Looking at Facebook's perspective - EthicalCS - Day 2

Continuing on what we did yesterday, I had students turn in their research.  Students had a good range of different articles they read from their options.  I tried to give them a mix of topics for different interest areas.  I was concerned they would find the 3 shortest articles and call it a day, but for the most part students seemed to pick questions that interested them.

Here were their choices:

• Facebook Says Social Media Can be Negative for Democracy
• Big data is going to shape our future cities. Will it treat us all equally?
• Can AI solve the internet's fake news problem? A fact-checker investigates.
• He’s Brilliant, She’s Lovely
• Can Computer Programs be Racist and Sexist?
• ‘Body Hacking’ Movement raises questions ahead of moral answers
• Self-driving cars programmed to decide who dies in a crash
• Amazon refusing to hand over data on whether Alexa overheard a murder

Students filled out this reading guide that asked them to raise their own ethical questions from what they read and also think about who was at fault and who had responsibility to build off what we talked about yesterday.

From there, we listened The Daily podcast of the day which reported on an interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. 

It was a nice complement to the previous day's podcast which talked about the Cambridge Analytica side of things more.  

Once again, I created a listening guide to help students stay engaged.  It worked.  It is so clear that you need to put a relevant question that is in the last 15 seconds of what you want students to listen to - as soon as they "get" the last question, they tune out.

One thing I realized is that I listened to these podcasts multiple times to make the reading guide and just to preview them.  Students only heard them once, and while I made the listening guide to help them through the story, it is a complicated story.  At the end of the listening guide, students needed to create a list of "players" or "characters" in this story.  They were eager to put down Mark Zuckerberg, which was fair, but I wanted them to think about who was the individual AT Facebook who actually did something in this story - what types of job titles did they have?

From there we made a character web with how people are connected.  Here was my rough draft.

I wanted student to think about what ethical responsibilities/roles each of these people played.  While I think I talked a bit too much here, I think there would have been an opportunity to have students think about this more themselves.  The tricky thing is that it is a bit of a creative writing exercise - they don't know how companies are typically organized - that there are thousands of departments in Facebook and most likily several of them played a part in this (from sales, to legal, to ad revenue, to the engineers who decide how much data developers have access to... it's a lot).

Finally, I wanted students to see that "using data" has happened forever - in fact, the wise use of data is how Obama was able to put together such amazing campaigns.  They got their data legally, but they used it in similar ways to Cambridge Analyitca.  There is this great MIT Technology Review issue that talks about how big data has "put the soul back into politics" from 2013 after Obama got re-elected.  I showed it to students to A) make the story a bit more balanced, and B) drive home that this has been brewing for a while.  While we were praising big data before, now we are questioning if it is the right thing to do.

On Day 3, I am going to pull away from the data side of ethics and try to put a nice end on the #EthicalCS detour.