Abstract

This report explores the development of interactive, web-based activities in a Computer Science course for majors that meets the requirements of the Computer Science Accreditation Commission (CSAC) for a course in computer ethics and social impact. Starting from a project to develop a digital library to support a long-standing course in "Professionalism in Computing", this web-based version has steadily evolved into a modular resource that permits teachers at other institutions to construct their own versions of an ethics and social impact course. For the past two years the passive nature of the digital library approach has been revised to incorporate active learning concepts. While maintaining the belief that the teaching of ethics and social impact still requires some classroom interaction between participants and collaborative development activities, each topical module has been augmented by on-line active learning plans that involve pre-class, in-class, and post-class projects. The pre-class activities allow participants to gain a basic understanding of the topic prior to the class, to review assigned readings from the library, to surf the web for additional resources, and possibly to participate in an opinion survey that can be used as the basis for an in-class discussion. Post-class projects involve the application of learned concepts to the lives of the participants and the institution. An on-line debate system that emulates an "Oxford Union" style debate, forcing participants to clearly take pro or con positions on arguments, is an integral part of the course, though also available as an independent module. Used asynchronously, the debate system gives the opportunity for discussions to extend beyond the time limit of a class period, can involve several sections of a course, or classes from differing institutions. The threaded structure of the debate system has significant advantages over chat rooms or LISTSERV® discussions.

In 1984 there was considerable concern throughout the computer industry regarding the emergence of a cadre of computer users who saw accessing networks 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 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 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 special topics 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 by 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 concerns of the computing field.

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 support many other educational paradigms, including:

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. As educational technologies change and the teaching/learning environments are reformed repeatedly, the manner in which we use these resources changes. 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.

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. 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. Here we concentrate on active-learning.

Typically active-learning approaches involve mutual learning projects. Karl A, Smith said of the more traditional style of teaching: "When students attend a college class, they typically expect to sit passively and listen to a professor 'profess'; they expect to be evaluated based on their individual course work–exams, papers, and quizzes–and they bring with them a set of norms for interacting with their classmates. Based on their past experiences with school, many students believe that they are in competition with their classmates for scarce resources–good grades" Active learning reverses these roles and attitudes. The responsibility for learning is shared by both the learner and the learning manager.

In support of this distribution, the University of New Hampshire Center for Academic Resources advises: "Active learning means taking responsibility for your learning and developing habits of mind and study strategies that will be

the means for accomplishing your academic goals. Responsibility is the toughest part: know that college expects that you will take charge of your learning -- that you will go to class, do assignments, and embrace confusion and "wrong answers" as opportunities to try again...If it hasn't occurred to you yet, know that from here on in you are THE responsible agent for your learning and life."

To the faculty member the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation suggests that active learning is a methodology that:

The challenge then is to overcome the propensity to easily adapt the web to be a simpler purveyor of reading materials and to develop an interactive learning environment.

Commencing in Fall 1994, a digital library in support of the junior-level major's course entitled "Professionalism in Computing" was developed under NSF support 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 (and still expanding). 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.

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 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 can be fulfilled better with a less structured strategy. A study of ethics has the advantage that to a great extent topics can be covered in any order and, provided that there is a diversity of subjects, it is not disastrous to omit certain topics. 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. In this solution each topical module (see Appendix I) supports a consistent collection of pages in the form of a sample class outline, a set of class notes, a bibliography, and a collection of in-class projects:

Each active-learning project is intended to focus on five steps:

These steps can readily be divided into pre-, in-, and post-class activities, or assigned to individual explorations, group collaborative efforts, or whole-class undertakings. There is no restriction on whether the work is done synchronously (in-class for example) or asynchronously (pre- and post-class, or as an assignment). It has been our common approach to assign steps 1 and 2 (discovery and identification) as a pre-class, individual activity. The identification of tools and resources is perhaps best done outside the classroom, though in a laboratory setting it is possible to undertake "scavenger-hunts" on the Web to locate resources and solutions. Step 3, looking at the alternatives, lends itself easily to a (possibly in-class or pre-class) group activity. Implementation and reflection are excellent topics for an in-class discussion, though the reflection element can be extended into a post-class assignment for individual thought and cogitation.

One of the simplest tools that we have found to be extremely useful is a on-line count-down clock! Within a class when students are working on individual or group projects it is essential that they have some guide to the time that is left for their work. To manage the in-class activities to conform to the allotted requires careful timing and adherence to a schedule. Keeping activities on time and restricting activities to a set time span can be used as a management tool to get to the point and to ensure that decisions are made. Later reflection will confirm (in our experience) that given the resources available an appropriate decision was made even under time pressures. Obviously it is the responsibility of the manager to ensure that there is sufficient time. The movement of portions of a project to pre- and post-class activities effectively extends the in-class project time allowance. Written in Javascript it can be easily ported to any course Web-site:

There are two major elements of the course where it is essential that participants develop "community standards". The first of these is associated with peer-evaluations that take place as part of the oral-communications segment of the course. Through a time-restricted decision-making exercise, the class decides on the criteria for evaluation of their fellow students in individual presentations. Breaking down the categories for evaluation into content, oral-presentation, and supporting-graphics, the class (often in excess of 60) creates a set of mutually agreed metrics for evaluation. The technique of decision-making is simply that used in many large group decision-making projects, starting with having individuals choose three criteria for each category, then working in groups to choose four, through sub-committees of group leaders who select five, and finally representatives of the subcommittees who select the final six criteria. For most students this is the first time that they have ever been placed in the position of having to make large group decisions and are surprised that it can be accomplished in a short time. The same technique is used a second time in the development of community standards for the conduct of the on-line debates. As a part of the class period on Netiquette (with a pre-class activity planned to recognize the problem and the resources for solution) the class decides on the rules of conduct in the forthcoming on-line debates. A similar preparatory exercise is the Behavioral Analysis activity that is used to organize students into groups. In this case students have a pre-class activity to determine their behavioral characteristics through the use of a forty element questionnaire. Classified into one of four categories (controller, analyzer, promoter, or supporter), clusters of like temperament explore their likes and dislikes in preparation for a presentation that will eventually lead into a broader discussion of interpersonal relationships in group settings. From the results of the pre-class analysis the instructor attempts to establish groups that will work together effectively for the remainder of the course.

The pre-class discovery is also a lead-in to the class on "Rules We Live By" where students explore the driving forces in their life and ballot on the "values" that influence their decision making. The top five choices for the past several semesters are shown in table 1:

Table 1: Driving Values

Once developed prior to class, this survey makes an excellent tool for an in-class discussion of the differences between laws and ethics, and between codes of conduct and community values. This mechanism can also be used as a course or module pre-test for assessment purposes in other topics.

Ask almost any student on the first day of a term what he/she considers to be the primary concern of a course in computer ethics and the most likely response will be "hacking". This topic is a prime candidate for an active-learning exercise. Using two readily accessible articles on hacking to be read in advance of the class, the class activity centers around exploring the answers to twelve questions that the students have explored by their groups for ten minutes:

A succeeding class can then concentrate on security as a tool for systems administrators and complete the strategies, implementation, and reflection elements of the activity.

Freedom of Speech is a topic that has many scenarios that can lead to active-learning projects. The sample project is based on the George Orwell book "1984" and the US Constitution, supplemented by visits by the participants to "hate" sites intending to explore the gray area between offensive and tolerated speech. Using pairs of key words groups are led through comparisons between narrowing extremes of concepts - love and hate, attitude versus action, and finally the differences between acceptance and tolerance. Typical of the activities is:

Followed by the following questions that will provoke further discussion:

Using examples from the Hate Directory it is possible to study the differences between these terms and how they are applicable to the question of freedom of speech on the Web. Discussion can evolve around the statement:

and the question "at what point it is necessary or appropriate in a democratic society (the antithesis of Oceana in "1984") to take action to limit free speech?" The recent Oregon court case that awarded damages to a group of abortion doctors against a Web-site that named them and appeared to promote hostile actions against them is a noteworthy case for discussion in this context.

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 prepared to participate. The task of 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.

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 allowed the two institutions to share resources, most of it in the form of links and some mirroring of pages so as to ensure the preservation of the materials in one place. An agreement with Florida Atlantic University provided a directory on "Netiquette" to both institutions. 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 the 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.

Just as textbooks allow faculty to share their developments with other faculty so that it is not necessary for each and every faculty member to have their own text, so we must learn that Web-resources can be similarly shared. The sharing of resources, the identification of the best source of materials, and the capability of being able to build of those resources is essential in this era of our legislatures insisting on our "doing more with less".

Initially interaction was provided in this course 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 students, and in particular women, together with 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. "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 a 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 has been modified to permit a number of different arrangements varying from the strict discipline of the debates to the "free-for-all" of a chat room.

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. 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 can be organized through the on-line debate system. No matter how learned the teacher of a course or the leader of a seminar, the involvement of students in a debate from other institutions will assist in widening their multi-cultural viewpoint.

An important component of the social impact and ethics learning environment is the statistical survey generation and polling system. The development of a survey instrument itself is an excellent active-learning project. 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 Virginia Tech 125 year-old honor system and a comparison with responses from two other institutions (see Appendix II). To the astonishment of the class it was revealed that almost 30% 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.

It has been suggested that "[o]ne cannot cover as much content in class; active learning requires too much time in preparation for class; it seems impossible to use active learning approaches in large classes; materials and resources are lacking; and there are many risks to be considered, including how colleagues will perceive the legitimacy of the approaches, how student evaluations might be influenced, and how promotion and tenure might be affected." Apart from the concerns about the perceptions of active-learning by other faculty, it is this author’s experience that student involvement, once they understand the mechanisms of learning in this environment, is greatly improved. Additional time is to be found in the pre- and post-class activities that compensates for the lost time in-class, but since students learn on their own in these periods their retention is better.

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.

I: Current Course Modules (Directories)