Instructor

• Instructor: Xiannong Meng
  http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~xmeng/

• Email: xmeng at bucknell dot edu

Textbook

Ethics for the Information Age, Michael J. Quinn. 5th Edition, 2013, Pearson.
    ISBN 13: 978-0-13-285553-2
    ISBN 10: 0-13-285553-4

Course Outcomes

After completing CSCI 240 students will be able to:

1. collect and analyze information from a variety of sources about societal issues related to computers and computing, and present informed opinions based on the information and analysis;
2. analyze ethical issues concerning both computer technologies and the exercise of their professional responsibilities.

Course Topics

The course will examine the societal impact of computers and their related technology. We will first briefly introduce different ethics theories which are used to evaluate the societal impact. We will then apply these theories to various areas, including intellectual property, information privacy, privacy and the government, computer and network security, computer reliability and liability, and professional ethics.

Structure of the Course

The course is a mixture of lectures and discussions. Student participation in the discussions is creticial to the learning. Readings will be assigned before class meetings. Each student is expected to read the articles assigned and to prepare for discussions when coming to the class. In class, we may have small team dicussion where a few students get together and exchange ideas. The students in the group should take some notes and bring the summary or highlights back to the whole class discussion. Typically after the small group discussion we will ask each group bring their opinions back to the whole class. We expect the opinions will differ and we could have a debate on the topic.

The class will have three quizzes at the specified date and time (see the course schedule for specifics.)

Writing Assignments

Each student is asked to write three short summary papers during the course, paper is due electronically every Thursday 11:59 p.m. The paper should be written in Microsfot Word or LibreOffice. The length of the paper should be about 400 to 600 words in English. The content of the papers should be just a summary of what we discussed in class during that week. Make sure you write your name and student ID in each of the paper submitted. The file name must be in the form of student-ID-wk1.docx if Microsoft Word is used or student-ID-wk1.odt if LibreOffice is used. For example, if the student ID is 123456 and the student is submitting first week's paper in Word, the file name should be 123456-wk1.docx. The instructor and the assistant reserve the right to reject submissions if the file name doesn't meet the requirement.