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.
We have developed two new pieces of software: SIMULATE, the case-based educational simulation that serves as the backbone of the course (Fleischmann, Robbins, & Wallace, 2009, 2011a, 2011b), and CaseBuilder, which allows students to create their own cases (Fleischmann, Koepfler, Robbins, & Wallace, 2011). We have refined this software through use in courses such as Information Ethics (spring 2010, spring 2011, and spring 2012) and Ethics of Information Technology in a Multicultural World (fall 2010) at the University of Maryland and Ethics of Modeling (fall 2010, fall 2011) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We have also collected large amounts of data from hundreds of students at the University of Pittsburgh which we have used to teach students about the relationships among values, ethical theories, and decision-making. We have analyzed this data, resulting in two journal articles, two conference proceedings papers, and two conference presentations to date, as well as other articles in preparation. Overall, students in the classes learned about the range of different values and the influence of culture on ethics and values, as recommended in the literature discussed above. The classes and the cases around which they were built can be a valuable experience in preparing future information professionals to deal with ethical dilemmas raised by the global information age, especially when the class includes a diverse range of students in terms of national origin and other factors. Specifically, the incorporation of multiple interacting roles (played by different students or student teams) confronting different ethical decisions based on the choices of other roles appears to be highly compatible with intercultural information ethics education. While most information ethics cases are built around a single role or a single decision, and thus a single perspective, the cases employed in this course included much more diversity in the number and types of roles and (interdependent) decisions. As a result, while other information ethics cases seem to promote normative and mono-cultural approachesto ethical decision-making, cases with multiple interacting roles may be particularly suited to teaching moral pluralism, which may be more appropriate in the small, highly interconnected world found in the information age. Thematic analysis of the post-test data revealed five major salient themes related to students’ learning about the international and multicultural dimensions of information ethics. These five themes were: Learning about a Diverse Range of Ethical Theories; Learning about how Ethical Theories are Related to Culture and Values; Relating International and Multicultural Dimensions to Understanding Oneself; Relating International and Multicultural Dimensions to Understanding Others; and Understanding the Role of Ethics and Culture in Information Systems Design and Use. Each of these themes was based on data from multiple courses, and three to six quotes are provided to illustrate each theme, ensuring that the themes spanned the various course offerings that used the diverse range of ethical theories as well as the multi-role cases embedded within the educational simulation.'
