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Ethics

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From: Oliver Burmeister
Date: May 9, 2002 3:44PM

Dear All.

I was disappointed in the otherwise excellent WebAIM course run last month,
to find what I thought was a generally light or soft approach to ethics (eg
in the week 2 discussion - for those of you who participated). Let me
declare my biases at the outset. I am a founding and executive member of the
Australian Institute of Computer Ethics. I am an advocate of ethical
responsibility for IT professionals.

Being relatively new to things accessible I was very pleased to see that the
WebAIM course did more than just give lip service to ethical issues.
However, other than using the word 'ethics' repeatedly, and making comments
that it is hard to read anything on accessibility without coming across the
term 'ethics', very little specific or deep discussion followed.

Sure there were concerns for general social responsibility toward the
disadvantaged in the community. There were concerns (quite well expressed in
an article referenced in that discussion) about the digital divide. There
were general concerns for the needs of the aging population. There were
equity concerns. Yet little in the way of specifics/depth.

I invite you either to this list or to me personally (and at some future
point I will summarise the discussion to this list), to share what to you
are the ethical issues. Perhaps together we can explore the issues in a bit
more depth?

I look forward to your replies,

Oliver

------------------------------------------------
Oliver Burmeister
Lecturer
Swinburne Computer-Human Interaction Laboratory
School of Information Technology
Swinburne University of Technology
PO Box 218, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122
Australia
(T) +61 3 9214 8304
(F) +61 3 9214 5501
email: mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED>
URL: http://www.it.swin.edu.au/schil/biographies/oliverburmeister.html
SCHIL URL: http://www.it.swin.edu.au/centres/schil/


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