Consequences of Computing:
A Framework for Teaching

Teaching Topics, Principles, and Skills in the Conceptual Framework - Page 32 of 36

The Minimal Implementation A practical question at this point is "what is a minimally sufficient implementation of the framework?" This question has several layers, and we will address them separately before attempting a general answer.

The reason we presented the principles and skills section was to make clear that we thought that essential work for undergraduates in this area was learning those principles and acquiring those skills. These are closely related to almost all of the "topics" such as privacy, property, risks, etc. but more fundamental in nature and more likely to be of help to the student upon graduation than a survey of whatever issues were "hot" when they were a sophomore. Thus, we think that any sufficient implementation of this framework will cover all the principles and skills we list, at least at the introductory level. Most of these are quite elementary and fundamental in nature. Leaving out any significant number of them would, we think, drastically reduce the coherence of this curriculum strand.

Secondly, we suggest that a sufficient implementation should include several of the ethical issues and several of the levels of analysis. We suggest this partly because an understanding of any one of them will inevitably lead to consideration of the others, and we cannot conceive of a course that dealt with one ethical issue with no mention or recourse to other ethical issues or to specific levels of social analysis. Even a narrowly conceived course, focused on "professional responsibility" or "property rights" should connect these to other ethical issues and to other levels of social analysis, and follow and explore those connections. In addition, the principles and skills are best understood when practiced in several areas, rather than in only one. In a single topic course, a student might mistakenly conclude that the principles and skills apply only to the particular ethical issue under study.

A final issue regarding implementation concerns the location of the material in the curriculum. The committee is unanimous in its commitment that these issues be taught both in a distributed fashion throughout the computer science curriculum and in a specialized, if introductory, course. As we have argued earlier, integration into the curriculum is necessary to provide students with the repeated contact with material that will assure it is understood in perspective to its applications to other areas. However, without the specialized course, students cannot give the sustained scrutiny to social and ethical issues that they deserve. A more practical consideration is that these issues are often placed towards the end of syllabi in other areas (a trend we also deplore) and are thus the first to go in a tight semester or quarter. If there is no single course to serve as an anchor for these issues, they might be squeezed out of the curriculum because of time pressure.

A full course in ethical and social issues in computing assures that departments will hire and maintain the expertise of faculty who work in this area. And it is these faculty who can then serve as resources to help integrate the issues throughout the curriculum. We are committed to both integration and a specialized course, to the consideration of several ethical issues and levels of social analysis, and most importantly, to the full inclusion of the principles and skills. A carefully designed curriculum can achieve these things with only a small increase in the "in class" hours from the amount suggested for this area by Curricula 1991.