I have worked in IT since 1999, so I have had my share of ethical dilemmas in the line of duty, so to speak. One thing that I found difficult was teaching young people about ethical behavior vs. illegal behavior. I found that teens didn't have the ethical issues that I did with certain things. For example, the millennials grew up with music and movies available to download whenever they wanted. They grew up with bittorrent and peer to peer sharing. For them, if it was available to download, then it was okay to do it. When I was teaching high school, I tried to teach that just because something might be legal, doesn't make it ethical, or just because something is freely available, it doesn't make it legal or ethical to take advantage of it. To be honest, it was the same thing when it came to teaching about copyright, intellectual property, and plagiarism. Cheating ran rampant because they didn't see anything wrong with it, or copying things off of the internet. It's very important to teach ethics to IT students, especially to the millennials who grew up with technology at their fingertips. How would you go about teaching ethics to today's IT students?
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