleagues’ ICT competences – what we presented at AERA in Chicago 2015. In this paper we go one step further by posing the questions (a) whether teachers accept the task of responsible ICT-handling, and (b) how can differences in ICT-responsibility between teachers be explained?

Teachers’ Professional ICT-Responsibility – Theoretical and Empirical Background
Based on a work of Coclar (2012) we distinguish three dimensions of “teachers’ professional ICT-responsibility”:
(a) “Scaffolding and counseling activities concerning ICT ´unethics´”: With this scale (5 Items, Cronbach α=.82) a situation is measured in which two dimensions are prevalent, (i) a negative behavior of students which must be recognized as having an existential frame, and (ii) a will to stop and to change this behavior.
(b) “Conscience of ethical sensibilities in teaching ICT”: This scale (5 Items, α=.75) conveys the meaning of prevention at its heart with respect to (i) a knowledge based sensibility by using external cases on unethical ICT issues, and (ii) the teachers’ possibilities to transfer (in a positive way) negative ICT knowledge into the classroom using positive feedback.
(c) “Cultural embeddedness of ICT ethics”: The issue of this scale (4 Items, α =.70) is conscience (i) about an ICT rule system on ethics that must become transparent through discussion, and (ii) about scaffolding students in their will to see the pitfalls and unethical possibilities of their own doing.

Method and (First) Findings
The paper is based on the sample of ICILS (International Computer and Information Literacy Study). The aspect of “teachers´ professional ICT-responsibility” was included in the national survey of Switzerland (2013; 796 teachers in 74 schools).
The results of our analysis proves the three-dimensional scale of “teachers´ professional ICT-responsibility”. Descriptive statistics indicate that teachers agree to the task of “scaffolding and counseling activities concerning ICT ´unethics”, but only slightly agree to “conscience of ethical sensibilities in teaching ICT” and “cultural embeddedness of ICT ethics”. With respect of differences in ICT-responsibility between teachers it becomes apparent that the aspects “collaboration between teachers in using ICT” and “ICT self-efficacy” have explanatory power –not “ICT-experience” and “use of ICT for teaching at school”.

In this presentation we will introduce the instrument and present first empirical findings.

Authors

• Horst Biedermann, Paris-Lodron-University of Salzburg

• Fritz K. Oser, University of Fribourg