Ethics

The attached recording provides coverage of a 14 minute interview with BT Counterpane's Bruce Schneier. Listen in as he shares some insightful words about privacy along with interesting commentary about ethics, cybersecurity and blogging. Don't forget the video (or audio) of his session in Seattle too.

Through system adoption of information technology for myriad purposes college and university campuses have significantly enriched higher education. Campuses have also unwittingly created new opportunities for abuse and crime in higher education. In this free April 5 EDUCAUSE Live! seminar, "High-Tech Abuse and Crime on College and University Campuses," Sam McQuade and Dave Pecora of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) will share unprecedented research findings about high-tech offending and victimization by and among college students at a technological institute. They will also describe what RIT is doing to prevent, deter, and technologically interdict many forms of IT-enabled abuse and crime. Browse related EDUCAUSE resources on Computer Abuse, Ethics, and Ethics Policies.

In this 21 min minute recording, we'll hear from Chuck Dziuban, Director of the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Central Florida. Listen in as he shares some thoughts on information fluency, the importance of libraries and more.

See also:

• How Choice, Co-Creation, and Culture Are Changing What It Means to Be Net Savvy
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• An Interview with Roy Rosenzweig

As a follow-up to my post yesterday on using log files for educational research, I wanted to post some links that may help people deal with ethical and legal issues arising.

In the UK, much academic research is carried out under the auspices of the UK Research Councils, which fall under the statutory control of the UK Government's Department of Trade and Industry (a subset of the Office of Science and Technology).

Each of the eight Research Councils has its own Ethics committee. Research proposals submitted to any funding programme managed by the Councils, and which carry recognised ethical implications, must first seek approval from the relevant Committee.

If researchers enjoy membership of a professional association or learned society, they should also establish whether that association has developed ethical guidelines which may be binding on the work of their members. For example, the British Educational Research Association has developed a set of ethical guidelines, and researchers' adherence to these is often cited in funding applications to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

A forum on ethics and the politics of search engines is scheduled for February 27th at Santa Clara University.  'Sounds interesting.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060206/20060206005911.html?.v=1

This 64 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled Right and Wrong in Cyberspace.

In this 20 minute recording, I sit down with Joseph Konstan, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and get his thoughts on the GroupLens project, open source software, ethical considerations in recommender systems, and the prospects of deploying recommender systems in a library setting.  IEarlier in the year, I wanted to sit in on his session at Microsoft's Social Computing Symposium, but I didn't get the chance, so I really enjoyed the opportunity to watch his presentation at CNI.

Related materials might include his recent article in ACM's Ubiquity and Lorcan Dempsey's recent blog entry entitled Circulating intentional data.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

UBC Computer Science offers I guess what could be viewed as a rogue CS course in CPSC 430. CPSC 430, otherwise known as Computers and Society, otherwise known as the CS-course-that’s-like-almost-an-arts-course, actually has really interesting material, though when I took it there wasn’t a whole lot of in-class debate (mostly lecture), which I personally would have liked more of.

The course covers the history of computing, as well as a cornucopia of ethics and law related topics. Even though I think there are ways in which the course could be improved/updated, I was struck by how much Dr. Rosenberg (my prof at the time) tried to impress upon us the notion that questioning our personal ethics is important.

Which brings me to the Sony Rootkit. Sure, I’m just an undergraduate. What do I know about the needs of multinational, multigazilliondollar corporations? What do I know about DRM and the entertainment industry? Not much. I guess I’m pretty naive. But I have to wonder what the Sony engineers who developed the rootkit were thinking at the time. How did they feel about their responsibility to users? How did they feel about user trust? Did they feel that they had less responsibility because they (maybe) didn’t write the rootkit from scratch? Were they unable to say anything about the decision to use a rootkit at all? Did they even want to say anything against the rootkit, or did they feel that it was a good idea?

This post might make you think, “Great, another voice for the anti-Sony peanut gallery,” but condemning Sony isn’t my point.

This doesn’t mean that I condone Sony’s actions. Whoever wrote or repurposed the Sony rootkit to violate users’ rights and trust made a conscious decision. From my perspective as an untried fledgling programmer, I’d like to be able to take the moral highground and say “That’s just wrong! What were the engineers thinking?”

Why didn’t they say anything? Why did they do it?

But then I think of what Rosenberg said about whistleblowing. How hard it is. How gray areas suddenly get complicated when things like billions of dollars are involved. So while I really admire Mark Russinovich for breaking the story, I also wonder: if I was in that kind of position, what would I do? Would I be able to stand up for what I believe in?

Would you?