The PIs will develop and pilot test educational materials for teaching ethical and social issues to graduate students in information assurance and security, computer science, and information technology, the main deliverable of the project being a book having four main sections: ownership; privacy; access; and safety, reliability, and liability. The book will present case studies to help students develop their ethical reasoning skills, and to engage students in an enthusiastic understanding of how information assurance and security professionals contribute to the construction of the future. The PIs envision that the final edited book could be used as the text in a stand-alone graduate course in a computing curriculum or an information assurance and security curriculum, or alternatively a chapter at a time as supplementary material throughout a graduate computing curriculum. The PIs' approach differs from existing efforts, in that the structure and theoretical basis of the book will stem from research on moral development in early adulthood as well as constructivist learning theory. That is to say, the PIs' book will address ethical and social issues in a manner that attends to the cognitive, social, and affective aspects of ethical development of human beings during early adulthood, which is the age of most graduate students. The PIs' approach is also unique in that it is specifically targeted at ethical and social issues for the information assurance and security graduate curriculum, which is a growing field.
Broader Impacts: The availability of a well designed, evaluated and tested educational resource as described above will help computing programs establish courses and curricula that emphasize ethical development of students. The project is built on the partnership of faculty from nine universities who will serve as developers and/or testers of the book. The home institutions of these faculty include an HSI and an HBCU, and the developer group has ethnic, gender and geographic diversity.
