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Opinion
Sense & Clickability
3/29/2007
Teaching Digital Responsibility." It describes a first-semester, required credit course taken by all Carnegie Mellon University students called the "Computing Skills Workshop." You can view more about the Computing Skills Workshop at its website.The course is peer to peer taught, and the most pertinent section to my recent thinking is:
Responsible Computing. Bandwidth, academic integrity, and copyright guidelines are covered in this session. It includes a section that explains safe and secure use of social networking sites such as Facebook. We present recorded case scenarios, review related policies and guidelines, and facilitate discussions to enhance the comprehension of students' responsibilities. (p. 3)This section of the course used to be called "Ethics." The students, as measured through evaluations, responded well to a new title (and new process) of "Responsible Computing." That change included "providing students not only with practical, real-life examples on how to behave responsibly in the Carnegie Mellon community but also what to look for and how to address questions in other situations." (p. 7)
Ethics (or maybe just consequences ...)
On the Responsible Computing Workshop site you can see nearly all of the class materials, including video of a number of "scenarios," which are supplemented with additional readings and discussed in small groups (12 students). These include:
- A scenario where a student ignores warnings about overlarge file transfers and then loses access for 45 days;
- A scenario where a student uses part of a report from her first year to bolster a later class report and is found out;
- A scenario where a student gets an RIAA subpoena and loses access for 45 days; and
- A scenario where a student rants on Facebook about how crappy a job interview went, and how terrible the company really is, and learned later that she was going to be offered the internship until the recruiter saw her Facebook post.
Likewise, the Facebook scenario is better viewed virtually than lived through. A recent Newsweek Kaplan College Guide article should probably also be in the required readings. In it, Laurie Sybel of Vermont University is said to advise students to "treat a Facebook page as though it were a resume...." I'm not so sure that doesn't take the "fun" edge off of having a Facebook page, though. Actually, the more I think about this, the more I think about how that would feel like writing one of those "bragging Christmas letters" that your family may enjoy poking fun at each year.
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