Collaborative Research: Educational Simulation for Computing and Information Ethics

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Modern global society is increasingly reliant on computing and information professionals to serve key roles in creating, managing, and maintaining the global computing and information infrastructure that is critical to research, education, commerce, and quality of life. As such, computing and information professionals need to learn not only technical skills but also how to resolve ethical issues such as in/outsourcing, intellectual property, and information privacy. Working in the new global economy requires that computing and information professionals are able to consider the range of cultural values and ethical perspectives as represented by leading thinkers such as Aristotle, Bentham, Buddha, Confucius, Gilligan, and Kant. To broaden and deepen the ethical perspectives of computing and information professionals, it is essential to develop and teach courses in computing and information ethics as part of professional graduate programs in computer science and the interdisciplinary information field. Further, to enable current and future computing and information professionals to appreciate and understand the relevance of ethics in their work, it is necessary to find educationally motivating ways to engage graduate students in professional computing and information programs to consider key ethical issues. In this project the PIs hope to accomplish this goal through development and evaluation of an educational simulation for computing and information ethics, which serves as the cornerstone for an innovative course focusing on the role of values and ethics in computing and information within a global society. Building on their prior research, the PIs will explore three main research questions: How do graduate students in a computing and information ethics course use educational simulation software to gain understandings of and hands-on experiences with important computing and information ethics issues such as intellectual property in a global society? Does geographical co-location have an impact on use of the simulation in the context of an internationally-oriented computing and information ethics graduate course with a diverse range of students? Do students in a graduate-level computing and information ethics course benefit most from interaction with peers, or with the software agents developed through this project?Broader Impacts: Project outcomes will include a free and open-source simulation for computing and information ethics, which allows students both to participate in and learn from cases, and to develop and implement their own cases that they can then share with peers. The PIs will develop a novel and highly participatory course built around the simulation, which will be implemented in professional computing and information master's programs across the country and the world, and which will better prepare computing and information professionals to deal with ethical issues throughout their careers.