Digital ethics case studies?

Published by in digitalstorytelling, ethics on September 18th, 2006

Brett Moller posted a good question relating to digital ethics and P2P file sharing, in his post “21st Century Ethics.” Here’s my reposed comment:

Brett:

I think we have to do a lot more than just tell kids, “That’s wrong, don’t do that.” The response of these kids does show they may be off the mark where adults would like them to be as far as ethics, but the heart of your question is what can industry do. I think the most effective way to help people of any age learn about ethics is to use real world case studies. Perhaps industry leaders could contribute to a digital storytelling archive of real-world ethics dilemmas or situations that could be used by teachers and students as case studies to debate and discuss. The best ethics lessons I had in school were from real world case studies. We typically used case studies we read about in a book, but it could be even more engaging to have digital stories from real people to use as the dialog starters. This could be a great grant project.

I am also very interested in ethics and promoting authentic ethics education / character development in school, which goes far beyond programs like “respect is our word of the week.” In addition to helping provide digital stories for ethical case studies, industry leaders could also avail themselves for videoconferences with students about ethical issues in business and elsewhere. Great question. I think this fits into a construct of “global citizenship” which I’ve blogged about a bit before and have wanted to do a skypecast on. I’ll pursue this thread more on my blog in the weeks to come, likely. Thanks for the thoughts and questions! :-)

On this day..

1 Comment »
  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/capturewales/ Gareth Morlais

    Making a digital story can also raise some interesting ethical points and, at our BBC Capture Wales project, we’ve wrung our hands together over many a case study. The issues that trouble us most circle around ‘safety of children and young people’ and ‘impact on third parties’. A man once made a story where they made a reference to a love affair and showed a picture of the ex boyfriend. We didn’t know whether or not that man wanted to be pictured or not and we asked the storyteller to consider altering the photo so the man wasn’t identifiable. He was able to do this in an artistic way, without taking anything away from his story and no-one got hurt. These things can creep up unawares on you and it’s useful to have a prompt by way of a first defence. Here’s a cribsheet I wrote to give to people who are helping people to make digital stories. It addresses rights and other legal issues as well as ethical and editorial ones. It’s called the Any List and you’re welcome to use it too if you like:

    ANY LIST

    This summary has been written for those of you who might want to publish stories on BBC platforms. It isn’t a full list of everything to consider but we hope it’s useful. Please have a think if you answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions. Does the digital story contain:

    - ANY photos or clips of ‘other people’s children’?
    - ANY sensitive issue involving a third party in relation to violence, abuse, sexuality, unhappy family background, marital problems, privacy, fairness, etc. which might cause hurt to them or to anyone else now or in the future?
    - ANY more than 30 seconds of commercial music?
    - ANY non-commercial music by family or friends?
    - ANY photos by anyone other than you, your family or friends?
    - ANY scans or images from newspaper or magazine articles, CD or book covers, the internet, works of art, etc?
    - ANY grabs or clips of any video other than your family home videos?
    - ANY scans of maps?
    - ANY quotes, poems or lines of text written by other people outside your own family?
    - ANY libellous content?
    - ANY company brands named or shown?
    - FINALLY has the impact of your story on the safety of other people, especially children and young people, been considered?

    Gareth Morlais, project producer, BBC Capture Wales / BBC Cipolwg ar Gymru

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