Summary for Topic 4 – Ethical issues raised by educational and business uses of social media
This has arguably been the broadest topic so far and the most challenging for me personally. These observations aren’t necessarily unrelated -the enormous scope for the field of the use of social media in a educative environment and in the workplace combined with the scope for what could constitute ‘ethical’ behaviour or issues meant that I found myself reading extensively but finding if hard to come up with a short but broad enough overview of both environments. This meant that I found it challenging to write my initial post.
When I later read my peer Vlad’s post on the topic I realised I completely failed to define what is actually meant by ‘ethical issues’. In reality this may not have been such an oversight as the term ‘ethical issues’ is in fact difficult to define and there is no one standard accepted definition. Interestingly I did come across a Code of Ethics map that Dr. Edward F. Gehringer from North Carolina State University has come up with to present many of the ethical issues in the digital age. However, again this is only one way of seeing ethical issues.
What is clear is that there is a lot of scope for can be considered as ethical issues in the use of social media. In my previous post I mentioned several examples of these within both spheres. Many of my peers such as George highlighted examples which showcased a lack of integrity of the part of the perpetrator. Evie raised an important point about feeling of isolation being raised by exclusionary uses of technology giving an example of lecturers who choose not to partake in social media which was also backed up by Jake‘s example of schoolchildren being socially isolated by lack of an access to social media.
It is clear from the actions of many companies and schools and from the advice that we have all read that we all firmly agree that it is important for education establishments and businesses to have a social media policy which should aim to minimise ‘unethical behaviour’. The key is for this policy to be unique i.e. developed in line with the organisation pre-existing code of ethics – whether that be a school’s Code of Conduct or a business’s Code of Ethics. In this way the adoption, implementation and monitoring of the policy will be much more effective and ultimately there should be fewer ethical issues posed by social media in the future.
