Realities of Teaching Social and Ethical Issues in Computing - Introduction - The Research Center on Computing & Society

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Doris Keefe Lidtke

Introduction

Teaching social and ethical issues in computing seems to have become a requirement in computer science curricula within the past few years. This is not an entirely new development having been addressed in the literature since the late 1960s. However, only a few within the profession have been concerned with the issues of computing and values, and only within the past few years has there been some consensus about the need for every undergraduate student to acquire some understanding of the professional and ethical standards of the field. In addition to the recognition of the business community and of society in general that undergraduate institutions need to teach professional and ethical practices, both the November 1990 “Criteria for Accreditation” distributed by the Computer Science Accreditation Commission of the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board and the recently published Computing Curricula 1991: Report of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Curriculum Task Force (COM91) specifically address this requirement. This paper will give some historical background about teaching social and ethical issues in computing, discuss the content which needs to be taught, the level of expertise which students should attain, the qualifications of those who teach in this area, and how to evaluate what is taught.

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