Teaching Social Issues

Section II: Challenges and Ideas

Challenge 3: How can I involve students in learning?

Once we have decided what we want the students to do in the course, we can begin to select an appropriate set of materials. The actual teaching methods that we use (Challenge 4) are not unique to social issues of computing. But there is a special set of issues to consider first--issues which are content-specific to this type of course.

One of our key focal points, for example, is on social behavior of people who develop and use computer systems. For most students, social behavior is much more complex than they initially imagine it to be. Few if any of them will have the specialized academic background needed to examine it carefully, and many will assume that intuition alone will provide them with sufficient understanding of social issues. Therefore, a course in social issues should be carefully designed to meet students where they are at the beginning--to accommodate their motivations, backgrounds, and interests.

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL MOTIVATION

Both of our undergraduate courses are required for information and computer science majors, although other students may (and many do) take them as an elective. The motivations of the two groups may differ--some of the former just "filling a square" as quickly and painlessly as they can, and some of the latter truly curious about the topic. Some may come to the class with a high level of interest; others may see the topic as irrelevant or, at best, as a sort of personal hobby. In a required course, a few students may not even believe in the legitimacy of the topic and really don't want to be studying it.

The majority probably fall somewhere in between these extremes. But any of them may have a starting barrier to involvement and learning: they may view the topic as one not subject to serious inquiry, or not directly applicable to their personal or professional life.

One of our more memorable students posted a note to the class electronic bulletin board which inquired: "Why do I have to take this class ... all I want to do is write computer programs?" It is up to us to convince this student--and others less outspoken--that those computer programs may affect someone else's working life (for good or bad), may provide access (or barriers) to the handicapped, and may even control the life (or death) of medical patients, airline passengers, and automobile drivers. We want students to develop a positive sense of responsibility for their work ( Ladd, 1991), especially in safety-critical settings such as these.

Most students care about grades, and some of them may be "motivated" only to get a good grade in the course. We'd like for them to go beyond this, even though they may have been "trained" throughout their academic career to focus on grades. Grades, for students, are probably analogous to pay for employees, in the management theory of Frederick Hertzberg. Bad pay (grades) may demotivate employees (students), but good pay (grades) alone does not guarantee the best job performance (learning). Students vary in how much effort they will expend to achieve more than their personal minimum acceptable grade for a course.

Our objective, then, is to design a course--select topics, materials, and activities--which will develop the students' internal motivation toward the course. At the minimum, we want to reach them in a way that will resonate with their own interests. At best, we want each student to have a sense of discovery--to find a new and exciting way of understanding computerization in their personal and professional lives.

CHOOSING TOPICS AND MATERIALS

There is a wide range of potential topics for a course in social issues of computing. We introduced some of these in Challenge 2, from the outline of C&C2--including mental models, forms of discourse, economic and organizational dimensions, worklife, electronic communities, privacy, safety, ethics, and professionalism. There are more: computers in education, gender issues in computerization, computers as democratizers, and so on. No one source could include them all.

There is also a wide range of materials from which to choose:

Anthologies

We emphasize C&C2 because its unique emphasis on controversy and social choices is designed (obviously) to support our objectives. An anthology such as this, or the one by Huff and Finholt (1995), provides a broad spectrum of professional and scholarly articles that examine key social and ethical aspects of computerization.

Texts

Some instructors such as Oz (1994), Johnson (1994), and Rosenberg (1992) have written books designed to serve as the primary text for a course in social issues of computing. Not strictly a text, but still developed primarily for computing and society courses, is the work by Forrester and Morrison (1992).

Specific-topic books

A group of these, especially in paperback edition, might form the core reading material for a course--or they could be used to provide depth or supplementary material on key course themes. Examples include risks of computing (Neumann, 1994), worklife (Zuboff, 1988), electronic communities (Sproull & Keisler, 1991), privacy (Rothfeder, 1992), "hacking" (Stoll, 1990), or a skeptical view of the "information superhighway" (Stoll, 1995). See the bibliographies in C&C2 for additional sources.

Scholarly articles

Many of these can be found simply by following the reference lists from articles in certain anthologies such as C&C2 or Huff & Finholt. Scholarly articles can be especially demanding because they make research methods explicit--most computer science and MBA students haven't been trained to understand them. But their importance is to show students that these topics are subject to serious inquiry--and how serious scholars examine them.

Professional articles

Students will encounter these in their work environment, and we'd like them to be able to understand this kind of literature. A continuing challenge for us is keeping our materials up-to-date: books take a long time to publish, and a topic this dynamic doesn't wait for a new edition. So we add current articles from journals such as Communications of the ACM or Harvard Business Review.

Popular media

We sometimes include popular articles in the class reading list, but we are more likely to just bring in topical articles when we see them. We also encourage students to do the same. They should easily find material related to the course in major national daily newspapers (especially the business section), magazines such as Time and Newsweek, specialized publications such as Business Week and the computer press (PC Magazine, MacWorld, etc.), and even on television and radio. A valuable use of these sources is to contrast their often ebullient, sales-oriented images of computerization with the more careful analyses of the academic journals. (A sample exercise is in Section II.) They also can supplement the intellectual core of the course by adding vividness in an accessibly-written way that also intersects the students' life experiences.

Selecting readings

None of the books on social issues--not even C&C2--can be followed step-by-step like a traditional textbook. You can select readings that meet the students "where they are," readings that purposely challenge them, or--perhaps best--some combination of these. Issues to consider include:

Students' backgrounds

An evening working-adult-oriented course can assume an understanding of worklife, for example, that a daytime undergraduate course cannot. However, the adult student may have multiple responsibilities--conflicting with their studies--and a more practical (or less scholarly) orientation than the "traditional" student.

Students' interests

Information and computer science majors are likely to be responsive to technical details that would instantly alienate many business majors--and business majors will appreciate productivity issues that computer scientists haven't heard of.

Academic level of the course

Graduate students should be able to understand much more scholarly language and rigorous analyses than can upper-division undergraduates. Lower-division undergraduates may need material which rests solely on a K-12 academic background plus (possibly) some limited experience with personal computers. The academic culture of each university will also vary; some may place greater emphasis on scholarly readings, others on more practice-oriented ones.

Sponsoring department

Information and computer science, management, sociology, philosophy, and others will prefer some materials oriented toward their own disciplines. But interdisciplinary material will still be needed--see Challenge 5.

Selecting topics

We try to select topics that our students can use in their own personal and professional lives. We also try to sequence these topics to foreground those that are most likely to be familiar, interesting--and involving--to the students in a particular class. As in any other course, we try to work from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

Philosophy

In a philosophy department, for example, a good starting point might be normative ethical theories. In an information/computer science department (our courses), these are best placed at the end, to summarize and integrate what the students have learned from discussing risks of computing, privacy, and other topics.

Information and Computer science

In an information/computer science department, we start with topics with which students are likely to have some experience--for example, electronic communities (especially for students who are likely to be familiar with email and Internet tools)[1] or risks of computing ("did you know that computers can kill people?"--students might not have thought of this possibility, and it gets their attention).[2]

Business/management

In a business or management department (for example, for MBA students), we might start with the impact of computerization on worklife, organizations, or productivity[3]--and include issues such as employee monitoring and security of commerce over electronic media. In many ways, courses with seemingly traditional titles such as "management information systems" or "systems analysis" can incorporate many of the themes that we include in social issues of computing.

Sample Syllabi

Sample syllabi for a selection of departments, levels, and term lengths are given in the resource list of Section II.

NOTES

1 Many students already enjoy network activities, but they can use the readings and class discussions to see many subtle aspects of group formation and interaction via computer networks.

2 See Jonathan Jacky, "Safety-Critical Computing," in C&C2, for a description of the Therac-25 disaster, which shocks many computer science students at first reading.

3 Sometimes called the "productivity paradox"--see John Leslie King, "Where is the Payoff from Computing?" in C&C2.