Computer Science Ethics Course Materials

Image courtesy Negative Space. 

Here are some materials from my Spring 2015 semester course on Computer Science Ethics, an upper-level Computer Science course that was majority Computer Science majors with a few Computer Science minors with majors in the Humanities and Physical Sciences.

The syllabus was generic, so I don't include that here, but I started the course with Net Neutrality (the legislation of which was current at the time) and questions of access (ResponsiveWebsiteUserExperience.pdf - a collaborative Google Doc on responsive websites and their implications for people with limited means in the western world, and accessing content in the developing world), and then allowed the students' interest to guide the course from there.

We did a lot of work in public in our HASTAC Group and the students were among the user testers for the new HASTAC site which has since launched.

Some students were particularly interested in hacking, so we launched a HASTAC Forum on "Hacking in the Classroom" to discuss whether or not hacking was an appropriate skill to learn in an academic environment, and what exactly people mean when they say "hacking." We did some work on penetration testing via virtual machines, which can be considered a form of hacking, where security technology professionals attempt to find the weaknesses of a system they are contracted to test.

The other documents attached below are a Discussion Leading project (CS455-DiscussionLeading.pdf) where students had free reign to teach a particular programming skill as well as to discuss the theoretical and ethical implications of the skill. There is also a follow-up HASTAC post as part of that project (CS455DiscussionLeadingHASTACPost.pdf), so you can read about what the students did in our group.

Additionally, students were frustrated with the Moodlerooms learning management system that they were using in their studies, and so we redesigned a component of the tool via UML (ClassDiagramsMoodleroomsredo.pdf), and their diagrams and write-ups are also in our group.

Think-Pair-Share was used extensively throughout the class and really was a transformative tool for everyday critical discussion. You can read a brief case study of this class, which I delivered at HASTAC2016 here.