Educating for ICT4S: Unpacking sustainability and ethics of ICT student intakes

DOI

10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.27How to use a DOI?

Keywords

education, New Environmental Paradigm, ethics, ecological worldview

Abstract

A key focus in transforming the profession of ICT to one of contributing to a sustainable future is the education of students who may think and act as sustainable practitioners in computing. An important understanding in this is the relationship between ethics and sustainability in the student intake. This forms a baseline upon which higher education can build. It is argued that sustainability can be considered ethics expanded in time and space but it is not previously known if an ethical understanding relates to an ecological worldview or to desires for contributing to sustainability. This paper reports on a survey of the first year intake of nine New Zealand polytechnics (n=256) and explores the link between ethics and sustainability in freshman students in their first week of higher education. A measure of ethical naivety was constructed based on standard measures of naive ethics (legalism, egoism, agency and relativism), the responses to this were compared to the standard measure of ecological worldview, the New Environmental Paradigm. While students can be considered pro-ecological, and not ethically naïve overall, the individual responses show much work is needed in education for ICT4S. A greater sophistication in ethics is associated with a more pro-ecological worldview is supported by the data, however, as the relationship is likely to account for only 20%, the implication for education for ICT4S is that both need deliberate acts of teaching.

Copyright

© 2015, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Samuel Mann
AU  - Mike Lopez
AU  - Dobrila Lopez
AU  - Nell Smith
PY  - 2015/09
DA  - 2015/09
TI  - Educating for ICT4S: Unpacking sustainability and ethics of ICT student intakes
BT  - Proceedings of EnviroInfo and ICT for Sustainability 2015
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 229
EP  - 241
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.27
DO  - 10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.27
ID  - Mann2015/09
ER  -