Throughout the course, I realized how central digital ethics is to our personal and professional lives. From the start, we explored What is Digital Ethics? and it reshaped my understanding of how our actions in the digital world impact our society.
In the module on Basic Data Ethics: Use & Protection, I became more mindful of how we handle data. It's not just about compliance; it's about trust and responsibility to protect others' information.
Learning about Generative AI Ethics was eye-opening. AI tools are powerful but come with ethical considerations—bias, information disorder like misinformation, disinformation and mal-information, and accountability must always be addressed thoughtfully.
Finally, Digital Wellbeing taught me the importance of balance. Technology should enhance, not overwhelm, our lives. Setting boundaries online has become as vital as maintaining balance offline.
This course has addressed the growing need for ethical awareness and practices in digital environments. This course reminded me that ethics in the digital age is not just about rules; it's about values.
I found the Introduction to Digital Ethics course informative, engaging, and thought-provoking. I learned much about digital technologies, ethical frameworks, data ethics, and generative AI. The course content presented in Moodle was well-organized and easy to digest. I also appreciated the live sessions because they allowed me to listen to the insights of other course participants. The assessments were also helpful in checking our learning.
I am grateful to the United Board and HKBU through the Centre for Holistic Teaching and Learning for this opportunity to learn how it is to navigate fundamental, ethical concerns on the use of digital technologies. I am especially grateful for the ethical frameworks that this course made use of as they foregrounded every necessary dialogue we have to engage in the use of what appears to be a valuable, inevitable resource like generative AI. As this is a novel technology, much is unknown. Yet, this Digital Ethics course offers a paradigm to evaluate our engagement with this technology on the basis of what is just, fair, useful, and virtue-forming. I find this particularly effective as this eliminates whatever potential bias one may have against such technology to focus on the usefulness, fairness, and virtue-forming properties of our and our students' engagement with AI.
Another takeaway from this course is the resultant call to recalibration. In listening to resource speakers and experts on the field of digital ethics, I have become aware of the pressing need to reassess our old ways of thinking about assessments and that some aspects of them may no longer be congruent to evolving digital tools that our students and teachers alike find helpful. It may not be fair to refuse our students the benefits of AI to their education.
I suppose, in the final analysis, what I have learned so far is the valuable lesson of trust. To trust students to know which aspects of their engagement is just, fair, useful, and virtue-forming and which are the opposite. There is no place for suspicion if we want to nurture students who are ethical at the core.
Enquiry: chtl@hkbu.edu.hk
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