CS 3604: Debates

Fall 2002, Dr. Rosson

 

Join the debates (beginning on 10/18)

Check out the debate teams (announced by 10/4)

Review the class-generated rules of netiquette, paying special attention to those related to listservs and Web forums.

Learning Objectives:
The debates are intended to sharpen your skills to adopt and support one or more viewpoints on an issue about ethics or professionalism in the workplace. Your grade for the debate has two parts - one for on-line debate management and one for the oral team presentation of the debate results.

Schedule:
We will run a "dummy" debate starting on 10/18; the actual (graded) debates will run from 10/30-11/20.

What you will do :
We will break the class into groups of 4-5 students each. Each team will choose an ethics topic and write a scenario that raises issues associated with this topic. To help you develop ideas for this, you may want to review examples from prior sections of 3604. You should also review this guide for analyzing ethical scenarios. Try to choose topics that have believable arguments both pro and con. Part of your team grade will be based on how well you choose and organize your topic.

General topics to consider include Special needs, ADA requirements, Universal accessibility, Consideration to public risks in system development, Internet censorship, Competitive intelligence or industrial espionage, Intellectual rights, copyrights, & patents, Privacy, National missile defense system, Protection of the environment or ecology, Ethics of medicine or biotechnology, Scientific fraud or plagiarism, Hackers, Professional and legal liability for defective information or software, Viruses, worms, and other "malware", Technological obsolescence (losing jobs to automation), Cryptography and public encryption, Whistle-blowing.

As soon as possible, your team should meet and choose a general topic (from the list above, or other issues of interest to you). You must then "reserve" this topic; we want to ensure that we get good coverage across the 10 debates. Send an email to the GTA with your team number and topic choice. If it fits within the scope of this class (i.e., an ethical issue related to computing), and if no other team has already selected this topic, he will reserve it.

Your first deliverable (October 16) is a topic description. This should be 1-2 pages that describe your choice of debate topics as follows (numbered and itemized):

1. Group number and names/IDs of all team members
2. Brief topic/scenario name (e.g., "The Freedom to Use Cryptography")
3. Written topic scenario (see examples for style and approximate size)
4. Give a brief statement of the pro position(s)
5. Give a brief statement of the con position(s)
6. State briefly why you think this topic is appropriate and/or interesting

After topics have been chosen, prepared, and approved, your team will construct a debate structure, following the team link on the debate index page. These pages will be part of a CoWeb (or Swiki), which means that the pages are editable "in place" by any of you. This should facilitate collaboration among the team.

You may organize your debate page however you choose, as long as you follow the general requirement to present both pro and con positions on the issue. A reasonable breakdown of responsibilities is to ask half of the team members to generate pro positions, and half to generate con positions. These should be posted in ways that make it clear which are con and which are pro. One of your goals is to provoke contributions and meaningful discussion, so think carefully how best to do this.

During the open debate period (October 18 - November 20), other class members will visit your debate page(s), respond to your positions, or add their own. It will be your team's responsibility to moderate this discussion, keep it going in reasonable directions, close down what you judge to be pointless or inappropriate discussions, etc. Because the page is editable, you will be able to organize contributions on the fly (e.g., moving them around), use formatting to highlight particular issues, and so on. Note that the CoWeb enables people to sign up for notification when a page is updated.

Grading:
Your individual debate grade is worth 25% of your total grade, and is a function of two components, the online activities (10 points), and the oral presentations (15 points). As this is a group activity, each student's individual score on this will be weighted by his or her team members' evaluation. The two components break down in turn as follows:

Team management of your own debate, 10 points. The grade will be determined by how well your group selects and presents an issue,with positions addressing both sides, as well as how the discussion is managed during the debating period (e.g., are you able to evoke comments from others, do you keep up with the discussion, feed it or provoke it as necessary, etc.).

Team presentation of debate summary, 15 points. The grade will be determined by how well you organize and present the results of your debate in a 15-min classroom presentation. The presentation must include Powerpoint (or other similar) transparencies, well-designed, etc. in accordance with the lecture and discussions of oral presentations. Every team member must participate in the presentation. More information on the presentations, including the schedule, will be available later in the semester.

Individual contributions to other teams' debates. An important debating rule is that all posts must include information identifying the contributor (first & last name). This ensures that people will take responsibility (and credit) for their contributions and it will give the debate a professional character. It will also allow us to assess each person's contributions at the end of the debate--these will be used to award you up to 6 points of Professional Activity credit. Note, however that your contributions to other team's debates are not part of your "debate" grade.