An EthicalCS Attempt - Day 1

Inspired by this tweet (which, BTW, the whole thread is worth reading)...

I've been wanting to talk to numerous people in this and related fields (eg @lizthegrey, @LeaKissner, @avflox, @anildash, and @amac just to name a handful out of dozens) about this question: Is it time for enforceable ethics in CS?

— (((Yonatan Zunger))) (@yonatanzunger) March 19, 2018

...and by Saber Khan's #EthicalCS chats on Twitter, I decided to take on a "EthicalCS" detour.  I think it ties directly into AP CSP's global impact piece and seems super timely with the Cambridge Analytica thing going on.

My goals were as follows:

• Bring in real-world situations
• Challenge students' assumptions about ethics in computing
• Show how programmers (and others) are responsible for privacy
• Demonstrate trade-offs with technology

To be honest, I could have made this go in 100 different directions.  There are SO MANY connections to be made here.

Big picture, over the course of 3 days, it ended up looking like this:

1. Listsen to a podcast (then discuss)
2. Have students read articles related to ethics in CS
3. Listen to another podcast (then discuss)
4. Watch a video (then discuss)
5. Develop a "Code of Ethics" of Computer Scientists

I have been listening to The Daily podcast and they had an episode about the Cambridge Analyica story that was concise and, I thought, engaging.  Also learning from videos I have shown, I needed to have a way to hold students accountable to listening.  I gave them a "Listening Guide" where I came up with questions which could be directly answered from listening to the podcast.  We did this in class too which helped with actual completion.

SO... here is how it went.

Day 1: Introduce the Ideas of Ethical CS

On day 1 we listened to The Daily podcast from 3/21.  It talks a bit more about the logistics of the story.  Specifically, it covers how the news broke and who the key players are.  Listen to it, if you don't know the story!

I also had students fill out this reading guide (shown below).  The first questions are all directly answerable from the podcast but I also wanted to give students some lingering questions to think about.





I talked a bit about the difference between "fault" and "responsibility" at the beginning of class.  This was actually something that was raised in my church one week and it really resonated with me.  Will Smith also has a bit on it too, but they take it in more of a personal direction, which, while still good, isn't the direction I wanted to take it.  I described it as, if I find a baby in the middle of a street, it is not my fault the baby is there, but it is my responsibility to do something about it.  I suppose if I knew more about laws I could talk about legal fault, but... I don't.  I asked students to keep in mind "Who is at fault and who has responsibility?" in this story.

For the most part the listening went well with the guide.  After it was done, students discussed the last two questions:

• What was Facebook’s “fault” in this story?
• What was/is Facebook’s “responsibility” in this story?

When reading student responses, it was fascinating to see that most students felt like the only thing Facebook did wrong was not tell the public immediately when the learned that someone had this information that shouldn't have that information.  From most students' perspectives, had Facebook just said "hey, this happened" right away, then they would be in the clear. 

This reminds me a lot of student thinking.  "If I am honest about a bad thing I did, I won't have any consequences".  They were applying that same logic to this situation.  I needed to push back more on this idea of what "bad thing" happened. So, I asked, what was "bad" about this story.  Here were their responses in order:

• Not alerting people their data was stolen
• Selling data after it had been used for academic purposes 
• Not being clear about how the data was going to be used
• Playing on people's fears 
• Note: This was an interesting side conversation about would "playing on people's hopes be any better" - we decided no.

So, we were getting closer to some important ideas. 

That took about 30 minutes total and then I had students take a test.

After the test, students had to choose from 8 different CS-ethics-related articles and fill out a short worksheet on them.

NEXT... reviewing what students researched...