As stated by Hargreaves (2002), “we live in a world of endless and relentless change” (p. 189), and “in a complex and fast-changing society” (Hargreaves and Fink, 2003, p. 693). Societal changes include the changing nature and patterns of employment, population, and demographic changes, technological change, and globalization (Chapman, 1996; Fullan, 1993). Technology, which changes our world(s) rapidly and relentlessly, has a great impact on our schools, one of the most important leading organizations in society. The increased use of technology, for instance, for instructional purposes has caused some debates about ethical and/or moral use of ICT in educational setting. Some of the researchers have argued that whether students and teachers are ethically linked together as a “community” or to the world through the use of technology (Prosser & Ward, 2000), mainly of computers. We could label all those debates as we like; it is ethics in technology, computer ethics, cyber ethics, or ethical issues of the information age. Whatever those debates call the term, it is clear that “computer ethics is one of the issues that emerged with computer technology” (Namlu & Odabasi, 2007, p. 206). Most of the researches aim to investigate whether teachers and students use the technology ethically. With this in mind, this study aims to determine prospective teachers’ unethical computer using behaviors.

An instrument (Unethical computer use behavior scale-UECUBS) developed by Namlu & Odabasi (2007) was used in this study. The instrument was designed to measure unethical computer using behavior. In the first part of the instrument, there are questions about gender, program of study and PC experiences of the participants. In the second part, there are five point scale 80 items about the value of educational research for teachers. After the factor analysis of the related items, the authors identified that the factors can be divided under five subscales; intellectual property (0.93), social impact (0.92), safety and quality (0.91), net integrity 0.85) and information integrity (0.85). The population of this study was 3.817 student teachers who were studying at the Faculty of Education of Inonu University in Malatya, Turkey. The sample of the study consisted of 400 students selected by proportional stratified sampling method. All the questionnaires were administered to the participants during 10-15 February, 2008.

The data will show whether gender, program of study and PC experience have an impact on ethical judgments of undergraduate students regarding information and communication technologies (ICTs). The study will have been finished by the end of July, 2007. We assume to find significant differences between male and female candidate teachers’ unethical computer using behaviors and differences among participants in terms of departments and PC experiences.