Courting Culture in Computer Science - Unstructured Educational Activities - The Research Center on Computing & Society

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Batya Friedman

Unstructured Educational Activities

Unstructured educational activities are not rigidly fixed or systematic; rather they represent informal efforts to promote and support opportunities for student engagement. Five such activities follow. Likely enough, computer science faculty and departments already engage in some of these unstructured activities to support their technical education. I want to sketch how these same unstructured activities can be used to integrate the technical with the social and ethical.

Electronic mail and bulletin boards. The information we bring to students’ attention through electronic media carries an implicit message about what students need to know and be concerned about as members of a computing community. Most of our electronic mail and bulletin boards for students communicate technical or pragmatic information: tips for homework, notice of new machines and software on campus, when and where a particular user’s group will meet, how to obtain new shareware, and the like. However, more can be done. For example, we can involve students in bulletin boards, like RISKS, that do discuss the social aspects of computing. And we can challenge students intellectually based on current issues. For example, consider the recent controversy over Lotus’ proposed software to provide marketing information about millions of Americans. Electronic mail to students could not only inform them of the situation but engage them in substantive discussion of, say, the implications of a software design for potential privacy violations. Through such broader use of electronic media we draw students into the larger societal controversies and discussions.

Informal classroom discussion. In our technical courses, we can respond to current social issues relevant to the course material. For example, on a course on algorithms it could be appropriate to discuss recent court decisions on the patentability of algorithms and the implications for algorithms as intellectual property. This is not to say that such discussions should be lengthy or occur all that often. It is to say that the discussions should be genuine in the sense that they draw on our own interest, and convey the immediacy and importance of the issues. Indeed, an absence of such informal classroom discussion can communicate to students that the technical can and should be separated from the affairs of computing in the larger society.

Departmental colloquia. In the span of a year at Mills we typically intersperse in our computer science colloquia series two or three social topics among the technical ones. In general, such colloquia can provide both faculty and students with common ground on social topics that then serves as a basis for on-going discussions. Moreover, since colloquia tend to be highly visible forums, they can help validate the value of such discussions.

Student involvement in school computing policy. Students directly encounter the social aspects of computing through the policies that govern their own school computer use. Such encounters provide rich educational opportunities. For example, at Mills, computer science undergraduates and graduate students participated in discussions about student access to specialized computer equipment. Through the discussions, students became keenly aware of how different policy decisions could affect their peers and their sense of community. While bounded by certain faculty parameters, students with faculty helped determine policy. Other policy areas that are amenable to student participation include, for example, allocation of computer time, welcoming novices into the computer center, promoting access to information, and establishing security for systems. (For more detail, see Friedman, 1986, 1991). By examining and defining social policy, students learn to navigate through some of the very issues they will encounter in their later lives as computer professionals.

Faculty advising. How do we advise students? For example, what is our response when a student comes to us with a social or ethical concern? Do we say, perhaps, “Yes, uh huh, but shouldn’t you be spending your time on your technical work?” Or in some other way do we dismiss or change the topic? Or, instead, do we say something like, “Yes, that’s interesting, and how does that social or ethical concern inform on your technical work?” That is, we can help students to see that their social concerns need not be in opposition or in competition with their technical education. The same holds true for career advising. For example, are we prepared to advise a student who tells us she wishes to pursue robotics but does not want to contribute to the development of “smart” bombs? Or are we left silent (as I was) because we are unaware of non-military options? Perhaps I am overstating the case based on my own experiences and those of close colleagues. I do think, however, that students construct understandings of themselves in relation to the field based partly on what we as faculty bring to the advising table.

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