THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHICS IN EDUCATION          2000w

Ethics are an important part of decision-making but students aren’t taught to think ethically. They do not understand what ethics is. They do not understand the difference between ethics and morals and yet aren’t two of the SLO’s in the computer science framework related to Ethical Behaviour? So how do we go about doing this? Sure we could just preach to them about what they should and should not do and the so-called reasons for this. This method would be fast and then we can move on to more interesting things, but teaching in this fashion we will lose a great opportunity to teach students ethical thinking. Plus if we were just to preach to the students it would go in one ear and out the other. So in order to understand if it would be a good idea to teach ethics properly to students we need to see where the students are at. We need to do this to see if teaching ethics is a right for them. We also need to see what computer ethics is and what it entails and lastly we need to look at the benefits of teaching ethics in a computer course.

Students

In order to see it is a good idea to teach ethics to students we need to look at the students. Perhaps the moragity of students understand ethics and thus don’t need to be taught. Maybe it is better to tell them what to do and not get them to think about the reasons why. If we were to teach students ethics would they find them useful. These all the things we need to know before we decide whether it is or is not a good idea to teach ethics to students. Let’s start off by looking at the skills the students already have. The article Computer Literacy: Implications for