The Mozilla “Teaching Responsible Computing Playbook,” New Case Studies, and More
Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program (@IEthics) at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are her own.
Earlier this month, Mozilla published a blog post titled “Higher Education Institutions Join Forces to Create a Playbook for Integrating Ethics into Computing Curricula.” We are proud to be one of those institutions, with Ethics Center staff members contributing to two of the sections included in the “Teaching Responsible Computing Playbook” (titled “Engaging with Industry” and “Effective Talking Points for Different Audiences”).
As part of the ongoing collaboration surrounding the playbook, we have also developed a website of resources that aim to help instructors worldwide in their efforts to integrate applied ethics into their computing curricula and related student community events. The resources include brief videos, concise modules for particular computing and data science courses, suggested in-class activities, suggested learning outcomes, and case studies.
Of note, the list of ethics case studies now features three new VR ethics cases by our colleague Erick Ramirez, who is an Assistant Professor in Santa Clara University’s department of Philosophy (and one of the Ethics Center’s interdisciplinary group of faculty scholars):
- “First Date: A VR Ethics Case Study”
- “VR Rage Room: An Ethics Case Study”
- “URVR: A VR Ethics Case Study”
We hope that these resources will be deployed and assessed in classrooms across a wide variety of colleges and universities. Any feedback offered would be very welcome! In addition, the editors of the Playbook itself are inviting contributions and feedback from additional instructors from multiple disciplines that inform responsible computing, and note that they “especially welcome contributions from non-US based educators.”
Photo: "Woman working at a cafe, hand on keyboard ,close up" by wuestenigel, cropped, is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .