From Awareness to Action:

Integrating Ethics and Social Responsibility across the Computer Science Curriculum

Third Report from the Project ImpactCS Steering Committee

Final Report: August, 1998

C. Dianne Martin, George Washington University
Elaine Yale Weltz, Seattle Pacific University

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Foreword

 

This is the final report of the ImpactCS Project. It is the culmination of four years of effort by many experts in computer ethics and social responsibility. The curricula progression and related models presented in this report are based upon approaches that have been widely implemented, debated, and disseminated through computer science education conferences, workshops, journal articles and web sites. Although this project focussed primarily on computer science education, the proposed frameworks, models and strategies could also be used in engineering, business, information systems or other technically-oriented curricula.

All aspects of the work of this project rest upon theoretical constructs and empirical evidence.

    • The intellectual framework used to define the core content presented in the first report [15] was derived from applied ethics and social analysis theories.
    • The pedagogical framework of knowledge units, learning objectives, and teaching methods presented in the second report [19] was based upon learning and teaching theories.
    • The implementation strategy presented in this report is based upon moral education theory, which has demonstrated empirically that a staged approach is necessary to teach principles of values and ethics [8, 12, 22].

Many people have contributed to the work of this project. The members of the Steering Committee were serious and diligent in providing feedback and suggestions for each of the reports. The hard-working consultants provided their special expertise as needed at each stage of the project. The outside reviewers provided excellent comments that broadened the scope of the reports and provided the necessary reality check for the reports. The editors of the Communications of the ACM have been very supportive in publishing each of the reports, and this has provided wide dissemination of the results of the project.

Although this is the last word from this project, it certainly will not be the last word in computer science curriculum development. Rather, we hope that it will provide a strong starting point for the computer science curriculum of the next millennium – a millennium that will, in fact, begin by having to cope with a serious and widespread "bug" created by past computing professionals who did not pay enough attention to the ethical and social implications of their work [CDM].


Acknowledgments

The work of the Project ImpactCS Steering Committee has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DUE-9354626), by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The George Washington University in the USA, by the School of Computing and Mathematics at Deakin University in Australia, and by the Department of Computer Systems of Uppsala University in Sweden. The members of the Project ImpactCS Steering Committee have reviewed this report prior to publication.