Professionalism in Computing: A Web-based Learning System
Author(s):
John A. Lee
Presented at the OEC International Conference on Ethics
in Engineering and Computer Science, March 1999
Abstract
Starting from a project to develop a digital library for a
Computer Science course studying social impact and computer
ethics, the paper describes a highly interactive Web-based,
active-learning system that is a highly developed
work-in-progress. Capable of supporting a variety
teaching/learning environments, the system is intended to
support courses in Computer Science, Computer Science
teachers whose primary disciplinary interest is other than
social impact, and ethics and students in the discipline who
have a need to understand the implications of their acquired
technology.
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The Problem
In 1984 there was considerable concern throughout the
computer industry regarding the emergence of computer users
who saw the networking of computers as a challenge to their
ingenuity and to their expertise in circumventing security
systems. These provocateurs were dubbed "hackers" by the
press, using a term that had previously been applied to
intelligent, innovative, but generally benign, pranksters.
While the problem of securing computer systems was by no
means new in the mid-1980s, the advent of the personal
computer and the inexpensive modem opened up opportunities
for nefarious users to extend their reach beyond their
personal domain. At the same time, though again not a new
phenomenon, it was understood that the reach of the computer
would have extensive social impact on the society into which
it was infiltrating, far beyond the extent that had been
realized in the more restricted domain of main frame
computers.
Against this background the Computer Science Accreditation
Commission (CSAC) included, as part of the requirements of
the curriculum of an accredited Computer Science, coursework
in ethical and societal impact. Over the past 15 years this
has manifested itself in Computer Science programs either as
a single (usually 3-credit) course or as a special topic in
several courses. Sometimes it is taught at the freshman level
to "inoculate" students against inappropriate actions, or as
a "capstone" course for upper division students who then have
a better idea of what the technology can support.
The potential social impact of the computer had been
recognized as early as the mid-1960s (Licklider, Fano,
Gotlieb), though their negative expectations were not as
severe as we have actually experienced in the past 30 years.
In response to the CSAC requirements, it was only those
institutions with sufficient faculty resources that were
ready to provide ethical and social impact studies to their
students. In only a few cases was there an existing course in
the curriculum of Computer Science majors. Moreover there was
a stigma associated with those scientists who were perceived
to belittle their credentials by turning their attention to
non-scientific subjects such as ethics and social impact; for
faculty concerned with their tenure or re-appointment this
was a distinct deterrent notwithstanding their personal
disposition. Even today there is still only a tiny cadre of
Computer Science faculty in US universities and colleges who
are interested in the topic and even fewer who have the
opportunity to teach it. At the same time there is occasional
opposition to permitting faculty from other disciplines to
teach "Computer Ethics" or "Social Impact", on the grounds
that they are not sufficiently familiar with the special
environments of the computing field. In the distributed model
it is inconceivable that an ethicist be recruited to teach
the occasional class in (say) the data base course.
Whether the ethics curriculum is provided in a
concentrated single source of study or is distributed in
scenarios across a number of courses, there still exists a
need for support for the discipline specific teacher. This
paper describes the steps taken to develop a Web site at one
institution, but with aspirations of expansion, to satisfy
not only these two styles of presentation but also to support
many other educational paradigms.
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The Opportunity
Teacher preparedness to manage a learning experience in
almost any subject is a function of the ready availability of
support materials and their ability to make the best use of
those resources. At the same time that there is a need to
extend the curriculum of all computer-related learning
experiences to include a study of computer ethics and social
impact, educational technologies are changing and the
teaching/learning environments are being reformed repeatedly.
The most successful teacher is frequently the one that has
the best access to background resources and, in the case of
ethics and social impact, keeps up-to-date on contemporary
issues. Textbooks can provide the core resource for a course,
but current topics require an on-line reporter, analyst, and
librarian to add new materials as they become available. As
new topics arise (such as the repeated Congressional attempts
to develop a Computer Decency Act and the challenges to
freedom of expression) they initially receive a great deal of
attention in the press and frequently corresponding
commentary in newsgroups, but there is rarely a responsible
observer who will maintain a on-going summary of the status
of the incident and ultimately to produce a closure
statement. Even in cases where there is a definitive end to
the event, such as the resolution of a dispute through the US
Supreme Court, the story of the development of the outcome is
an important part of the understanding needed in the study of
ethics and social impact. While threads in newsgroups collect
the commentaries into a single line, the analysis and
evaluation of arguments and situations is necessary to create
a learning environment regarding the subject. The fluidity of
the topics in ethical standards and social impact in
computing creates an opportunity where students can use
unbounded collections of reports to develop their own
analytical, evaluative, and presentation skills.
Incorporating resources into meaningful learning
experiences and developing active learning scenarios by which
students can be involved in their learning opportunities is a
process that has not been a part of the training of most
Computer Science professors. The newcomer's major expectation
is that given knowledge of the topic, their transformation to
teacher from learner is straightforward. This itself is a
compliment to their teacher who did not over-emphasize the
teaching methodology to the detriment of the learning
experience. Consequently in providing a topical resource
today there is a distinct need to go beyond the provision of
a knowledge base for information identification and
coalescence, so as to provide an appropriate means for the
disseminating that information. The system must be able to
support the "traditional" lecture class, through distance
learning presentations, to self-learning situations. A
knowledge of computer ethics and social impact is an
important subject for study in disciplines beyond Computer
Science since the computer has entered into the toolbox of
most professionals. The existence of a source of classroom
materials and information related to computer usage will
assist in spreading the word that there are standards for the
use of computers and the expectations of clients who are
served by computer systems.
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The Initial Work
Starting in 1994 the Department of Computer Science at
Virginia Tech undertook a National Science Foundation project
in Educational Infrastructure (EI) to investigate the
application of digital libraries to Computer Science
education. This project, which completed its term in 1997,
commenced its work contemporaneously with the "opening" of
the World Wide Web and quickly turned its attention to the
use of the Web as the delivery mechanism for digital
libraries. Since that time the principal investigators and
associated research assistants have applied digital library
and Web technology to the presentation of course materials
for 75% of the courses in the curriculum of Computer Science
majors at Virginia Teach. The work moved from the use of a
passive system to provide an alternative means to paper
hand-outs, to a system with much greater interactivity.
Initially this involved the integration of World Wide Web
presentations with Internet tools, and expanded to take
advantage of the CGI and form capabilities of second
generation Web browsers (using PERL and C++), and later to
Web Applets implemented in Javascript and Java. Among the
tools developed and given limited application were an on-line
testing mechanism and an on-line debate systemize front page
is shown in the next figure.
Starting in Fall 1994, a digital library in support of a
junior-level major's course entitled "Professionalism in
Computing" was developed and used as the vehicle for a number
of experiments in the use of the Web for course support. This
development continued throughout the term of the NSF project,
eventually resulting in a collection of over 3000 Web pages.
The collection is organized into a number of directories and
into two major sections corresponding to topics of general
interest and those specific to Virginia Tech. From the
beginning, the applicability of the resource to a variety of
environments was of paramount importance. The NSF project
involved three institutions who expected to benefit from the
results, and it was realized that it would not always be the
same faculty member at each institution who would have the
responsibility of managing the course. Moreover it was
recognized that the number of topics to be covered in class
could only be a subset of the topics available. A more
complete coverage of the topic then required that not only
could the course manager select those subjects that are to be
used in face-to-face encounters, but those same resources
could be used as the crux of (say) take-home assignments or
on-line discussions.
From the beginning it was expected that these materials
would be used by different faculty at Virginia Tech who would
put their own "twist" on the course. No matter how good the
textbook, how extensive the resources, how detailed the
notes, every faculty member has their own way of presenting
materials, adding their own imprimatur and incorporating
their own experiences. It was important therefore to
modularize the digital library so as to allow each teacher to
organize the materials according to their own desires.
However, it was realized as the library developed that in
moving from a lecture presentation mode of learning to a
self-paced, Web-based learning environment, the peculiar
influence of the librarian/Webmaster diminishes and the needs
of the learner could be fulfilled better with a less
structured strategy. This approach also has the advantage
that, by eliminating a fixed structure, the content can be
readily updated as new problems arise, new laws are
promulgated, precedents are established in court cases, or
international diversity is recognized. On the other hand,
within each module there is structure in the form of a sample
class outline, a set of class notes, a bibliography, and a
collection of in-class projects.
The content modules (or directories) related to the social
impact and ethics course currently cover the following
topics:
Ethical Issues:
- Campus Ethics
- Community Values
- Computer Crime
- Computer Ethics
- Hacking and Security
- Social Impact
- Computer Ethics and Social Impact in K-12
Education*
- World Codes
Social Issues:
- Censorship
- Disabilities
- Freedom of Speech
- Green Machines
- Privacy
- Professional Topics:
- Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks, Intellectual
Property
- Discrimination and Harassment
- Fraud and Dishonesty in Business
- Liabilities
- Licensing of Programmers and Software Engineers
- Netiquette
- Professional Responsibilities
- Personal Relationships
- Safety Critical Systems
- Viruses
- Whistle Blowing*
- Workplace Issues*
- The Millennium Problem (Y2K)
- History of Computing
Each module is currently organized to include seven major
files composing the nub of a learning experience:
- class.html: the introduction, giving the goals and
objectives of the class, links and references to basic
readings, and a link to a set of class notes
- notes.html: the class notes in a form that can be used
for overheads for a lecture or as a set of notes for
student self-paced learning.
- bibliography.html: a bibliography relevant to the topic
especially emphasizing links to on-line resources so as to
provide additional reading materials in support of the
class. As far as possible, the majority of the on-line
references in this file are contained in the same directory
as the bibliography, though copyright restrictions have
limited the accessibility of some material. Links are also
included to items stored in the digital libraries developed
through the ENVISION and SUCCEED projects that contain many
articles originating in the journals and magazines of
professional organizations.
- projects.html: a collection of in-class projects. Some
require groups of participants to review the pertinent
materials and then prepare a class presentation on some
particular aspect of the topic, while others are active
learning projects, including those from the USF workshop
(see a later description of the workshop).
- scenarios.html: a collection of synthetic and real-life
scenarios for use in in-class discussions or for use in the
debate system.
- examinations.html: examination questions. This section
is being modified into an on-line self-testing area, with a
view of using it as a means of providing self-testing for
learners, and eventually as a means of managing learning
progression through modular testing.
- current.html: the current topics area is maintained as
an attempt to keep up-to-date in the area of concern. This
area provides an opportunity for students to be involved in
the maintenance of the site by providing links and reports.
In fact, our management of the course provides
opportunities in each assignment for the expansion of the
site through student contributions.
A special directory that is a part of this library is a
collection of Codes of Practice, Ethics, or Conduct that is
maintained on behalf of the International Federation for
Information Processing (IFIP) Technical Committee on the
Social Impact of the Computer (TC-9).This collection of codes
was originally developed as a part of an international effort
to develop a common code of ethics for national computer
societies. While that effort did not result in a common code,
the collection of codes forms a valuable source of materials
for the comparative study of national attitudes towards the
use of computers. The collection has been extended to include
the codes of many other non-computer related professional
organizations. Also included is the "Toronto Resolution", a
guideline for the development of codes of ethics developed in
1992 by an interdisciplinary meeting of scientists and
professionals. This page is credited with assisting the
Philippine Computer Society to develop a code for their
membership. The collection can also be used by students to
study existing codes and their application to ethical
situations. Recent additions have included the "Hacker's Code
of Ethics" developed by Steven Levy, Gene Autry's Cowboy
Code, and a growing collection of codes of appropriate
computer usage from universities, colleges, and public
schools.
The "institution-specific" section of the Web site
incorporates not only administrative materials such as the
university required syllabus, grading policies, and course
policies, but also topics that are peculiar to the Virginia
Tech curriculum requirements. Two subjects that are regarded
as peculiar are the portions of the course on careers and the
history of computing. The directory on "careers" prepares
students for their senior year of interviewing and career
decision making. It involves support for students in
preparing their resum&#eacute;s, writing cover letters,
interviewing and reviewing employment contracts. The history
web site has taken on a life of its own and now gets the
greatest number of hits per month of any other collection of
course materials in the department .Part of this success is
attributable to the growing interest in the subject since the
50th anniversary of the computer got a great deal of
attention in 1996, and as the professional societies
recognized their own roots. Other directories in this section
concentrate on writing and presentation competencies that are
part of the skills practiced in the Virginia Tech version of
this course. It was envisaged that this "front end" could be
replaced by other teachers from within the institution to
organize the course to match their own teaching style.
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Collaborative
Development
The general interest section of the digital library has
been expanded by collaboration with faculty at several other
institutions. From Spring 1995 a collaborative arrangement
with the MIT Computer Science Laboratory has allowed the two
institutions to share resources, some of it in the form of
links from the general interest section to pages stored at
MIT and the mirroring of some pages so as to ensure the
preservation of the materials in one place. An agreement with
Florida Atlantic University provides a directory on
"Netiquette" to both institutions. In Fall 1996 the IEEE
Computer Society Press published Ethics and Computing by
Kevin Bowyer of the University of South Florida (USF), the
first comprehensive textbook that matched the goals and
syllabus of the Web materials developed within the EI
project. It was decided to make some minor modifications to
the general interest directories and to collaborate with
Prof. Bowyer in using the Web as support for the textbook.
The class notes on the Y2K problem were provided by Cmdr.
Michael J. Holden at the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey, California. As part of a 1998 NSF-funded summer
workshop at the University of South Florida under the
direction of Kevin Bowyer, twenty colleagues were recruited
as collaborators in the development of active learning
scenarios in support of the individual topics. The primary
repository of this collection is located at USF ; the
individual scenarios are linked from the projects.html pages
in the Virginia Tech library.
In the Spring semesters of 1995 and 1996 the technique of
developing individualized 'front ends' was used by different
faculty within the Virginia Tech Department of Computer
Science to organize their classes. In Fall 1996 the course
materials availability was extended to two other institutions
who created front ends in their local server with links to
the directories in the general interest section stored at
Virginia Tech. Norfolk State University (Virginia), a partner
in the NSF project, managed a seminar course with 20
participants which used the directories , and Heritage
College (State of Washington) involved 15 students in a
self-paced course .Both institutions reported a favorable
response from their students. At Heritage College the entire
Computer Science program is populated by a single full-time
faculty member and three adjuncts who simply did not have the
time or resources to offer a course in computer ethics and
social impact. Using the materials as a Web-based learning
medium, the course provided the first exposure to the topic
for students in an environment where the resources are not
sufficient to support a faculty member with the necessary
expertise.
The goals for the inclusion of two other institutions in
the use of the materials were twofold:(1) evaluate the
ability of other faculty and students to assimilate the
course library, and (2) expand the on-line debate population.
On the latter point, it was recognized that the student
population at Virginia Tech is primarily white and
conservative. Norfolk State University is a traditional black
institution in Tidewater Virginia serving an urban community
of students with a very different social background from
those at Virginia Tech. Heritage College is a unique liberal
arts college located where no other four-year college exists.
Fifty percent of the college's undergraduate students are
either Native American or Hispanic Americans. Eighty-five
percent are the first persons in their families to attend
college and sixty percent live below the poverty level. Many
Heritage students are farm workers and/or single mothers;
women make up 70 percent of the undergraduate student
body.
Each institution used the course library in a different
manner. While Virginia Tech had moved to a Web-based course
style using classrooms with Computer Assisted Teaching
Systems (CATs), Norfolk State and Heritage used a seminar
format in which students studied topics using the Web-based
materials (in an order of their own choosing). These groups
met once a week with a faculty member to discuss their
findings. An attempt was made to involve the three groups of
(roughly 100) students in joint on-line debates (see the next
section), with the hope that these three disparate
populations would come down on different sides of certain
issues. Three debate topics were chosen for these joint
debates dealing with current issues in computing: a case of
the appropriateness of minority representation on the Board
of Directors of a major computer corporation (based on actual
correspondence between the company's President and a
stockholder, with permission of both parties), cryptography
and the clipper chip, and a charge of plagiarism against an
unnamed student who copied the format and background of
another student in preparing a home page. While the debate
topics were well covered, the differences in student
backgrounds did not emerge as vividly as expected. This may
be partially the result of a more restricted access to
terminals at Norfolk State and Heritage than is common at
Virginia Tech. It is hoped that through this project, this
experiment can be repeated with improved access
facilities.
In evaluating their involvement Richard Barnhart of
Heritage College reported:
"It was interesting over the course of a couple of weeks
to see the class's attitudes changing over the
plagiarism/copyright/"look and feel" question. Their initial
reaction was "get a life". They came to understand that there
are many such issues that they will face, especially since
most of them will be "the" computer person for some company
or department, and that people will have questions and issues
come up constantly. These students very frequently will have
network privileges into all parts of the corporation; many of
them had never thought of this in the context of ethics.
Perhaps we could use your model and do something more
"local"; or maybe it's feasible for Tech to handle it. As you
probably realize, it's a long ways between places out here,
even in Washington which is the smallest of the Western
states. It's 4 1/2 hours to Whitworth (in Spokane), 3 1/2
hours to George Fox (in Oregon), 3 1/2 hours to any
Seattle/Tacoma schools, etc. There are dozens of small
colleges that could benefit from an interchange of
ideas."
Unsolicited responses were received from other
institutions who had used the materials but had not
'registered' with us as participants in the experiment.
Typical of these (and most interesting) is the comment from
the United Arab Emirates : 'just a quick note to say that I
really have enjoyed visiting your site, and in particular
reading the student responses to your ethical dilemmas. I am
trying to build a similar (if lower level) course on computer
ethics for some Higher Diploma Information Administration
students in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and think that
your idea of creating an on-line discussion group is an
excellent way of making the students come to grips with
ethical dilemmas in a way which extends far beyond a listing
of the 10 commandments... This should be interesting as my
students are all women, have very strict Muslim social codes
and have in many cases have led very sheltered lives.' During
the 1997 Spring semester the library was used by a University
Honors Colloquium on 'internet Issues' organized by a faculty
member from the Department of Chemistry, and since Spring
1998 it has been a resource for a Science and Technology
Studies (STS) course entitled "Computerization, Self, and
Society."
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Active Learning
As noted above the primary impetus for the inclusion of
active learning activities within the site came from the NSF
sponsored workshop at the University of South Florida. A
major portion of that workshop was spent in the development
of projects that could be used in Computer Science courses.
The work on developing activities has continued and in
particular has been incorporated into the lesson plans for
most topics. The projects.html page of most directories now
contains back links to the USF compendium as well as
additional local developments.
In general our experience shows that it is essential that
students have a pre-class activity prior to a class that will
involve active learning so that they are ready to
participate. Attempting to not only provide the fundamentals
of the subject and motivate participants to be involved in an
active learning experience followed by a summary and
assessment simply does not fit into a single class period. On
the other hand, the pre-class activity imbues a commitment on
the part of the students to learn more about the topic and to
be more involved in the activity.
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Collaborative
Learning and Managed Discussion
The development of a digital library to support teaching
and learning in computer ethics and the social impact of a
computer through the earlier NSF grant has now reached the
point where it is moving from a primarily passive system to a
much more interactive arrangement. Initially interaction was
provided through the development of an on-line debate system
modeled after the CERN product WIT. Prior to the development
of Web-based resources, this course had used an 'Oxford
Union' style debating system to discuss ethical scenarios and
current issues. With restricted class time, this provided the
opportunity for only a limited number of students to
participate, and much of the discussion relied on spur of the
moment reactions in order to contribute to the argument. A
survey of student participation revealed that the debates
were dominated by extroverted white males while more
thoughtful women, and students whose first language was not
English, were at a considerable disadvantage. By putting the
debate on-line and allowing several days for asynchronous
participation, it was immediately apparent that there was a
wider diversity of opinion and more reasoned contributions.
The latter benefit was partially instigated by the
requirement that the price of participation was the inclusion
in each contribution of either a (preferably Web-based)
reference or a conjunction of the argument with an ethical
principle. Moreover 'me-too' statements were outlawed and
negative contentions were required to be accompanied by a
rationale. Initially the debate system was organized as four
tree structured threads, the initial node of each branch
being one of four primary position statements developed by
the student-led debate management team, followed by the point
and counterpoint statements from the class participants. As
other courses began to use the system as a collaborative
development methodology, it was modified to permit a number
of different arrangements basically varying from the strict
discipline of the debates to the 'free-for-all' of a chat
room. The system has also been used by other courses as a
collaborative development tool, and in other situations as a
decision-making vehicle. A typical debate tree is shown
above.
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The Next Step
Building on the digital library, the next step was to
extend the learning environment to take advantage of the
emerging interactive facilities of the World Wide Web and
their supporting browsers to create a Web-based learning
facility. The digital library was already modularized to give
emphasis to specific topics, and this was further subdivided
in order to focus a learner's attention to threads of
interest or to localize current issues during their
development phase. The emerging system will eventually
incorporate self-paced learning modules, on-line
self-evaluation, on-line testing, discussion groups, debate
systems, mechanisms for on-line updating and extension of
modules, mechanisms to build study threads through the
libraries of materials, topical issues forums, and survey
mechanisms.
Web-based learning is a growing phenomenon that has yet to
reach its full capability. Much has been made of the Web
simply as a passive searchable resource, and our experience
already records that many learning opportunities have been
satisfied through this mechanism, but data 'mining' is truly
only a precursor of data analysis and refinement. Substantive
learning can only be achieved through the management of data
acquisition, and the collaborative development and
reinforcement of concepts. The general tenets of Computer
Aided Instruction (CAI) can now be implemented in a Web-based
learning environment built and maintained on the basis of a
digital library. An important component of the social impact
and ethics learning environment is the statistical survey
generation and polling system. Within the topic of social
impact and ethics, surveys can be used to examine public and
changing attitudes toward certain issues. For example, one
class undertook to examine student attitudes towards the 125
year-old University honor system. To the astonishment of the
class it was revealed that over 50% of their colleagues had
cheated on examinations or tests, and the majority agreed
that they would not turn in colleagues whom they discovered
to be cheating. These results were later confirmed in a
national study by the Josephson Institute. The recent
experiences of the students at Smoky Hill School in Aurora,
Colorado, who implemented a survey system as part of their
CyberDome Web pages, were positive. While they chose to
restrict their surveys to members of the school system, the
responses were very revealing of attitudes and opinions of
the peers. One use of the polling system has been to survey
the opinions of the participants to be used in a subsequent
class. For example, the module on 'community Values' includes
a pre-class activity on values that is then used for
discussion later. The mechanism can also be used as a course
or module pre-test for assessment purposes.
A major part of the assembled materials in each directory
is a collection of scenarios or cases that pertain to the
topic. These comprise two forms of case: an actual case
history or a synthetic scenario. An actual scenario in the
collection is the article on the Therac 25 incident which has
been used as a case study for several years. Other cases
include (1) the story of PGP (Pretty Good Protection)
developed by Philip Zimmerman and the subsequent problems
with the classification of the encryption system as an
'armament' and the consequential limitation of its
exportation through the Internet, (2) the case of a student
at the University of Michigan who published a poem in a
newsgroup that visualized violent acts against a named
student in one of his classes, and (3) the case of Bob Morris
who inserted a worm into the Internet and caused the
overloading of a large number of UNIX servers.
Such cases are particularly important since they show
learners that social impact and ethics is not simply a
subject of academic interest but rather is part of the daily
life of computing. Conversely the synthetic cases are
designed to provide 'food-for-thought' in discussion groups
and are generally designed to present two reasonable diverse
viewpoints. The inclusion of such case reports in the library
is an important element of the collection project. From these
will come case studies developed by the participants, and
retained in the library for other students to review and
build upon. In fact, the retention of student contributions
in the library is an integral part of this project. This
helps not only in expanding the content but also creates a
model for others to emulate in their own research, study and
writing.
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Future Developments
At this time the organization of the ancillary articles in
the directories is essentially planar, the only structure
coming from the links in the basic readings list and the
bibliography. Our experience in building a Virtual Computer
Museum shows that it is possible to create on-line threads or
routes through the material through the use of keywords and
codes that provide attribute information regarding the
content of the articles. These mechanisms will be installed
as a part of the work of the next stage through the use of
Applets that may interlink pages (and segments thereof), and
providing each page with the ability to have their
characteristics modified during their lifetime. This
mechanism can also be used to rank articles in the order of
their frequency of usage or by other criteria that can be
determined by the user , by the learner or the learning
manager. This information will be important in maintaining
the course materials and in assessing the effectiveness of
the thread systems.
Through the mechanisms for teachers and learners to
develop their own 'front ends' to the library of materials,
and means to navigate the collected items in different
manners, several styles of presentation are possible:
- Self-paced, "Keller" plan learning
- In-class active learning projects
- Seminars
- Conventional lecture plans
- Web-based learning
- Distributed learning (in several courses)
- Distance learning
- Collaborative learning
- Collaborative development
Other institutions are invited to use the present digital
library in different manners, to test the adaptability of
system. To ensure that front ends are developed correctly, it
will be necessary to provide Web page authoring facilities
that will ensure that all the appropriate pages in the
administration section are modified.
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Outcomes
As a result of this project the Computer Science
curriculum across the US, and possibly across many other
countries, can be refined and improved by the availability of
a central repository and directory of learning materials that
will support the efforts of faculty in Computer Science who
are not primarily trained in ethics and social impact. In
turn this will lead to the greater infusion of the topics
into the curriculum of Computer Science programs. Graduates
of Computer Science programs will have a deeper understanding
of their responsibilities and liabilities, and during their
academic career will be more aware of the standards that
should guide their behavior. It has been our experience,
reflected in the assessment from Heritage College, that many
students have a 'oh yeah!' encounter during this class. At
Virginia Tech, where a large proportion of students are
involved in cooperative education, it is not uncommon for
students to reflect on their industrial activities and
realize that already they have been put into unethical
situations because of their lack of understanding of proper
procedures and codes of conduct.
The Computer Science curriculum, apart from the single
requirement for exposure to social impact and ethics,
concentrates on technical learning based on formal logic,
mathematical theory and statistics. Decision making in the
technological arena is based on well established data, and so
for the Computer Science major analytical reasoning in a more
subjective discipline occurs only in this one course. As an
outcome of this learning experience, provided that there is
more to the learning than just data collection, Computer
Science majors can further expand their abilities in
analytical reasoning and evaluation of arguments. The on-line
debate system formalizes argumentation and reasoning to a
greater degree and is more effective as a learning tool than
the 'seat-of-the-pants' and 'instant-reaction' class
discussion. Especially for Computer Science and Computer
Engineering majors who are more fluent on the Internet than
they are face-to-face, this provides an outlet that they
would not have otherwise. For students who are participating
in a self-paced or distance-learning experience, their
involvement in on-line debates must be an important part of
their learning. For this reason, the administration of the
site must include on-going debates or discussion groups to
accommodate individual learners who are not necessarily a
part of a larger class. Similarly debates among students
hosted in several different institutions, such as the
community of colleges suggested by Heritage College, can be
organized through the on-line debate systems. No matter how
learned the teacher of a course or the leader of a seminar,
the involvement of students in a debate that includes
students from other institutions will assist in widening
their multicultural viewpoint.
Some institutions choose to distribute the study of social
impact and ethics across several courses, relating the
presentations to the topics within technical courses. A
discussion of Netiquette, for example, is perhaps best
introduced at the time that students are first introduced to
Internet communication through e-mail, newsgroups, and
LISTSERVÆ systems. Security, hacking and viruses are
pertinent to the study of operating systems, while
intellectual property is appropriate to programming when
students first produce objects that are their personal
property. There is no reason why this approach to studying
the social impact and ethics cannot benefit from the
centralized digital library. For example, a course entitled
'The Introduction to Computer Science', commonly called CS1
after the designation of the course in the ACM/IEEE-Computer
Society curriculum, in a Web-based environment may include
links to certain elements of social impact and ethics
Web-sites without passing through the front ends expected of
comprehensive courses. Already this approach is in use
building Web-sites for courses which have other courses as
prerequisites. Reminding students of the knowledge presumed
in the second course by linking back to the prerequisite
course is an excellent means of forming an educational
continuum unbounded by semesters and time.
For some years this author has pushed for the inclusion of
ethical considerations and exposure in pre-college
institutions. We have likened computer education to sex
education and driver education; each introduce students to
techniques and equipment. In sex education and driver
education the teachers accept that there is more to learning
the subject that simply learning the theory and mechanics;
both require the discussion of moral and ethical issues.
Computer education is no different. Like the faculty of
college Computer Science departments, teachers in public
schools are equally unprepared to teach the social and
ethical dimensions of computing. In the school system, the
case study approach is most effective. The availability of
scenarios and cases on the Web-site especially when supported
by analyses and commentaries will assist in getting the
message about the appropriate uses of computers to students
during their early years of using computers at the time when
their concepts about computers are being formed.
The tools necessary to effectively support this project
also have effective applications in other areas, such as
chemistry, biology, or engineering. On the one side this
model has application in the development of similar sites
relating to the social impact and ethics in other
disciplines. The tools will have application in the
development of Web-sites for topics other than social impact
and ethics.
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Dissemination
In the summer of 1997 the current Educational
Infrastructure grant closed its term with the organization of
a workshop for faculty interested in Web-based learning
techniques in which the use of the social impact and ethics
system were presented. In 1998 the USF workshop provided
another opportunity to advertise the availability of the Web
site and to recruit additional contributors.
From one point of view it is possible to argue that the
use of the Web for the presentation of course materials on
social impact and ethics is an automatic means of
dissemination. Those interested will find their way to the
site. However, the mere existence of a site on the Web does
not means that it is necessarily used appropriately. For the
most part the World Wide Web is a passive medium whereas what
is needed here is a pro-active approach to dissemination.
Even within a single course it is necessary to use other
means of communications than just the Web. For example, we
started with the concept that changes and modifications to
the Web pages could be announced most easily by the
introduction of a special Announcements page. While this is
useful as a tracking device for those who are not
'registered' to use the materials, the fundamental passive
nature of the Web must be supplemented by the use of more
pro-active e-mail, LISTSERVÆ, or newsgroup
communications.
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Long-Time Support
Following the completion of this project, it is hoped that
Virginia Tech and other participating institutions should be
ready to provide a Webmaster for the Web-pages and the
maintenance of the supporting system. The faculty involved in
teaching and managing courses based on the collection of
materials and tools should be expected to continue to
contribute to the collection and to continue to develop
learning modules. It is intended that the course materials
will be available at several mirror sites and thus will
provide a distributed long-lasting archive. The history pages
are already the subject of a potential collaboration with a
long-established distance learning organization.
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Conclusions
A major criticism of our approach to teaching ethics and
social impact in a single course is that this has also become
the "dumping ground" for other subjects that do not
necessarily fit easily into other courses. Writing and oral
communication were an early addition, and today we find
ourselves being asked to be the departmental flagship for the
issues of diversity and internationalism. With these concerns
and ever increasing enrollments, the time pressures are
becoming difficult to manage. University administrations seem
to believe that by using a web-based approach the load on the
faculty decreases and the bandwidth of the communication
channel broadens so as to be able to involve more students
with fewer resources. This is simply not the case. The
initial development took over 2000 man-hours to create a
passive environment. At least another 2000 hours have been
spent on inserting a small measure of interaction, and
several hours each day are spent in keeping up with current
events.
Web-based learning systems have the capability of being
more than simply a passive information system through which
students browse randomly to locate useful data. The social
impact and ethics courseware that was developed at Virginia
Tech as a digital library is now moving towards a more
interactive system that can be used in a variety of
teaching/learning environments to the benefit of both the
teacher and the student. As a topic that is still emerging as
an object of study in universities and colleges, replete with
developing legal precedents and new instances of challenge
from a highly innovative sub-culture of hackers, social
impact and computer ethics cannot be solely encapsulated in a
paper medium. A "living" medium of delivery is essential.
This paper is a progress report on the road from an almost
obsolete technology of 1993 to the learning environment of
the 21st century. What we accomplish here will be a model for
other university courses, and eventually for classes at other
levels. The study of the social impact of the computer and
computer ethics should not be limited to post-secondary
computer education, but should be available to all users of
computers. Through this system perhaps we can find ways to
incorporate elements of computer ethics into many
courses.
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References
- Fano, R. M. 1967. 'The Computer Utility and the
Community', 1967 IEEE International Convention Record, Part
12, pp. 30-34.
- Gotlieb, C.C., and A. Borodin. 1973. Social Issues in
Computing, Academic Press, New York.
- Laughlin, Stuart C. 1996. The Design and Use of
Internet-Mediated Communication , Applications in
Education: An Ethnographic Study, doctoral dissertation,
Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech.
- Lee, J.A.N. 1997. 'Professionalism in Computing: A
Web-Based Learning System', Selected Papers from the Eighth
National Conference on College Teaching and Learning,
Florida Community College at Jacksonville.
- Lee, J.A.N.,E.A. Fox, N.D. Barnette, C.A. Shaffer, L.
Heath, W. Wake, L.T. Nowell, D. Hix, and H.R. Hartson.
1995. 'Progress in Interactive Learning with a Digital
Library in Computer Science', Invited paper, Proc. ED-MEDIA
95, World Conference on Educational Multimedia and
Hypermedia, Graz, Austria, June 17-21, 1995, pp. 7-12.
- Levy, Steven. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution, Doubleday Press, 1984.\
- Licklider, J.C.R. March 1960. "Man-Computer Symbiosis",
IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume
HFE-1, pages 4-11.
- Luotonen, A. 1994. 'World Wide Web Interactive Talk
(WIT)', http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/WIT/User.
(last accessed 1996).
- Project Envision Final Report, NSF Grant IRI-9116991,
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/papers/ENVreport/final.html,
15 October 1995.
- Project SUCCEED, http://succeed.engr.vt.edu/index.html, 28
January,1996.
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Author
information:
J.A.N. Lee is a member of the faculty of the Department of
Computer Science at Virginia Tech, and a collaborator in the
Center for the Study of Science in Society. He has served as
the Vice President of both the Association for Computing
Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society. Most recently he
served as the secretary of the IFIP Technical Committee 9.
The Social Impact of the Computer. The author is cooperating
with the Virginia Department of Education to modify the K-12
'Standards of Learning' in computers and technology to
incorporate an ethics and social impact module.
E-mail: janlee@cs.vt.edu ; URL: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~janlee
John A. Lee
Department of Computer Science
and Center for the Study of Science in Society
Virginia Tech Blacksburg VA
24061-0106