ACM Teaching Materials for Computing

Coverage of ethics and computing is proliferating at universities, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. This includes standalone courses, and incorporation of ethics into technical computer science and related courses. Most of these courses, particularly the standalone ones, make extensive use of recent media articles, papers, videos, and other resources about issues related to ethics and computing. Thousands of such media articles alone are published annually. There is enormous duplication of effort by people who are teaching these courses, as discovering these resources is not always an easy process.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Task Force on Ethics and Computing Education has developed an initial categorized open access collection of the titles and links to articles and other resources related to ethics and computing. Each reference in the collection is categorized by the most relevant technical topic. The collection will be updated regularly using a mechanism whereby people can submit suggestions that will be vetted by individuals knowledgeable in the field. It will be publicized so that educators teaching ethics in computing courses and units will be aware of this collection and how to access it. Educators who find novel ways to use the repository also will be encouraged to submit their experiences to EngageCSEdu.

This work is informed by [1], which describes a crowdsourced spreadsheet of tech ethics courses and syllabi, as well as a subsequent analysis of what is taught in these courses [2]. Our aim is to provide a sustainable, evolving set of resources for such courses within the context of EngageCSEdu. In addition, just before the final submission of this paper we became aware of Computing Ethics Narratives [3], an excellent and related collection of resources produced as part of a project funded by the Mozilla Responsible Computer Science Challenge. We are cooperating with the creators of this resource moving forward.