MALET Issues

Ten guidelines of computer ethics, online resources for teaching ethics and Internet safety, and eight tips for establishing a "culture of proper use" of technology in the classroom!

Since I work with Special Education students a high school, I am always interested in the effectiveness of technology on learning. ABSTRACT Using technology can help students with disabilities to enhance and improve their independence in academic and employment tasks, their participation in classroom discussions, along with helping them to accomplish some difficult academic tasks. This paper discusses the role and benefits of using assistive technology in the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), in academic skills, and in transition services. A summary of the important principles that need to be considered in the integration of technology in educating or training students with disabilities is provided.

More on Howard Gardner and some great presentations and ebooks are also available on this site.

Cyber safety and ethics in schools.

From the abstract: "...as online learning has become increasingly popular, there are concerns about the perceived impersonal nature of the online medium, and how this might particularly affect adolescent learners."

This article was taken from the Academic Search Premier database accessible in the SUNY Empire library. "The article focuses on a study related to roles and ethics of digital technologies in the healthcare industry." Some of the issues discussed in the article include the use of smartphones, sensors and monitors for medical documentation and in measurement of one's health. Other pertinent issues include keeping the privacy of patient records in the digital age.

I read about Helene Hegemann in the 1st chapter of "Disconnected : Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap". She was celebrated author of "Axolotl Roadkill" at age 17. It was discovered that she plagiarized portions of her novel. This article is an informal interview and article on the author. It gives a short summary of the novel and more details concerning the plagiarized portions. Helene defends her novel as a "remix" - which is what everybody in the digital age is doing. This brings up ethical issues such as intellectual property, authority; and obviously "originality and authenticity."

I chose to read the "A Situated Practice of Ethics for Participatory Visual and Digital Methods in Public Health Research and Practice: A Focus on Digital Storytelling" article on the ethical issues involved in digital storytelling. This article delves into ethics of digital storytelling. It gives 6 ethical principles for digital storytelling. It outlines conditions for ethical practice and provides a digital storytellers bill of rights. Basically this documents the basic right to well being for the storytellers, because this could be "fuzzy" as described in the above article.

From the abstract: 'Also, though there have been large investments made to integrate technology into K-12 classrooms to equip students with the skills needed to prepare for college and a career, the practical use of this investment has not been impressive. Lastly, several meta-analyses showed promising results of effectiveness of technology in the classroom. However, several inherent methodological and study design issues dampen the amount of variance that technology accounts for."

We describe a cheating strategy enabled by the features of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and detectable by virtue of the sophisticated data systems that MOOCs provide. The strategy, Copying Answers using Multiple Existences Online (CAMEO), involves a user who gathers solutions to assessment questions using a "harvester" account and then submits correct answers using a separate "master" account. We use "clickstream" learner data to detect CAMEO use among 1.9 million course participants in 115 MOOCs from two universities. Using conservative thresholds, we estimate CAMEO prevalence at 1,237 certificates, accounting for 1.3% of the certificates in the 69 MOOCs with CAMEO users. Among earners of 20 or more certificates, 25% have used the CAMEO strategy. CAMEO users are more likely to be young, male, and international than other MOOC certificate earners. We identify preventive strategies that can decrease CAMEO rates and show evidence of their effectiveness in science courses.

Open source software has made inroads into mainstream computing where it was once the territory of software altruists, and the open source culture of technological collegiality and accountability may benefit education as well as industry. This paper describes the Recourse project, which seeks to transform the computer science undergraduate curriculum through teaching methods based on open source principles, values, ethics, and tools. Recourse differs from similar projects by bringing the open source culture into the curriculum comprehensively, systematically, and institutionally. The current state of the project is described, and initial results from a pilot exercise are presented.(

Enrollment in undergraduate computer science courses is at an all-time high at colleges nationwide. But this trend that's been hailed by the U.S. tech industry has a dark side: a disproportionate number of students taking these courses are caught cheating. Enrollment in undergraduate computer science courses is at an all-time high at colleges nationwide.

The author believes young people are the most avid users of digital media throughout their daily lives, so we can expect that digital media will be central to their civic lives. Also civic organizations are so deeply enmeshed in the online world that basic participation now requires a certain amountof digital literacy. Civic life is rapidly digitizing, so a crucial component of teaching students the skills to engage as competent civic actors is teaching them how to engage in virtual spaces persuasively, critically, collectively, and before invisible audiences.

This is a short literary review of Jason Ohler's 2008 book (title above). For the purpose of organization, Ohler classifies digital storytelling into three sections: Part I-Storytelling, Education, and the New Media, Part II-The Art and Practice of Storytelling, and Part III- Going Digital. According to Ohler, Digital storytelling is important to society, it shares an interrelationship with technology and it has a place in education, tied to literacy. Regardless of the technology advances made in the future, people will use it to fulfill the inherent need to tell their story. (For proof, just look at the progressive advancement of Snapchat. What began as an app allowing users to send cellphone picts to friends using custom contacts lists image display times of ≤10 sec has evolved to allow creation of Sanpchat Stories allowing users to chronicle daily activities via video clips, images & captions available for friends to view over 24 hr.) Ohler identifies fundamentals of a digital story as: Genre, resonance, active/passive viewing, point of view, emotional engagement, tone, spoken narrative, soundtrack, creativity, media grammar, and more. In addition, the reader is able to see how each element connects to literacy development, inquiry, and the backwards design.

American youth are interested in civic engagement as well as in playing with media. A research team commissioned by MTV interviewed more than twelve hundred young people, conducted expert interviews and ethnographies, and took a national poll of a representative sample ages 12-24, between December 2005 and April 2006. The research found, 70% believing in the importance of helping the community, 68% already doing something to support a cause on a monthly basis and 82% describing themselves at least somewhat involved. From this data, it does seem that the majority of young people are convinced that civic engagement (i.e., supporting a social cause of some kind) is something they should be involved. However, there is a strong disparity between interest and involvement, an "activation gap" and there is significant room for growth.

As an instructional tool, teachers have the option of showing previously created digital stories to their students to introduce content and capture students' attention when presenting new ideas. Teachers who are able to create self-made digital stories find that they can be particularly helpful not only in engaging students in the content, but also in facilitating discussion about topics presented in a story and helping make abstract or conceptual content more understandable. A multimedia-rich digital story can serve as an anticipatory set or hook to capture the attention of students and increase their interest in exploring new ideas.

In August 2009, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries launched a mobile web site and catalog designed for use on smartphones. Library users can search for books and view library hours, location branches, and other basic information about the University of North Carolina libraries on their iPhone, Android phone, or other smartphone. An outline of the development process is given in eight major steps that are designed to be replicated by other libraries. Lessons learned during development are also shared, along with recommendations of devices to develop for and tools to use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] [Abstract from ESC Academic Search Complete database] Link: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.library.esc.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=11&sid=32d26eef-5aab-4af2-ad1a-c9624344797d%40sessionmgr115&hid=126&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=57138008&db=a9h Haefele, C. (2011). One Block at a Time: Building a Mobile Site Step by Step. Reference Librarian, 52(1/2), 117-127. doi:10.1080/02763877.2011.528269

The article discusses survey results regarding the involvement that libraries have with digital technologies. Topics discussed in the article include the way in which libraries use mobile technologies to expand their reach to additional clients, mobile services that librarians would like to be able to offer to their clients, such as electronic resources, and difficulties that libraries face in offering digital technology services to their clients. [Abstract from ESC Academic Search Complete database]

This article examines technology trends in higher education and how they impact student habits and preferences in college libraries. A study was conducted among students at the Sam Houston State University in East Texas to investigate their usage of electronic devices and technologies such as text messaging, Twitter, podcasts, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, and social networks. Results indicate that students do wish that basic library services were available through the most popular social networking sites and Internet technologies. Topics include a review of literature consulted, methods used, and the demographics of the student body researched. [Abstract from ESC Academic Search Complete database] Link: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.library.esc.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=7&sid=32d26eef-5aab-4af2-ad1a-c9624344797d%40sessionmgr115&hid=126&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=61993848&db=a9h Cassidy, E. D., Britsch, J., Griffin, G., Manolovitz, T., Shen, L., & Turney, L. (2011). Higher Education and Emerging Technologies: Student Usage, Preferences, and Lessons for Library Services. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 50(4), 380-391.