DEVELOPING AN ONLINE DECISION MAKING SYSTEM IN ORDER TO USE IN COMPUTER ETHICS LECTURES

Abstract

Computers are the most favorable technological tools of the modern societies living all around the world. During the last twenty years, the impacts of these tools on human beings have been so large that caused to change both technological and emotional perceptions of the individuals. In addition to the positive effects of this period of change, it can be mentioned that our emotional lives, due to overlapped virtual and real worlds, have been more complex than before. New challenging issues and ethical problems emerged by computerized world are some of the underlying causes of this complexity. The changing social structure reveals new ethical issues which need to be produced new solutions. Therefore, computer ethics is one of the biggest ethical research areas of the 21st Century. With a literature review, it can be seen that there are different models designed by researchers to solve ethical issues in computer-related environments. In this context, the main aim of this study is to develop an online ethical decision making system in order to use in computer ethics lectures as a supportive educational software. Barger(2008)'s eight-step approach has been used as the primary ethical decision making model of the system. The developed system was examined with a pilot study. The participants of the pilot study were 30 students attending Computer Ethics Course in Yildiz Technical University, Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technologies. All of the process from literature review to pilot study was explained and the results of the pilot study were presented in this paper.