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

2.1 The Freshman Computers and Society Course

The cornerstone of our approach is a required three-credit Computers and Society course given in the freshman year. The course we will describe was taught at The George Washington University in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department during the 1990 – 91 academic year and has evolved from a traditional Computers and Society course that began in 1982. The syllabus of the course is shown in Table 1. The purpose of this course is to provide two key tools to students: an awareness of the social and ethical issues within the field and the analysis skills to deal with these issues. Awareness takes the form of an introduction to the presence and nature of ethical dilemmas within several subfields of computer science and an exposure to the major voices, past and present in ethical thinking within those subfields. The tools taught in the course include a grounding of the students own metaphysical perspective, familiarity with several different codes of conduct, an introduction to the language of ethics, and some basic skills and experience in thinking, speaking and writing about ethics.

6

Week:

  

Topic:

1

  

History of Computer Technology

2

  

Moral Framework for Assessing Technology

3

  

Professional Ethics: Codes of Conduct and Test Scenarios

4

  

The Scientific Method

5

  

Privacy and Civil Liberties
 

Impact of Artificial Intelligence

7

  

Computers in the Workplace: Co-Determination, Participatory Design, Deskilling

8

  

Role of Computer Modeling in Public Policy

9

  

The Electronic Schoolhouse: Computers in Education

10

  

Computers and the Law: Copyrights, Liability, Computer Crime

11

  

Software Reliability and Socially Critical Systems

12

  

Computers and Equity: Access, Ethnic, Gender, and Socioeconomic Issues

13

  

Computers and Medicine

14

  

Computers in the Future

Table 1: Sample Syllabus for Computers and Society Course

Go to: 2.1.1 Format

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