Opportunities for pro-bono programming

I’m making a list of opportunities for programmers to do pro-bono work. Please tweet @EiaCC, or comment on this post, if you have other suggestions.

• Dates various, Worldwide – Givecamp
• Date unknown, Worldwide – Random Hacks of Kindness
• March 23-25, Kansas City – Coders 4 Charities

Daily computer ethics news stories

If you follow our twitter account, @EiaCC, you will see that we have started tweeting a news story each day at 11am that is related to the textbook. Our hope is that this will help provide students and instructors with fresh topics and cases.

If you have a tip for a good story, Tweet it to us @EiaCC!

Book has launched!

Exciting news: The book is now officially available. The Kindle eBook version appeared on Amazon some time yesterday (January 24), and Amazon and Cengage are now taking order.

The book should also be available at Miami University’s campus book store some time this week. See the “Where to buy” links on the right-hand side of the blog.

Grading Philosophy

I have been asked to comment on my grading strategy for the ethics class. Al and I do things a bit differently, and there is definitely not a right or wrong way to do things, but this is my approach.

Coursework categories

I have three types of coursework in my course, each worth a certain percentage of the grade. For each category I will explain my grading philosophy below.

• Exams, 25%. (1-hour midterm 9%, 2-hour final 16%)
• Papers and presentations, 40%. (7.5% for each of 4 papers, 10% for the presentation)
• Class participation and informal assignments, 35%.

Exams

I use exams to focus on the two lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, Knowledge and Comprehension. (See Wikipedia:Bloom’s Taxonomy for more info.) On exams I ask only about definitions, key ideas, theories, and methods that are presented in the textbook or other readings. The reasoning behind this is twofold. First, in our outcomes-based assessment model, we need to be able to demonstrate knowledge and comprehension of ethics-related topics. As this is hard to tease out of longer writing assignments, the exams are a good place to do it. The second is that I do not want “test panic” to cause a student that has prepared conscientiously to do poorly on the exam. This is also why exams have less weight than the papers and presentation.

Papers and presentations

I use papers and presentations to evaluation the upper parts of Bloom’s Taxonomy; application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. I also use papers and presentations to try to move students up from the lower to higher levels of Perry’s scheme. In particular, I think it is important for students to formulate their own novel position, and argue for it. As you will see from looking at the paper assignments on this site, I feel that persuasive, thesis-driven writing is the most appropriate type for this class, and that the most important feature of a good paper is an interesting thesis. A well-written paper on a boring thesis will never receive more than a C- in my class, while an interesting paper with a flawed presentation may get an A- or B+.

Presentations

Just as my paper assignments are persuasive writing, my final presentation assignment is also meant to be persuasive and thesis-driven. I use the Pecha Kucha presentation style. Students must produce a 20-slide talk, where the slides use timer functionality so that they auto-advance every 20 seconds. The result is a talk that is 6 minutes 40 seconds long. Students are encourage to write their script in advance, and practice many times before presenting. Slides should have little or no text, but use imagery to support the student’s speech. The goal is to, again, present a talk that is persuasive and entertaining, as well as informative. I find that students that focus on “informative” first end up producing talks that are not at all successful.

Participation and informal assignments

The most controversial element of my course, at least among my colleagues, is the huge weight I place on “participation.” It is important to understand that this is more than just attendance in class. If I give a quiz, the student’s quiz score adds participation points. Free-writing assignments, which are used to motivate students to read and prepare for class, give participation points. Any substantive contribution during class discussion, or in-class activities, gives participation points. I assign participation grades based on a traditional bell curve, though I reserve the right to raise or lower the mean depending on my assessment of the overall participation rate of the class as a whole.

The average student gets about 6 participation points per class period (though some earn substantially more or less). Most students earn 2 points per class period for their informal assignments, which are usually free-writing or reflection questions that respond to the assigned reading for the day. I grade informal writing as follows:

• 3 participation points for a particularly deep or insightful response
• 2 points if the answer proves that the student read and understood the reading
• 1 point if the student did something useful
• 0 points if the student obviously did not prepare for class

Grading informal assignments should not be allowed to take up your grading time, which should be focused on the paper assignments. Grading free-writing is mostly spot checking, and I can usually get the grading done, and recorded in my gradebook, in less than 30 seconds per student.

Course Schedule, Fall 2011

I have been asked to provide a rough schedule of my course, including the readings and free-write assignments. I will update this post throughout the semester with that information.

Each numbered bullet corresponds to 1 week. Free write assignments are given in sub-bullets. This is a standard 3-credit course on the semester plan, so I have 15 weeks of class with 3 hours of course meetings per week. The course meets two times per week, hence two free-writes per week.

Note that I had a week of parental leave this semester, and that examinations and holidays eat up another week, so there are only 13 weeks of course content listed in this schedule.

1. Ethics in a Computing Culture, Chapter 1.
• Section 1.1.1 all questions
• Question 15 from the chapter exercises.
2. Ethics in a Computing Culture, Chapter 2.
• Section 2.3.5 question #2
• Question 17 from the chapter exercises.
3. Ethics in a Computing Culture, first half of Chapter 3 (up through 3.4). “Analysis of student privacy rights in plagiarism detection.” (This is a paper that I presented at APPE, and which is currently in submission to JSEE.).
• Topic brainstorm free-write for 1st paper assignment (in class, students workshop their theses for the first paper)
• “Should we use TurnItIn.com to deter plagiarism in this class? If the class is not unanimous on this point, how should we resolve the conflict?” Also, full topic proposal for first paper.
4. Ethics in a Computing Culture, rest of Chapter 3. “The Murderer” by Ray Bradbury.
• Paper 1 is due. Do in-class peer review exercise. With remaining time, discussion of Ch 3.
• “What role does ‘privacy’ play in Bradbury’s story, ‘The Murderer’? What motivates the murderer to do what he did? Were his actions rational?”
5. EiaCC, Chapter 4, up through end of copyright section (4.3.1 in the manuscript, may be different in the printed book)
• Questions 2, 3 and 4 in the “Fair Use” section
• Accusations of plagiarism in popular art are incredibly common (see, for example, accusations against Todd Goldman, and Shepard Fairey, among others). Even if all of the accusations are factually accurate, were the artist’s actions actually ethically wrong? Explain your reasoning.
6. Finish Chapter 4
• Free-write assignment for Paper 2
• One of the following: Section 4.7.1 all three questions, OR Section 4.7.2 both questions
7. Read all of Chapter 5, and “Computing and Accountability” by Nissenbaum
• Section 5.3.3, Question 5
• For each of Nissenbaum’s three recommendations, tell me whether or not you think it is practical, and briefly explain your reasoning.
8. Read first half of Chapter 6, p. 4-21 of McLuhan’s Understanding Media, p. 98-101, 107-108, 129-133, 190-191 in McLuhan’s Laws of Media. (Note: In the printed edition of the book these McLuhan readings are summarized in Chapter 6, but they do not appear in the pre-print version I am using this semester)
• Understanding Media: What one sentence from this reading is the most important, or sums up the rest the best? Write it down, and then explain your reasoning.
• Laws of Media: Select a recently invented technology (like Twitter, “the cloud,” Skype, etc) and create your own Tetrad summarizing its effects on society.
9. Second half of Chapter 6, plus “The Gadget Lover” rom McLuhan’s Understanding Media.
• For free-writing, select one of the “long” questions from the end of the chapter exercises.
10. “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace” by Heim, and Chapter 7 of EiaCC
• Heim free-write: Tell me which paragraph you found most interesting or provocative. Briefly explain why you selected this paragraph.
  Tell me which paragraph is most at odds with or contradicts your sense of “cyberspace.” Briefly explain why you selected this paragraph. (Thanks to Mark Hoffman and Timothy Dansdill of Quinnipiac University for this reading and exercise.)
• Ch 7 free-write: Either Q8 or Q9 from the end of chapter exercises.
11. Chapter 8 of EiaCC
• Ch 8 reflection question: In your view, is there a duty to give people from vulnerable groups special (better) treatment than others? Explain your reasoning using one of the moral theories from Chapter 1.
12. Chapter 9 of EiaCC
• Answer the reflection questions from the “flash crash” section.
13. Week reserved for student persuasive presentations (Pecha-Kucha format)

Paper 4: Freedom of speech and government control of cell phone networks

Last paper of the semester, on chapter 7.
http://www.users.muohio.edu/brinkmwj/EiaCC_files/2011_Fall/Paper04_FreeSpeech.pdf

Paper 3: Property and Augmented Reality

I’m currently writing a chapter about the ethical implications of augmented reality for a Spring book, and I invited my students to write papers on a similar topic. I think it is a good idea to have students work on real issues, related to the instructor’s own scholarship.
http://www.users.muohio.edu/brinkmwj/EiaCC_files/2011_Fall/Paper03_Property.pdf

Figure 8.1

Because the book is printed in a single color, Figure 8.1 might be difficult to interpret. Here are the four original full-color images:

	Normal eyesight	Colorblind version (Made using Sim Daltonism, by Michel Fortin)
Original game design
Colorblind-friendly design

Paper 2: Privacy

Paper #2 this semester was based on Chapter 3, the Privacy chapter. In this case I gave students two options for topics to write about: Online gossip, or the Missouri law that bans non-public teacher-student interactions through Internet sites

The assignment is available from my web site.

Armstrong Interactive guest post: Criticism for computer scientists

I have a new guest post up on the AIMS (Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies) blog. Check it out: Criticism for computer scientists, in which I argue that computer scientists ought to be reading the humanities.