Non-Apologetic Computer Ethics Education:
A Strategy for Integrating Social Impact and Ethics into the Computer Science
Curriculum
C. Dianne Martin and Hilary J. Holz
Implementation of the ideas presented in this paper requires a major commitment of effort on the part of computer science departments to integrate the social and ethical impact of computer technology across the curriculum. We believe that such an effort is both worthwhile and necessary for the future of our profession. Previous efforts to implement only one of the components discussed has resulted in a fragmented and unsatisfactory understanding of the issues on the part of students. By integrating this strand across the four years of the computer science curriculum, departments will send the message to students that ethical and social impact concerns are taken seriously. They will also send a message to future employers of their students that their students will be able to think, discuss and write about technical issues within a social and ethical context.
The freshman Computers and Society course will establish the analysis skills early and guarantee that ethics is covered in a systematic and thorough way by an instructor who is carefully chosen. The course content can be monitored and updated periodically as new issues arise. It will provide provocative case studies for students to analyze in the safety of the classroom before they encounter such issues in the real world. Concerns about the capability of computer science students to handle philosophical theory are not borne out by the experience at George Washington University, where freshmen computer science students proved themselves to be quite capable of and often enthusiastic about dealing with both the abstraction and complexity of ethical frameworks.
The incorporation of case study analysis into the core computer science courses expands the number of viewpoints that the students will be exposed to in relation to social and ethical issues. It will not take a great deal of time since the skills and format for the assignment have been previously taught in the freshman course. It provides the opportunity for truly in-depth analysis of the subject material in the context of the growing technical knowledge of the student and enables the student to see how the social and ethical issues cut across the technology.
The senior project becomes the final, integrative experience that enhances both the technical and social understanding of the student. It provides the transition from the academic format of a typical class assignment to the real-world format of a significant project. The impact statement is not just a scenario, but a truly in-depth analysis of a real problem. The student may encounter not just one ethical problem on such a project, but several contradictory problems to consider.
The most serious problem in implementing this integrated approach across the computer science curriculum is the lack of familiarity that most professors have in locating and preparing materials to deal with the social and ethical issues. What is needed at the outset of such a curricular change is for a single faculty member or committee in a computer science department to be designated to direct the effort and advise the rest of the faculty. This person or committee would be responsible for establishing the syllabus for the freshman Computers and Society course, for developing an initial set of scenarios to be used by the rest of the faculty in the other computer science courses, and for establishing a format for the social and ethical impact statement to be included with the senior project. Over time the rest of the faculty would become more comfortable in dealing with the issues and developing their own scenarios as students who were prepared to analyze and discuss the issues moved through the curriculum. As more computer science departments begin to make this transition, publishers would recognize the marketing advantage of providing new materials within the traditional technical textbooks to facilitate the process.
Go to: 3.1 Beyond the Computer Science Curriculum
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