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If you’re in a hurry, check out the discussion questions found at the end of each chapter. They can lead to interesting class debates and require no preparation beyond reading the chapter. 1 “Non-Apologetic Computer Ethics Education: A Strategy for Integrating Social Impact and Ethics into the Computer Science Curriculum,” C. Dianne Martin and Hillary J. Hold, The Research Center on Computing & Society (web site), www. Southerner. Deed/organizations/arcs. The end-of-chapter interviews, new to the second edition, provide another source of discussion topics.
While the text of each chapter is designed to present a balanced view of each issue, the interviews reflect the perspectives and passions of individual people. Some of their opinions may provoke interesting discussions among your students. One of your important roles is to prevent a few extroverts from dominating the discussion. It is easier to keep the discussion moving from person to person if you can get a wide variety of people used to speaking up regularly. Ideally your class is small enough that you can learn the name of each student. If you know everyone by name, you can call on people even if they do not have their hand up.
Try to create an expectation among the students that nearly everyone will contribute something to every class session. Another one of your responsibilities is to ensure that the students Justify their point of view. If a student should say, “l think such-and-such is wrong” without further elaboration, you should ask the student to explain why the action is wrong. Sometimes you need to drill down several levels before you get to the fact or value upon which the conclusion rests. I encourage my students to couch their arguments in one or more of these words: benefit, harm, right, obligation, or duty.
A utilitarian analysis relies upon an evaluation of benefits and harms. A social contract theory analysis focuses on rights. A Kantian analysis considers duties or obligations. Asking for these words can have two benefits. It makes the analysis more rigorous, and it helps the class understand the ethical theory being used. Many of the issues discussed in this class are highly controversial. Students often have difficulty coming up with a logical argument defending a point of view to which they are emotionally attached. One way to solve this problem is to poll the class and find out which students support an issue and which are opposed to it.
If the class is reasonably well divided between the two points of view, ask the students to argue the point of view particular point of view, students can be more analytical. You can add value to a concussion and keep it moving along through the use of meta-comments. For example: “Maria has Just given a utilitarian argument why the proposed action is wrong. Can someone analyze this issue from a Kantian point of view? ” It is important that students understand there are multiple ways to look at nearly every issue. Through the use of leading questions, you can help ensure that both sides of an issue are expressed.
If you cannot find anyone to express a contraries view, you may need to bring that view out yourself. You have a better chance of getting a wide range of perspectives expressed, however, if you never reveal your win point of view or your favorite ethical theory. Role-playing Exercises You should occasionally set aside time for role-playing exercises. Role-playing activities guarantee that many students will participate, and students particularly enjoy them. The textbook contains many role-playing exercises. For a typical activity, the class is divided into small groups that give presentations representing a particular point of view.
You will need to give the groups time to discuss the issue and devise the arguments they will make to the rest of the class. The amount of time depends on the exercise, but it is often 10-20 minutes. Next, each group makes its case. Again, the amount of time depends on the exercise, but it is often 20-30 minutes. Finally, it is good to have a concluding discussion in which the students have the opportunity to discuss the relative strengths of each group’s case. Writing Assignments Writing assignments provide another important opportunity for students to practice constructing ethical evaluations.
The media are filled with stories raising moral problems related to information technology. It is easy for students to find a current news story related to the topic of a chapter. In a typical 600-word essay I ask students o describe a moral problem, take a clear stand on whether a particular action or decision is right or wrong, and then defend their position through the use of one or more of the practical ethical theories described in the book (Kantian, act utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism, or social contract theory).
You can find guidelines for grading written essays on the Web (see the next section). Web Resources A variety of Web sites contain information valuable to instructors of computer ethics courses. This section describes a few good sites. The Excommunicates. Org Web site provides detailed case studies that you can use in lass. Some of them overlap with cases described in Ethics for the Information Age, while others are different. The site introduces a methodology called “Social Impact Analysis” for exploring the social and ethical issues related to a computing system.
It gives practical advice on how to lead an ethics case discussion, and it provides a worksheet that students can use when weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions. The home page for the site is Excommunicates. Org. DOLCE is an acronym for Developing On/Off-Line computer Ethics. The DOLCE Web site contains several early in the term to help motivate the study of ethics. The site also contains several rubrics (evaluation sheets) that can help you grade written essays. The URL of the DOLCE home page is esthetics. IIS. Deed/dolce.
Edward F. Grinner at North Carolina State University has created an attractive visual map that provides links to Web sites, news articles, and case studies related to computer ethics. The URL for the Ethics in Computing site map is ethics. SC. NCSC. Deed. ARCS (Research Center of Computing & Society) is a particularly valuable site if you are integrating computer ethics in an existing computer science course. It provides ass studies relevant to a wide variety of courses in the typical undergraduate computer science curriculum.
You could also take advantage of these case studies if you are teaching a stand-alone computer ethics course. The home page for this site is www. Southerner. Deed/organizations/arcs. SERIES is an acronym for Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. The SERIES Web site is a good place to check if you are integrating computer ethics into another computer science course. Its materials suggest how discussions of ethical issues can be introduced into various undergraduate courses in computer science.
The URL for this site is www. Series. Purdue. Deed. Summary One of your roles as a teacher of computer ethics is to raise questions and ensure that a wide variety of points of view are expressed. You are also serving as a role model, demonstrating to students the importance of thinking about the right thing to doвЂ?and then doing it. EthicsвЂ?doing the right thingвЂ?is not Just for people with a Ph. D. In philosophy. Ethics is for all of us, and all of us have more to learn. It’s perfectly acceptable to respond to a question with, “l don’t know.
I’ll read up on that and get back to you. ” I do that all the time. By letting the students know that you are a student of ethics, too, you can give them confidence that they can startвЂ?right nowвЂ? to think about the moral qualities of their professional decisions. Chapter 1 1 . According to the author, there is good reason to say we are living in the Information Age because computer and communication technologies have made it easy to collect, store, manipulate, and distribute vast amounts of information. 2.
The Amiss demonstrate that people have the ability to evaluate every technology critically and determine whether its use will improve or degrade their quality of life. . Three aids to manual calculating are the tablet, the abacus, and the mathematical table. 4. Commercial mechanical calculators became practical in the late nineteenth century because advances in machine tools and mass-production methods made it possible to manufacture reliable devices at a reasonable price. 5. Rapid late 19th century created a growing market for devices that could speed up accounting. . The Burroughs Adding Machine Company surpassed its competitors by combining an excellent product with excellent marketing. 7. The widespread adoption of the mechanical calculators led to the lowering of ages of bookkeepers and the transformation of a male-only occupation to an occupation employing a large number of women. 8. The invention of the cash register was a response to two needs: the need to prevent clerks from embezzling money, and the need for better sales accounting. 9.
In the early twentieth century, the U. S. Census Bureau used punched cards to store census data, Marshall Field’s used punched cards to analyze information generated by cash registers, railroads used punched cards to send out bills more frequently, and the Pennsylvania Steel Company used punched cards to do cost accounting on manufacturing processes. 0. A data-processing system has three principle components. The first component inputs data, the second performs calculations, and the third outputs data. 1 1 .
The development of radar in World War II stimulated three advances in computing: electrostatic memory (exemplified by the Williams Tube), semiconductor memory (exemplified by the transistor), and graphical user interfaces (exemplified by Doug Newsagent’s ONLine System). 1 CHAPTER 1 . CATALYSTS FOR CHANGE 12. IBM quickly overtook Remington Rand as the leading mainframe computer maker because it had a larger base of existing customers and a much better sales and arresting organization, and it made a much greater investment in research and development. 13.
The motivation for the creation of higher-level programming languages was a desire to make programming less tedious and error-prone and improve programmer productivity. Higher-level programming languages changed computing by enabling programs to be moved more easily from one manufacturer’s computers to another manufacturer’s computers. It also led to a large increase in the number of people writing computer programs. 14. Time-sharing gave more organizations access to electronic digital computers in the sass by allowing them to share the cost of archiving (or leasing) and operating a computer system. 15.