Ethics and children's information systems

✍ Scribed by Joanne Silverstein; Helen Nissenbaum; Mary Flanagan; Nathan G. Freier

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 27 KB
• Volume: 43
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0044-7870
• DOI: 10.1002/meet.14504301133

✦ Synopsis

Overview

As information technologies become increasingly prevalent in children's lives, designers must make difficult design decisions regarding both the developmental constraints of the user population (e.g., cognitive capacity, literacy, attention span, etc.) and implications for fundamental human values (e.g., information access, privacy, autonomy, informed consent, psychological welfare, etc.). Whether interacting with digital reference systems (Silverstein, 2005), robotic pets (Kahn, Friedman, Perez-Granados, & Freier, in press), or educational games to teach young girls programming (Flanagan, Howe, & Nissenbaum, 2005), children are continuously constructing knowledge about these information systems and utilizing that knowledge to reflect upon larger domains of life such as the personal-psychological, social-conventional, and moral.

Designers may not recognize that specific affordances of the technology they design, such as a voice interface, can have value implications, such as reifying existing gender stereotypes (Nass, Moon, & Green, 1997). This is particularly true for children, whose concepts of social norms and moral principles are still in dynamic and formative stages of development.