Understanding the Digital Revolution Lab - Ethics and ePortfolios

Overview - In this first lab, you will set up your online ePortfolio, which you will use throughout this course (and others), and add your first entries to it.

Prerequisites - Review the material from the first lecture; you should be aware of Lessig's regulation and the three ethical theories - Deontology, Utilitarianism and Virtue ethics.

Learning outcomes -

• State the uses of emerging technologies within key industry contexts;
• List major information systems that support business organisations;
• Recognize the impact of IT on broader societies;
• Review a range of information system applications;
• State and reflect on legal and ethical concerns relevant to IT;

Task Details -

Task one - ePortfolio

Mahara is the University's ePortfolio system. Your ePortfolio is an online space where you can share your work, keep one or more learning journals, upload files and more. In this course, you will need to edit and maintain your ePortfolio a number of times, and you may need to in other courses as well.

Creating a Journal entry

From the menu, select Content and then Journals. You can maintain multiple Journals in your ePortfolio, so create one just for this course by choosing Create Journal. Label your Journal with an appropriate name, for example ITECH1100. You can choose to add a description if you like. Add a new Journal entry by clicking + New Entry.

Ethics - Self Reflection

In the lecture, we discussed three ethical frameworks, Deontology, Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics, and you were asked to consider which of these three resonate most with how you think about morality and ethical behaviour.

Using your own words, write somewhere between 100-200 words on which of the three frameworks makes the most sense to you. You may also search online for other systems of ethics that you might prefer.

Some ideas to help you write if you're having trouble:

• What makes this framework appealing?
• What is it about the others that you don't like?
• Would you be willing to listen to somebody using another framework?
• Explain each framework in your own words;
• Describe something positive and negative for each one;
• If one or more appeals to you, explain why; if none do explain why not;
• Justify your choice as best you can based on your experience, perhaps refer to an example in your life where you've faced a moral dilemma and how you responded to it.

Creating a new page -

You can submit your Mahara work through Moodle, but only if your content is in a Mahara page. Luckily, it's reasonably easy to add content from your Journal to a page. You should be aware that, depending on your assignment, any work on a page submitted to Moodle will be locked until it has been reviewed by your tutor. This means you might choose to only include a single Journal entry so you can continue to add other entries to your Journal.

From the menu, select Portfolio and then Pages, and choose + Create page.

Task 2 - Contribute

There are two goals for this section - firstly, you will get a taste of contributing to a software or knowledge project online, and secondly you will gain some experience with the FedUni library web site. Your specific task is to improve a Wikipedia article by adding links to other pages.

Task 3 - Document your contribution

Using your new Mahara skills, write a small (approximately 50 words) Journal entry about your contribution. Add it to the Page you created earlier.

Attachment:- Assignment Files.rar