An ethical basis for sustainability in the worldviews of first year students

DOI

10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.15How to use a DOI?

Keywords

education, New Environmental Paradigm, ethics, ecological worldview

Abstract

A key focus in transforming the profession of ICT to one of contributing to a sustainable future is the education of students who may think and act as sustainable practitioners in computing. An important understanding in this is the relationship between ethics and sustainability in the student intake. This forms a baseline upon which higher education can build. It is argued that sustainability can be considered ethics expanded in time and space but it is not previously known if an ethical understanding relates to an ecological worldview or to desires for contributing to sustainability. This paper reports on a survey of the first year intake of a New Zealand polytechnic (n=52) and explores the link between ethics and sustainability in freshman students in their first week of higher education. A measure of ethical naivety was constructed based on standard measures of naive ethics (legalism, egoism, agency and relativism), the responses to this were compared to the standard measure of ecological worldview, the New Environmental Paradigm. The implications for education for ICT4S are discussed.

Copyright

© 2014, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Samuel Mann
AU  - Karyn Costello
AU  - Mike Lopez
AU  - Dobrila Lopez
AU  - Nell Smith
PY  - 2014/08
DA  - 2014/08
TI  - An ethical basis for sustainability in the worldviews of first year students
BT  - Proceedings of the 2014 conference ICT for Sustainability
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 120
EP  - 131
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.15
DO  - 10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.15
ID  - Mann2014/08
ER  -