Abstract

This paper presents the results of an international collaboration on ethics teaching for personal and professional values within the area of formal higher education using new communication technologies. The course design was based on the dialogic technique and was aimed at clarifying the students’ own values, defining their own positions related to ethical dilemmas, developing argumentative strategies and an ethical commitment to their profession and contribution to society. The online dialogue between heterogeneous groups of students based on their cultural background –the main innovation of this training– was possible thanks to the technological and administrative support of the participating universities. To analyze the effect of this innovative training we employed a quasi-experimental design using a control group, i.e., without the option of online dialogue with students from another culture. University students from Spain (University of Cantabria) and Chile (Universidad Autónoma de Chile) participated in this study. The positive results, which included better scores and positive assessments of both debate involvement and intercultural contact by students who participated in the new teaching program, support the main conclusion that the opening of international dialogue on moral dilemmas through new communication technologies contributes significantly to improve ethics training in higher education.

Abstract

In recent years, the term «globalization» has become a catchword in many languages. It is an open-ended process that implies different levels of unification. In music, attempts have been made by individual and collectively by artists from different cultures in the world. In each case, the process has been focused on the unification of musical sounds that can be identified within the global community. Technology is successful with the duplication of sounds of musical instruments for computer games, but the creation of zones of cultural interaction as defined by actual musical instruments is presenting challenges with the unification of cultural values into one global community. In music, globalization implies «world music» that is articulated as a hybrid product. The process of globalization is readily realized electronically, with sounds of musical instruments, but the creation of zones of cultural interaction, with the same musical instruments, will require a mixture of configuration of factors ranging from ecology to language and cultural manifestation. The objective of zones of cultural interaction is not to unify style of music, but through globalization is the sharing of actual musical instruments. To accomplish this objective, geographic spaces will have to surmount the globalization of the world ecology, language, and culture.