[Year 12 SofDev] Ethical dilemmas

[Dianne Hay]

The activity I use to introduce ethics in Business Management may work for some of you to start off the topic...

I get the students to stand up in an open area (a good one to take outside if the weather is nice) and give them a series of ethical questions/scenarios (they don't have to be IT related for this intro activity - in fact, it works better if they are not IT related).  For each scenario, they must decide between two choices. For choice 1 they have to go to the left side of the room for choice 2 they have to go to the right side - they can not choose the middle

For example: if your house was on fire and you could only save one of the following, which would you save. 1. A bottle containing the cure to cancer or 2. Your dog.

The idea being that they have to consider the consequences of each option and make a choice (many just want to stay in the middle).  It often starts some debates between students, or you can question students as to why they made the choice that they did or why they had such a problem trying to decide.

To help devise a list of dilemmas, you may want to have a look at some of these sites.
http://listverse.com/2007/10/21/top-10-moral-dilemmas/
http://www.differencemakers.com/swapshop/pdf/dilemma_examples.pdf
http://www.friesian.com/valley/dilemmas.htm
http://dornsife.usc.edu/dilemmas-and-case-studies/


Hope this helps

Di Hay
Teacher of Accounting and
Software Development
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From: Mark KELLY [mailto:kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au]
Sent: Friday, 26 August 2011 3:26 PM
To: Year 12 Software Development Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: [Year 12 SofDev] Ethical dilemmas

Today I started ethical dilemma theory with my kids (using http://www.vceit.com/slideshows/SD-U4O2-Managing-Ethical-Dilemmas.ppt) and it's not too easy!

The kids, as VCAA has kept saying in examiners' reports) too keen to turn the ethical problem into a legal one (which is easier for them to deal with) or to not see that each dilemma has its shades of grey and is not black and white.

I guess they could handle it better in a few years, but it's really hard for them to cope with at this stage in their development.  I hope the 'ethical dilemma' exam question this year takes into account that much of our our cohort are not yet mature thinkers capable of handling subtle distinctions.

Happy weekend ;-)

--
Mark Kelly
Manager of ICT, Reporting, IT Learning Area
McKinnon Secondary College
McKinnon Rd McKinnon 3204, Victoria, Australia
Direct line / Voicemail: +613 8520 9085, Fax +613 9578 9253
kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au<mailto:kel at mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au>
VCE IT Lecture Notes: http://vceit.com
Moderator: IT Applications Edulist<http://www.edulists.com.au/>

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