Digital ethics in 1:1 classrooms

Abstract

This thesis endeavours to better understand the confluence of youth, digital technologies and ethics in an Australian 1:1 student-device high school environment. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) my study gives attention to the human, technical and discursive dimensions of emergent digital ethics actor networks and follows the growing body of work looking critically at ICT and education. I used the analytical framework of the four moments (problematisation, interessement, enrolment and mobilisation) of the Sociology of Translation (SoT) model first proposed by Callon (1986) and bent it to follow the multiple ethical effects of the 1:1 assemblage in a school setting.The thesis followed the moment of problematisation of digital ethics in schooling as it was discursively constructed across multiple texts, voices, political promises and curriculum associated with the Australian Digital Education Revolution’s program of 1:1 devices for students in years nine through twelve. I found administrative rules and practices, cyber safety talks and protocols, school safety policies, school values and local and global citizenship themes in curriculum that framed the definition and expectations for digital ethics in school. Following Callon’s framework to the next moment of interessement, I found strong Obligatory Passage Points, working to enrol students into the digital ethics assemblage, with signed agreements and digital filtering and monitoring of devices. These static, normative, rule based and simple descriptions of how to be online became untangled in the 1:1 classroom.The moments of enrolment and mobilisation of digital ethics are demonstrated by painting complex and layered interludes and narratives of student-devices-teachers-classroom assemblages. The effort here was to pull forward technological actors and to reposition students within socio-technical networks. This was an onto-epistemological move that enabled new views of digital ethics in the making. I found moving students to a 1:1 relationship with devices changed who they were and the commensurate attempts by the school administration to curtail, contain and curate digital learning environments to ensure productive learning experiences and ‘ethical use’ of the Internet were minor interruptions that student-devices seemed to easily bypass or ignore.This study revealed that the rapid introduction of public ‘tools’ as private and personalised extensions for learning ruptured normative approaches to education-based character development. This new ‘student-device’ assemblage created new translations and reconfigured learning, teachers, peers and boredom (motivation and interest) in unexpected ways. Student-devices incurred a bleeding of public-private lives, where private lives were unintentionally invited in to school classrooms but were either not recognised (e.g. hidden teenage digital traumas affecting learning) or were blocked (e.g. limiting social media access through filters).A central figure in the emergent digital ethics assemblage was the IT manager- filtering-monitoring network. This was a form of risk reduction and safety management developed by Education Queensland. Filtering and monitoring endeavoured to control, manage and ensure policies and procedures were followed and that infractions were recorded. However, reflecting on Latour’s 1994 technical mediation model, the filtering and monitoring assemblage shifted the student-device network, which translated into closed-off learning opportunities, new barriers to break, questions around surveillance, (student-teacher) frustration, and unfollowed leads to new problems (unassessed MIS reports).Ultimately, this ethnographic socio-material approach was a productive way of conceptualising the world with a view to consider ethics as products of nonhuman and human relations. In particular, this study reveals that one-off cyber safety talks at the beginning of the year, simple signatures on ‘appropriate use of device documents’, and filtering and monitoring systems did little to support and advance digital ethics.I start and end with this - digital ethics is important. My study revealed that digital ethics could not be delineated as a pure translation of offline worlds (non-tech) moving online, but rather as the emergence of new conditions and contexts to manage how to be in online worlds. The formal divisions between different fields of ethics that considered value theory or normative ethics were disrupted as they became entangled with the digital. Normative questions of what is ‘valuable’ and how to balance the demands of ‘self-interest’ compared to the ‘interest of others’ are extended and obfuscated across the digital; each becoming interconnected assemblages where the division between self-other is contested or rewritten. This research suggests that teaching and nurturing ethical approaches to digital lives in school is a complex activity. This activity may be enhanced with an increased sensitivity towards understanding ourselves as materially complex hybrid actors; an appreciation of technology as extensions of self rather than tools that can be curated, controlled and curtailed; and that there is an urgency in advancing thinking about responsibility - response (ability) - in digital worlds.