As humans are increasingly relying on unmanned systems, the need to insure that the decision made by such systems are moral and ethical arises. Universities have many approaches to incorporate ethics in the curriculum including offering a dedicated course, or embedding elements in various courses, or a mixture of the two approaches. This paper attempts to address the issue of incorporating unmanned systems ethics into science, engineering, and information technology curriculum.

Discussions of technology and education often promise revolution, and freedom from the constraints of campuses and classrooms. There is less discussion of why such infrastructures were needed in the first place, or of the challenges facing learners when these are no longer available. In order to explore such critical alternatives, we can begin to ask different kinds of question. What is the cloud made of? What do learners work with, when they study? Where are they, and what places do they move between? From a sociomaterial perspective, such questions draw attention to the ways in which academic work is encoded, transmitted and stored; how the cloud, far from being nebulous, relies on undersea cables and server farms; and how learners try and coordinate all this as they take bus journeys, sit in class or meet with friends in the bar. These points will be illustrated with examples from a longitudinal study of University students’ uses of technology, in which they recorded and described how, where and when they studied. This analysis has implications for the design of e-learning, raising questions about whose responsibility it is to build the infrastructure that students need to learn, and introducing a note of caution to discussions about the transformational potential of technology.