Teaching Social Issues: Introduction

Teaching Social Issues of Computing

Introduction

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We enjoy teaching. We especially enjoy teaching about social issues of computing. Rob has been doing this for 25 years at UC Irvine. He's just finished writing and editing a critical anthology of readings about social issues of computing -- for use by students, instructors, scholars, and the interested public. Tom began working in this area in 1987 as Rob's teaching assistant, after retiring from a military career. He's gone on to teach this topic regularly at CSU Long Beach (CSULB) and occasionally at UC Irvine.

It's an exciting and challenging topic. We're writing about it to share our excitement and our experiences (successful and not-so) with others who are teaching -- or who want to teach -- courses in social issues of computing.

Challenges and ideas

The first section of this book is organized around some of the specific teaching challenges that we've faced. For each challenge, we'll discuss both our own ideas and others' ideas that have been helpful. The fact that we've developed many of these ideas collegially doesn't mean that we do everything the same way, as you'll see in the discussion. But we believe that variety is healthy in a book about teaching: better to provide a smorgasbord of ideas from which you can choose, instead of a homogenized "right way" to present the material.

Resources

In the second section, we'll provide resources such as sample syllabi, assignments, and teaching tips. Many of these resources will be focused on Rob's new book: Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices (2nd Edition), published by Academic Press (1995). We'll refer to it here simply as C&C2. But the same teaching strategies, and many of the same assignments, can be used with a wide variety of other reading material.

Your input is important

Whether you're new to this topic or have been teaching it for years, you will probably encounter challenges that we haven't discussed here. You will also have ideas that we haven't thought of or heard about yet. We'd like to include them_both in future printed editions of this book and as resources that we can point to electronically. What we'd really like is to sit down and discuss them with you over a cup of coffee. If that's not possible, then let's discuss them by email, phone, or "snail-mail" (see page ii for addresses). Most of all, we hope that you'll share our excitement with the topic and its challenges.

Acknowledgements

It's a lot easier to stay excited about a topic when people around you are also excited about it, and in this we've been fortunate. As Rob was writing and editing the substance of our course material, Tom was looking for new ways to engage students' interest. De Gallow (of UC Irvine's Instructional Development Services) pointed him to the active and cooperative learning literature for new ways to organize his CSULB class. At the same time, Jonathan Grudin and Mark Ackerman were incorporating new techniques into their own classes at UC Irvine. We've shared ideas regularly, and we're grateful for the opportunity to do so. We're all encouraged by the results so far, but we want to keep improving.

We are especially grateful to a series of Department Chairs who have fostered a learning environment in which students not only master technical skills but also develop a broad appreciation for their responsibilities as practicing professionals: Mike Mahoney and Sandy Cynar at CSULB and Fred Tonge, Tim Standish, Julian Feldman, John King, Lee Osterweil, and Mike Pazzani at UCI.