Missed the Summit July 27, 2021? We've got you covered.

Teaching individuals from around the world and across disciplines came together on July 27th, 2021 for the Teaching Responsible Computing Summit. The Teaching Responsible Computing community works towards integrating responsibility and ethics into computing curricula, with a focus on teaching methods. The aim is to support cross-disciplinary practitioners and faculty, along with academics, industry practitioners, Computer Science education researchers, and teaching and learning experts in their work. The community includes teaching teams across colleges and universities who are part of the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, and others working broadly with computing, social responsibility, and ethics curricula. It includes the 30+ collaborators on the Teaching Responsible Computing Playbook. The community offers opportunities for collaboration, peer learning exchange, and periodic presentations and events relevant to social responsibility, ethics, computer science, research, teaching methods, and technology. The goals of the Summit were to: spark cross disciplinary insight; collaborate and foster connections across a global cohort; and provide a platform for sharing and scaling teaching methods ideas across geographies. 

The Summit welcomed 200+ registrants from more than 15 different countries. The day started with an introduction and overview by Jenn Beard, J. Bob Alotta, and Kathy Pham, who spoke about the details of the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, and the broad goals to impact tech culture and the tech industry. Next were 30 Lightning Talks that included topics like integrating ethics into intro programming, new class assignments, how to have difficult conversations the classroom, code of conduct, decolonization in computing, civic technology, student self-reflections, teacher training, and much more. After that, three panel conversations focused on Cross-Institution Collaboration, Student Teach Teams, and Interdisciplinary Collaboration took place. The day ended with breakout sessions for participants to dive deeper into the topics raised in the panels and others including how to choose computing courses for integrating ethics, critical design thinking in industry, discussing equity and justice in the classroom, working with industry, understanding learning outcomes and assessments, and managing resistance at different levels. During the event, the attendees shared resources in a shared document and collaborated in the Zoom chat. Our sincere appreciation to everyone who attended live or watched the recorded sessions afterwards.

Questions? Contact: [email protected]. The Summit followed the Mozilla Community Guidelines.

Hosted by Mozilla, with support from Omidyar Network, Schmidt Futures, Craig Newmark Philanthropies

Lightning Round Speakers (3 minutes each)

11:30pm - 12:00pm EDT

Jess Parris Westbrook, Depaul University College of Computing , Creative Coding <strike-through> “efficiency and optimization”</strike-through>

Aditya Johri, George Mason University, Role-Play Case Studies for Teaching Ethics of Algorithms

Alicia M. Grubb, Smith College, BRAVE Conversations in Computing

Eric C. Botts, University of St. Thomas, Let’s Craft a Code of Conduct for the Internet

Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder, Ethics from the Start: Ethics Integration in Intro Programing

Evan Peck, Bucknell University, Takeaways from 2 yrs of a Responsible Intro CS Course

Pedro M. Sasia, University of Deusto, Spain, Inclusion of Ethics in Computer Science Curricula

Sierra Gilliam, Georgia State University, Mapping Self in Society: A Method to Teach Data Ethics

Roland Maio, Columbia University, AdBloom: Erasing the Boundary Between Ethics and Technics

Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University, Decolonising Computer Science: Educating Educators

12:10pm - 12:40pm EDT

Heather Leson, IFRC, Data is a Team Sport - Co-curating a Data Playbook

Alexander Steinhart, ThoughtWorks, Responsible Tech Playbook - From Purpose to Practice

Cameron Flowers, Floreo Labs, Design Thinking, Critical Pedagogy, and the power of coding

Denise Dreher, Explore AI Ethics, Resources for Teaching Ethics & Artificial Intelligence

Erhardt Graeff, Olin College of Engineering, Civic Professionalism in Undergraduate Computing

Hadar Ben-Tzur, Beyond – Design and Technology Agency, Toward Critical Design Practice

Honey Dacanay, Government of Canada and McMaster University, Teaching for Multiple Futures

Thomas Hoy, Code for Canada, Sprinting with Speculative Design

Sarah Judd, AI4ALL, AI & Ethics

Neal Patwari, Washington University in St. Louis, Lessons: Equity & Fairness in Est. & Classification

12:50pm - 1:35pm EDT

Irina Raicu, Santa Clara University, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Incorporating Ethical Analysis into Hackathons

Kathryn Fisler, Brown University, Responsible CS in Data Structures and Algorithms

Kevin Lin, University of Washington, Centering Identity and Culture in Critical Computing

Maria Smith, UC Berkeley, Activist Teaching in the Data & Computing Classes

Ron Cytron, Washington University, Group-based Exploration of Algorithmic Fairness

Stacy Doore, Colby College, Computing Ethics Narratives (CEN) Repository and Teaching Modules

Sean O'Brien, Yale Law School, Yale Privacy Lab, Ethical Hacking

Vandana Janeja, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Adaptable Ethics Module for Data Science Education

Marty J. Wolf, Bemidji State, Bootstrapping a Culture Shift in Software Development

Dalia Muller, University at Buffalo, Impossible Project: Making Computing Anti-Racist

Panels

2:30pm - 3:45pm EDT

Cross Institution Collaboration: Emanuelle Burton (University of Illinois at Chicago), Ellen Zegura (Georgia Tech), Xinru Page (Brigham Young University)

Teaching Team Panel with Students: Sabrina Fuller (University of Virginia), Sammy Raucher (UC Berkeley), Yanyan Ren (Brown University)

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Atri Rudra (University at Buffalo), Ben Shapiro (Georgia State University), Jeffrey Behrends (Harvard University), Maria Rodriguez (University at Buffalo)

Breakout Sessions

4:00pm - 5:00pm EDT

Choosing Computing Courses, Critical Design Thinking, Cross Institution Collaboration, Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Working with Teaching Assistants, Discussing Justice and Equity in the Computing Classroom, Engaging with Industry, Learning Outcomes and Assessments, Managing Resistance 

Summit Summaries

Lightning Rounds

11:30pm - 12:00pm EDT

Jess Parris Westbrook, Depaul University College of Computing , Creative Coding <strike-through> “efficiency and optimization”</strike-through>

A creative coding approach shares material with computer science, it shares languages syntax logic and the use of this material to produce systems and generate artifacts. Positionality is a formalized statement used in research, study context, it recognizes social and political forces at play. Conditionality addresses and dismantles old timey claims that information is objective, that experience can be known through universal truths. Every individual is invited to operate and engage on their own terms from their own positionality and priorities. Creative coding primes a broader range of learners towards a creative and critical relationship with the invisible systems underlying and driving our contemporary lives.

Aditya Johri, George Mason University, Role-Play Case Studies for Teaching Ethics of Algorithms

Students are encouraged to look at algorithms past the scientific perspectives. One way is to provide students with case studies to allow them to view the case through a perspective of others. The case studies last around 20 to 45 minutes and are followed up with a post-discussion assignment.  Through both self-reporting and analysis, students reported a change in perspective.

Alicia M. Grubb, Smith College, BRAVE Conversations in Computing

Students are really uncomfortable presenting and having risky conversations. Through collaboration with the learning science community, we designed the BRAVE framework (Build, Risk, Ask, Value, use Evidence). Students go through the reading and then consider which BRAVE letter they are best at and which they will be working on and improving. Through asking students to play devil’s advocate or build on someone else's idea and get more into nuanced discussion, we encourage them to advance the conversation. Students overwhelmingly love this framework; some students also reported that this framework created a safe space for conversations.

Eric C. Botts, University of St. Thomas, Let’s Craft a Code of Conduct for the Internet

Global connectivity through the internet has been a revolution in human progress. Since its beginning, the internet has sprung utopian ideas, but we also recognized its more nefarious potential. While the technical solutions to the impact of bad actors are necessary, it is not enough. What I propose is that we assert the primacy of human agency and create a code of conduct for the internet.

Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder, Ethics from the Start: Ethics Integration in Intro Programing

In an effort to integrate ethics into introductory programming classes, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, we took existing assignments, and we tweaked them in order to integrate ethics into the curriculum. One of the priorities was an intervention that places as little of a burden as possible on the instructors. With that in mind, we took existing assignments, and brought up ethical issues in the content and in contacts. Ethics is part of the technical practice of the computer science program, it shouldn't be an add-on or a nice to have. It also ensures that anyone who learns any coding also learns that ethics is part of this practice. Ethical issues, social impact and social justice should be included from day one into computer science programs to ensure that they capture anyone who learns any coding.

Evan Peck, Bucknell University, Takeaways from 2 yrs of a Responsible Intro CS Course

We developed five to seven responsible programming assignments that roughly a quarter of our whole student body gets through at some point before graduation. We've had about five different instructors teach it. At some point in the assignments, we ask students to fill out a form asking them to tell us questions that they are wrestling with. What’s interesting is that the more we started integrating the responsible computing themes the more questions about fairness we saw. It started to feel like we were redefining what students see as the core part of their course.  We are normalizing the inclusion of social impact, and we had students asking for more.

Pedro M. Sasia, University of Deusto, Spain, Inclusion of Ethics in Computer Science Curricula

Identify, Justify, Formulate — this is how we can teach and learn ethics. Today, I am giving a brief overview of the Tecnoetica initiative. First Pillar is that ethics can be taught and learned, and thought not straightforward, oftentimes it's a rationality which has its own language, methodology, and strategies. Producing principles that guide the future action, this means that it can be taught again, and it can be introduced, for example, as we do in our knowledge transfer. Including ethics in curricula provides a 360 approach and diverse opportunities in higher education. The Tecnoetica initiative aims to include an assessment of the ethical competence in engineering in final degree projects.

Sierra Gilliam, Georgia State University, Mapping Self in Society: A Method to Teach Data Ethics

Mapping Self in Society is a flexible teaching framework that allows students to collect, process and visualize their physical movement data in ways that support critical reflection about personal data and data privacy. The framework is divided into five activities, the first activity allows students to collect their physical movement data as GPS traces over a day or a week. Students are able to download this app in the iOS App Store or Android Marketplace. The next activity is to convert the data into a more human-readable format. In activity three, students create one or multiple thematic maps of their local environment. Activity four allows students to visualize their physical movement data over different thematic maps with other people to explore relationships between themselves and society. And lastly, activity five  allows students to reflect on their experiences from a data ethics perspective.

Roland Maio, Columbia University, AdBloom: Erasing the Boundary Between Ethics and Technics

We tackled the common perception that the ethical issues raised by competing technologies are somehow separate and distinct from the technical matters of design and implementation. Although this may sometimes be the case, we take the position that for some competing technologies, this description is not only inaccurate, but it's also a limited view of the technical matters. For responsible technologists, sometimes there is no boundary between the ethics and techniques of privacy. To implement our approach, we focus on the following problem in social networks — do others see what I see in online advertising?

Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University, Decolonising computer science curriculums: Educating the educators

We argue that our students need basic democratic education, because they will design systems in the future that will affect many people. When we argued that we should implement decolonization and gender issues into the curriculum, we experienced a lot of resistance. The response from lecturers is that technology is neutral and therefore there is no need to include the above in the program. In order to bring forward change, we need to start with educating the educators. A group of engaged PhD students and postdocs started to compile a reading list mainly targeted for senior academics, but also for early career researchers. We focused on the following themes: how to decolonize computer science, everyday racism in IT, decolonization in practice, history and why it matters, claims of data neutrality and bias, and radical infrastructures.

12:10pm - 12:40pm EDT

Heather Leson, IFRC, Data is a Team Sport - Co-curating a Data Playbook

We are not the first humanitarian organization to say that sometimes tech is shaping our work versus us shaping the tech. We need to work closer with people who are designing and teaching students at universities. Over the last two years we’ve worked with a university on an embedded responsible computing impact course for students called Limitless. It’s a youth engagement program in 17 languages that was created with computer science and language students. We also ran a 10,000 person event called climate read on an open source platform built by students. Our team has also designed a data pla

Alexander Steinhart, ThoughtWorks, Responsible Tech Playbook - From Purpose to Practice

We are entering the area of responsible computing, where technology and business are much more aligned with societies and individual needs. ThoughtWorks is a global tech consulting company active in 70 countries with 9000 employees. Our work includes cloud and open source tools that reduce the carbon footprints, and a responsible tech playbook. The book highlights some of the leading tools that any organization or team can realistically adopt.

Cameron Flowers, Floreo Labs, Design Thinking, Critical Pedagogy, and the power of coding

Language is technology. It is a well formulated system designed to translate the world around us. Programming languages teach us how to operate systems, and our sociolinguistics need to do the same, referencing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which ties into the design thinking. Creating a space for others to share, empowers students to be teachers and be critical about the world around us. Instead of creating solutions for the students, we need to create space for them to be able to ask why and how and give them the power to support their movements. Design thinking as a framework predicates itself on this context.

Denise Dreher, Explore AI Ethics, Resources for Teaching Ethics & Artificial Intelligence

A Google search right now for artificial intelligence and ethics, yields about 24 million records returned. I wanted to just focus on what are the things that are useful for teachers and for students. I have developed a website that's a portal of links to all different kinds of items that are useful in ethics and artificial intelligence and also teaching ethics in general and moral education.. The future plans for the website are to collect open access syllabi and curriculum, and also to have a section on debate topics.

Erhardt Graeff, Olin College of Engineering, Civic Professionalism in Undergraduate Computing

Let's talk about civic responsibility. Computing professionals have responsibilities to the public like everyone else, but their relative power and technocratic culture can be at odds with serving the public good and practicing democracy. We need civic professionalism. So how do we cultivate a different professional mindset and identity? There's evidence to suggest it can be forged through undergraduate experiences that are action-oriented and community-engaged, where students challenge and revise their assumptions, values, and identities. 

Hadar Ben-Tzur, Beyond – Design and Technology Agency, Toward Critical Design Practice

I practice research based design. I will explain design thinking in products in the context of product design for those of us who are not product designers. Design thinking is a cognitive strategic and practical process that starts with developing empathy with users. The stages of critical design are: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. During the process we always ask questions: who is it designed for, how will it be used, why do we think it matters, why do we even want to build this product or introduce this feature, and what is the nature of the experience.

Honey Dacanay, Government of Canada and McMaster University, Teaching for Multiple Futures

The way we teach policy in public policy schools is a bit broken. We're designing the curriculum to create future public servants and assist the people who are teaching them. Our program is a public policy in a digital society program. We are creating a curriculum that is taught for not just current and future public servants, but also for the people who will be running government people who will work in private sector and advocacy groups.

Thomas Hoy, Code for Canada, Sprinting with Speculative Design

Public sector innovation has fundamentally different goals than the private sector. User Experience (UX) design can be quite focused on an individual, while speculative design focuses on societal needs. UX design is a reactive practice — it solves problems of individuals, but speculative design can push us into a more value-focused direction. Speculative design opens us up to conversations about what a good society would look like, and what we could expect from government services.

Sarah Judd, AI4ALL, AI & Ethics

AI4ALL offers AI programs for underprivileged high school students to introduce them to the concepts of AI. To introduce students to the concepts of AI, and in particular AI and ethics curriculum, we have the students pretend to be CEOs of companies that are building AI systems. They go through creating an ethics statement for this pretend company, and then we go through privacy and explain ability and fairness. 

Neal Patwari, Washington University in St. Louis, Lessons: Equity & Fairness in Est. & Classification

I wanted to mention a few lessons I learned from teaching a graduate course on equity, fairness, estimation and classification at Washington University in St Louis. In the course we studied key concepts and the state of the art and AI fairness, including definitions and feedback loops, allowing the students to contribute to CS and social justice. Students who have not previously had gone through any sort of sociology curriculum fell behind in comparison to those who did — as they lacked theory and were not able to make connections between computer science and social justice.

12:50pm - 1:35pm EDT

Irina Raicu, Santa Clara University, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Incorporating Ethical Analysis into Hackathons

Professors teaching computer science and software engineering have long been embedding ethics into their courses, and the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics has been publishing resources such as teaching modules and case studies.  One new thing we tried was to work with the students and mentors and organize annual humanity hackathons.

Kathryn Fisler, Brown University, Responsible CS in Data Structures and Algorithms

We are looking specifically at what you can do in data structures and algorithms classes. The high level takeaway is we want students to begin to frame this as a form of complexity, on par with the other kind of complexities they were already being trained to work on. So it's as important as runtime, it is important as space usage, we just want it to be right up there on par when students look at the assignments that they're trying to work on. In general, we're really working on having students understand that your responsible decisions or irresponsible outcomes can end up accidentally encoded as early as the time when you pick your data structures and your algorithms.

Kevin Lin, University of Washington, Centering Identity and Culture in Critical Computing

I want to center, in particular, identity and culture in our critical computing work. We talk specifically about racial justice in our technical courses. It is important that we think about how we talk about these issues in our classrooms, how we educate our dominant students. I want to think about how we talk about the computing culture that is around us, the culture that makes students feel like they have to value certain things in computing.

Maria Smith, UC Berkeley, Activist Teaching in the Data & Computing Classes

Four lenses of human context and ethics: Positionality, power, narratives, and sociotechnical systems. In workshops, we use these four lenses to teach how technology limits and enables citizens and their sense of belonging. Positionality is the capacity of being aware of how the opportunities of one's identity, expertise, and power informed perspectives, aspirations, and actions and are shaped by one's relationship and environment. Power examines the asymmetric capacity of a person or technology to structure. Narratives are shaped by data science and society, people use narratives to express and explain who they are, the way the world is and what needs to be done and what features are possible or desirable. Sociotechnical system is an organization, in which the actions of people and technologies are intertwined. Accuracy does not always mean equity or justice, and data scientists in and of themselves cannot solve social problems. It requires an interdisciplinary and community approach.

Ron Cytron, Washington University, Group-based Exploration of Algorithmic Fairness

A particular focus of our work has been to look at issues of fairness and responsibility in the context of group work that our students normally do. Half the time is spent with students working in groups of four with a Teaching Assistant at their table and faculty roaming around. We looked at two different problems, one has to do with cake cutting (I cut, you choose), and the other with an eBay style auction.  What we wanted to study was how these exercises affect students thinking about fairness. 

Stacy Doore, Colby College, Computing Ethics Narratives (CEN) Repository and Teaching Modules

We began this project with a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of our team. The narratives that we curate in this project are designed to help students realise how ethics impact their work. We designed a repository of various resources divided between ethical themes and technologies. The database is full of narratives that span film clips, audio podcasts, short stories, journal articles, news articles, and a whole variety of other types of media. The way that this is organized is around two main kinds of taxonomy — ethical themes (social, political, cultural, economic) and technologies (computing etc.)

Sean O'Brien, Yale Law School, Yale Privacy Lab, Ethical Hacking

Hacking is used by everyone and can mean many things, from minor tinkering to breaking into systems. In the ethical hacking curriculum, we try to teach students what not to do and that with great power comes great responsibility. Some examples of ethical hacking we did in class include making fairy lights flash in a Halloween pumpkin. There is a further moral obligation in ethical hacking in how we can improve the lives of others. There is a reframing of science education that needs to happen. By teaching ethical hacking we ensure that the systems stay in the hands of the people.

Vandana Janeja, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Adaptable Ethics Module for Data Science Education

How can we embed ethical theory in a fast paced learning environment? Every student learns the data life cycle. We can use that for embedding the ethics theory into the data cycle. The key takeaways for this is that you can amend your current curriculum instead of redesigning or creating a new program

Marty J. Wolf, Bemidji State, Bootstrapping a Culture Shift in Software Development

Development software has a well-established culture and process. Talking about values and concerns beyond the software is rarely part of that process. To change this, first step is to normalize talking about ethical concerns and social responsibility. The computer science faculty are hesitant to lead these conversations. My proposal is to normalize having conversations about social and ethical concerns surrounding programming projects in our classes.

Dalia Muller, University at Buffalo, Impossible Project: Making Computing Anti-Racist

Students contribute to the realization of a collective vision of a future in which computing can be anti-racist. The Impossible Project teaches the value of attempting the impossible. Students use active and engaged learning to explore how technology is shaped by human, societal and historical forces. Students know from the onset that they will fail but they will grow as individuals and challenge themselves to call the idea of anti-racist computing into their collective imagination. Future visions from each module are compiled and presented on a single graphic to show the world a solution.University at Buffalo, Impossible Project: Making Computing Anti-Racist

Students contribute to the realization of a collective vision of a future in which computing can be anti-racist. The Impossible Project teaches the value of attempting the impossible. Students use active and engaged learning to explore how technology is shaped by human, societal and historical forces. Students know from the onset that they will fail but they will grow as individuals and challenge themselves to call the idea of anti-racist computing into their collective imagination. Future visions from each module are compiled and presented on a single graphic to show the world a solution.

Panels

2:30pm - 3:45pm EDT

Cross Institution Collaboration: Emanuelle Burton (University of Illinois at Chicago), Ellen Zegura (Georgia Tech), Xinru Page (Brigham Young University)

Three faculty members shared experiences collaborating across multiple academic institutions and industry, and disciplines, including computer science, religion, and literature. The panel questions included: Please tell us about your role and how you've worked or planning on working across institutions. How did you get here? What are some effective methods to work across institutions? Some of you also have a cross disciplinary component. Can you talk more about the combination of cross-institution and interdisciplinary? What are the challenges?

Teaching Team Panel with Students: Sabrina Fuller (University of Virginia), Sammy Raucher (UC Berkeley), Yanyan Ren (Brown University)

Three students share their undergrad and PhD experiences working towards integrating ethics in computing. The panel questions included: Please tell us about how you've worked with the faculty and department to integrate ethics and responsibility in computing. How has this work impacted the rest of your undergraduate or graduate experience? From your student perspective, how do you think we can best make these lessons stick with students? What advice do you have for the faculty members here today?

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Atri Rudra (University at Buffalo), Ben Shapiro (Georgia State University), Jeffrey Behrends (Harvard University), Maria Rodriguez (University at Buffalo)

Four faculty members joined across Education and Learning Sciences, Social Work, Philosophy, and Computer Science to discuss collaborating across disciplines. The panel questions included: Please tell us about your role and how you've worked or planning on working in an interdisciplinary way? What disciplines are you collaborating with, and why? What led your respective fields to collaborate? What are lessons learned from working across disciplines? What were some obstacles and how did you overcome? What are effective methods to work across disciplines? What are methods for bringing collaborators to the table who are not usually included?

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