Thursday, December 13, 2012

Digital Citizenship, Ethics, and Netiquette


One technology that deals with digital ethics in regards to adult education is the program ExamGuard (http://www.examguard.com/TestingEngine.asp).  ExamGuard is ideal in an online environment and can be utilized for distance learning or a computer lab self-paced environment.  It handles digital ethics with respect to the idea of cheating while taking an online exam.  ExamGuard blocks out the ability to simultaneously search the internet and insures that it is the only window available for the duration of the exam.  Because many online or lab based courses work on the honor system, it is difficult to give administer an old-fashioned test since the learner can just look up the answers in another window but ExamGuard allows an ethical way to test without the instructor being present or available.

A great technology or resource for the idea of Digital Etiquette is a movie and subsequent activities on Brain Pop (http://www.brainpop.com/technology/computersandinternet/digitaletiquette/).  The brief movie goes over the brief do’s and don’ts of communicating digitally such as not using all capital letters and not naming other people without their knowledge or permission.  Although this technology is not geared specifically toward adult education, it is a great prerequisite for any type of adult learning.  I plan on incorporating this into my practice by showing it on the first day of any computer lab course I teach that involves the internet.

2 comments:

  1. William- Thanks for sharing your links this week. I had never heard of exam guard, that would be a very useful tool for distance and lab courses- just knowing that was on a computer would deter students from cheating on exams. Brain pop is a good choice for your internet course, and as you say, may be geared toward younger users, but it will benefit anyone new to computing and email. Thanks for sharing your resources this week. Teri

    ReplyDelete
  2. Exam guard is a great tool. It is nice to have a safety net to keep students from using other windows while testing. The trick will be getting them not to call their classmates to tell them what questions are on the test after they are done. That is when the instructor has to set up the exams to ask content questions in a variety of ways. It might be more work, but that would make the online testing environment a little more cheat proof.

    Thanks for sharing,
    Octavia.

    ReplyDelete