Teaching Virtue in a Virtual World: Internet Ethics for Students

Frances F. Jacobson & Greg D. Smith -- School Library Journal, 3/1/1998

Every time Abner posts a comment to a newsgroup, his posts are flamed by a group of enemies. Abner has responded to each flame in turn, and a full-scale war is now in progress.

The day we discussed this hypothetical scenario in our computer literacy class, the students' response was unequivocal and enthusiastic: "War, war!" they said. "More flames!" We looked at each other and rolled our eyes. This was one of those days when it was hard to get our message across.

The Internet in schools has become a magnet for controversy. So far, the focus has been on students accessing inappropriate materials -- and with good reason: pornography on the Net is widely and easily available. But in addition to this lightning-rod issue, Internet use in schools presents educators with several other, equally sticky, situations.

One such challenge involves the ethics of online communications -- teaching students about rights and responsibilities in the online world. This issue gets less attention than others simply because many schools don't yet offer student e-mail accounts. But it's only a matter of time before student e-mail becomes the norm -- along with all the problems that go with it.

At our school, we learned the hard way that we had to tackle ethics head on. In 1994, the school gave each student a computer account that included e-mail privileges and access to the University of Illinois's newsgroup feed. Although we had a simple acceptable use policy, abuses, some of them serious, kept surfacing. We realized that we couldn't teach ethics in a 50-minute class period. Instead, we've made it part of the fabric of our entire approach to teaching online skills.

It took some bad experiences to show us the importance of a sustained approach. Three years ago, we instituted a required, two-semester sequence on standard software applications, Web and desktop publishing, and information literacy. Team-taught by four teachers, the course gives students a systematic introduction to Internet services and culture. In devising the curriculum, we consciously included lectures on netiquette and other behavioral do's and don'ts. Yet we learned very quickly that electronic communications could be dangerous tools in the hands of enthusiastic adolescents.

The final straw occurred when a (still unknown) student impersonated an alumna online and sent a highly offensive e-mail message about a female student to the entire student body.

In response to this incident and an escalating number of similar violations, we issued a moratorium on the use of personal e-mail accounts. Passwords were disabled for two days, effectively shutting down e-mail, although Web access was still available in the library and the labs. We gathered the school community together in a town-hall -- style assembly, during which students and teachers stepped up to the microphone to express their frustrations and concerns. There was a great deal of debate about the moratorium, which was widely perceived as a punishment indiscriminately meted out to the whole for the sins of a few. Many of the speakers, however, vented at the unknown perpetrators and called for a school-wide consciousness-raising.

After the moratorium, we instituted a few technical fixes. Previously, for instance, it was possible to send e-mail to large groups of individuals (e.g., all students, all staff) with the simple use of an alias. Now such messages are moderated by the system administrator (Greg), who returns any offensive messages to the sender.

More important, perhaps, we increased the proportion of ethics lessons in our computer curriculum, and we spread the course over two years -- one semester per year in eighth, and then ninth, grade. This gives us a second opportunity to cover ethics when students are a little older.

The computer course meets every day of the week for a semester. We see students for about four weeks of that time to teach search techniques, information evaluation, using e-mail, using newsreader software to read Usenet postings, and Web page design. (Other teachers handle office software applications, desktop publishing, and HTML.) The key is that ethical behavior is not a one- or two-day lesson, but a theme we address throughout the course.

Ethics 101

To introduce students to ethical issues, we use hypothetical scenarios that transform abstract concepts into concrete situations they can identify with. These scenarios are all based on real situations we have witnessed at school or, in the case of copyright issues, in the world at large. We use these scenarios when teaching students how to use newsreader software. We post the scenarios to one of the school's newsgroups, and students respond online. This way they learn about two things at once: using newsreader software and the ethical issues surrounding online messaging.

After the newsgroup experience, we follow up with face-to-face class discussion.

Students generally become very engaged in these discussions, revealing a lot about themselves and their need for autonomy and independence. To get them thinking about the responsibility that goes with that independence, we introduce a scenario such as this:

Julian has walked away from a lab computer without logging off. Trish sits down and, still logged in as Julian, sends inflammatory e-mail messages to a number of students and posts similar messages on the class newsgroup.

There was general consensus among students that Julian had made a mistake and that he should be corrected, but that Trish was more culpable because she willfully took an action against another person. One student wrote:

Julian is pretty dumb for leaving his computer in the first place, but Trish should have the decency not to mess with it, especially not to flame! I think that Trish should be reprimanded and Julian should be reminded not to leave his computer without logging out.

During the same discussion, some students revealed their feelings about the incident that generated our town hall experience:

I agree that it isn't fair or nice to use someone else's account without their permission, and also it's immoral and probably illegal. And as we all at Uni have learned, it's stupid to screw with e-mail or you have to sit through an assembly where the students take turns yelling at the teachers for taking away their e-mail.

Responding to another situation, most students were staunch defenders of e-mail privacy. Here's the scenario:

Lester sends e-mail to the entire student body inviting them to a BYOB party at his house while his parents are away. Lester receives a message from a system administrator calling him in for a meeting with school officials. He objects because he feels that his e-mail is his own private business.

And here's a student response:

Lester's mail is his own business. The school, or anyone else for that matter, doesn't have the right to know about his mail. If someone tattled on him, that's [a] different story. Even thogh [sic] what he did wasn't that ethical doesn't mean that you could blame him because it wasn't the right of the administrators to know about what he writes.

In some cases, common sense prevailed:

Any party were [sic] you invite the entire school is not going to be private. Everyone is going to know about it!!!

Copyright ethics can be even harder to teach. Most students are simply not aware of copyright law and how it might relate to publishing on the Web. Intellectual property is an abstract concept that's hard enough for adults to grasp, let alone 13-year-olds. Students have not yet created anything themselves, so they have great difficulty empathizing with a creator whose work goes uncompensated.

Moreover, their personal experience with the Web is a de facto lesson in Wild West morality. Copyright violations are so rampant that they appear to be the norm, giving rise to the common assumption that "anything on the Internet is free."

Our response is to deliver straightforward lessons on copyright concepts and to discuss how such concepts apply and might evolve in an Internet-centric world.

Like traditional library skills, lessons in ethical behavior need to be integrated throughout the curriculum and throughout every student's school career. For example, when I teach how to use search engines, I reinforce an earlier discussion of intellectual property by having students play an informal game of "Find the Copyright Violations" in the Web sites we retrieve.

We give essay tests to gauge the effectiveness of our lessons and the depth of students' understanding of the issues. The tests present a scenario, ask students to identify the important issue, propose possible solutions, and describe a non-Net equivalent of the same problem. This last component is extremely important. We want to draw attention to the fact that most of the problems online reflect universal ethical themes and that all should be judged according to the same standard.

Crime & Punishment

Schools have to set consequences for the abuse of all kinds of privileges, and that goes for Internet access, too. We've come to believe, however, that suspending computer or Internet privileges -- a common punishment today -- is impractical. In the near future, the removal of access privileges will be like taking away writing utensils. Instead, consequences will have to fit the model of other punishable behaviors.

Acceptable use policies (AUPs) have quickly become standard library tools for addressing online behavioral problems, but they are hard to enforce. Dispensed at the beginning of the school year or at the initiation of Internet access, they soon lie dormant. The phrase "acceptable use" is also tough for many of us in the library community to swallow. We do not ask students and their parents to sign an agreement before using other materials in the media center, which, even with a careful selection policy, is sure to have something to offend everyone.

Our plan for the immediate future is to create two policies to replace our generic AUP. One, an electronic information resources policy, will be a component of our collection development policy and will be disseminated to the entire school community. It will represent the school's position on open access to information. The second policy is a computer network usage agreement that will address the behavioral issues associated with personal computer accounts. Both students and their parents must sign off on this second policy. We decided on a two-policy approach in hopes of separating behavior from issues of intellectual freedom and access to information.

Students have to be prepared to be responsible users and producers of online content in any environment. We hope that these lessons and discussions will meet their needs in the long run, after they've graduated and gone on to college or a career. Despite its frustrations and pitfalls, we believe this is the only viable strategy that serves both our students and the orderly development of electronic information resources.

So does our profession. In June, the American Association of School Librarians will publish the new Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning, which take a broad view of the media specialist's mission. One section discusses teaching students "to know how to practice ethical behavior in regard to information and information technology." We are remiss if we don't accept the responsibility of teaching the ethical use of information in all forms.

Resources

• AASL Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning
  (draft 5, October 1996)
  www.ala.org/aasl/stndsdrft5.html

• Bellingham (WA) Public Schools District Copyright Web Publishing Rules
  www.bham.wednet.edu/copyrule.htm

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  "Net Culture -- Virtual Community & Netiquette" Archive
  www.eff.org/pub/Social_responsibility/Virtual_community_and_netiquette

• "Ethics and Law" column,
  eSchool News www.eschoolnews.com

• "Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia," Nonlegislative Report of the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, September 27, 1996.
  www.indiana.edu/~ccumc/mmfairuse.html

• Internic's Netiquette Guidelines
  ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1855.txt

• Linda C. Joseph's "Cyberbee" Web page (copyright materials)
  www.cyberbee.com/

• The Librarians Information Online Network.
  Internet Forum
  www.libertynet.org/~lion/forum-inter.html

• Brad Templeton's "10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained
  www.clari.net/brad/copymyths.html

• Zarinnia, Anne. "Highlights of the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia," WEMA Action Sheet, vol. 1, no. 1, 1997.
  (Wisconsin Educational Media Association Office, Fennimore, WI; 608-822-6884.)

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