Abstract:

The pervasiveness of information sharing through highly popular social media tools have raised notable ethical issues to be considered particularly in the areas of privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility. These issues were mentioned in the well-known framework of Richard Mason (1986) which was recognized as PAPA (privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility) dimensions which are still unresolved. Today ethical information sharing through social media particularly for educational purposes have been neglected in the literature. Moreover, there is dearth of research focuses on the comparison of student and faculty views on these issues. For this reason, the aim of the study is to compare and contrast viewpoints of university students and faculty members on the ethical use of Facebook within ICT (Information Communication and Technology) context. In order to fulfill this aim university students’ and faculty members’ views were assessed by a pre-developed reliable scale including 27 Facebook information sharing scenarios in ICT context based on 5 option Likert type questions with options as crime, unethical, questionable, acceptable and ethical. The scale were administered to total of 530 participants namely, 380 were university students and 150 were faculty members at a university in Rwanda. The data was analyzed using SPSS v17. Descriptive statistics as tables, frequencies, percentages were used to portray the views of students and faculty members. Independent samples t-test was used to detect any significant differences among the views of students and faculty. The participant type was the independent variable and dimensions of PAPA are the dependent variables of the study. The design of the study is causal-comparative. The average of the responses given to the scenarios for the students change from questionable to acceptable whereas for faculty unethical to questionable and there exist statistical significance among the views of students and faculty members which revealed that faculty members were more cautious in their responses about PAPA issues than students who are more optimistic or somehow superficial about evaluating scenarios compared to their faculty counterparts. In the privacy, accuracy and accessibility dimensions, students evaluated scenarios as almost acceptable whereas faculty members’ responses are close to questionable. In property dimension, student responses are close to ethical whereas faculty members’ ratings were close to questionable. The biggest gap among student and faculty responses lies in the property dimension. Faculty members are more selective users of social media tools i.e. Facebook and they approach with more caution when it comes to issues of particularly property as compared to students who are more capable users of social media but their spontaneity in use causing more ethics related issues. This study is among the rare examples that tries to explain information sharing related ethical dilemmas in ICT context through Facebook in a comparative perspective. It also helps to understand the reason lying behind difference among student and faculty views on ethical, ICT use of Facebook.

Keywords:

Facebook, ICT, Information ethics, PAPA framework, SNS.