This award is made through the Ethics Education in Science and Engineering solicitation (NSF (06-524)). The project will adapt a new graduate-level course, "The Societal and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology," developed at the University of New Mexico (UNM) by the project PI, and transfer it across a wide range of institutions. Pilot-tests will be conducted at five collaborating institutions: Howard State University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Washington, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan. UNM and the collaborating institutions are all partner institutions in the NSF-funded National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN). The course itself has a modular structure of topic classes, guest speakers, and a project. After an introduction to nanotechnology, and an overview of ethical systems, seminar-style classes address the specific societal issues of nanotechnology. The intention is to create a true nationally-based (rather than institution-specific) nanotechnology ethics resource which will enable institutions to meet their particular requirements in preparing students for the ethical challenges of emerging technologies. This will be supported with an interactive national electronic resource to be implemented in the early stages of this project. This interactive electronic resource is what will make it possible to bring compelling pedagogic support to faculty with little training in ethics, especially those taking an across-the-curriculum approach. There will be faculty at each site who will gain experience in the subject area as the project proceeds, and who will become gradually more able to engage in discussion on these topics. The project PIs will provide individual support to these faculty, and the web environment will provide them with compelling materials. And finally, the online environment will allow students to interact asynchronously with an experienced instructor and with other students using thread-based bulletin boards. In the later stages of the project the potential of using synchronous interaction in discussion forums will be explored. Nanotechnology is predicted to have significant social impact, and to pose a number of critical ethical issues. Since the majority of nanotechnology training takes place at the graduate level, with the students coming from a range of disciplines, this leads one to predict that many students could graduate as nanotechnologists with no ethics training at all. This underlines the need for an educational basis from which to address the research challenges and ethical issues implicit in such interdisciplinary research. The project is also a complement to studies in the societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology being carried out across the NNIN network
