Guide for Educators

Aim and Scope

Our aim is to provide materials for educators that will help students to navigate some of the central ethical issues that new digital technologies pose in relation to our attention. We hope that this resource will be accessible and of interest to students from roughly 15 years of age upwards.

This learning resource has been developed as part of the research project, “Salient Solutions,” funded by the Norwegian Research Council. This project explores various ways that our attention is shaped by outside actors (including new digital technologies) and what threats this poses to individuals and to society.

This resource was designed with a special eye to the Norwegian curriculum in Religion and Ethics, but we believe that it will also be suitable for curricula in other subjects, including English and the Social Sciences.

This resource was developed by philosophers to serve as a philosophical resource for educators and students. As such, the focus of this resource is less on facts about digital technologies and more on larger conceptual and moral questions about the nature of attention and its connection to our identities and values, the moral permissibility of the way that digital technologies shape what we as individuals and as a society pay attention to and, more generally, how attention is connected to democracy and public engagement (and what follows from that in terms of how it can permissibly be shaped by outside actors).

Learning Outcomes

We have divided this resource into 4 separate lessons. These lessons are connected, and the later ones build on some of the themes from earlier ones. As such, we recommend that they all be taught together instead of piecemeal.

By the end of these lessons, students should be able to do the following:

Identify key features of attention and articulate why what we pay attention to is an ethical issue.
Reflect on and articulate ways that what we pay attention to shapes what we believe, what we want, and how we act.
Identify ways that digital technologies affect how we pay attention and what we pay attention to, and what ethical issues this raises.
Apply consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics to practical questions that emerge in relation to new digital landscapes and attention (e.g., what should we as individuals pay attention to online? It is morally problematic that attention is bought and sold online?)
Identify and analyze challenges that new digital technologies pose to democracy and our role as citizens.

Reflection Exercises

Each lesson includes a number of reflection exercises. These are designed to get students to engage in philosophical reflection on the issues at hand. We anticipate these questions to generate lively discussion and think many can suitably serve as topics for longer essays. We leave it to the instructor to decide on how the students should answer these questions (e.g., by writing their answers down, discussing with a peer or in a group, etc.).

Resources

The resources that have been drawn on in formulating this resource are listed at the end of each lesson and in the bibliography under the "Resources" section of the website. Under this section we also include a list of “Core Readings” that may provide useful background information for educators as they prepare their lessons.

Coming Soon! Brief Interviews With Philosophers