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Consequences of Computing:
A Framework for Teaching
Principles and Skills Underlying the Social and Ethical Dimensions - Page 18 of 36
PRINCIPLES AND SKILLS UNDERLYING THE SOCIAL AND ETHICAL DIMENSIONS
The specific topics addressed in courses or modules (e.g. privacy of electronic mail in
organizations) may change based on currency of the topic or technology, the interest of the
instructor, the nature of the undergraduate program, or the location of the course in the
undergraduate curriculum. Some items on the dimensions are currently more fundamental than
others (e.g. property, risk, privacy), but all are important, and the emphasis within each
dimension may change over time.
The goal of a curriculum should be to prepare students of computer science to deal with new
issues as they arise in practice, later in their careers. Given the changing nature of the
technological universe, different issues than were addressed in school are likely to arise.
Thus, an emphasis on the principles and skills that allow one to understand a wide variety of
issues will enable students to be more flexible in their approach and will help instructors to
avoid simply doing the social and ethical topic du jour as they teach the subject.
This section provides some guidance in terms of the important principles and skills a student
of computer science should be exposed to in the course of an undergraduate curriculum. The
principles and skills associated with each dimension are what we consider to be the
fundamental and important content of this area and are represented in Figure 3. The
particular topics from the table in Figure 1, important though they are, can simply be viewed
as vehicles through which to teach these principles and skills.
The important principles and skills from the technology dimension of our 3 dimensional table
are well covered in Curricula 1991. They can be found under the "recurring concepts" and the
specific skills associated with the knowledge units. We provide here an analysis of the
important principles and skills from the ethical and social analysis dimensions. Our
presentation of each principle or skill includes: a statement of its character and importance,
an explanation of its fundamental or elementary character, and preliminary suggestions about
how it could be taught. An in-depth presentation of methods, resources, cases, lab exercises,
syllabi, and curricula for teaching these principles and skills will be the result of the
ImpactCS project's later stages.
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