professional curriculum

When the terms technology and daily life (personal and pro-fessional) are juxtaposed, one, as an engineer, should wonder if ICT can change the quality and the shape of people’s lives, so affecting their social values. In that case, as a ICT professional, we will have to be attentive with regard to what we do when exercising the profession and the consequences that our actions involve, ensuring that social well being, the common good, is not at risk. For this reason, it is advisable to rely on norms of behav-iour to guide ICT professionals in their ethical practice.

Responding to the recommendations of the most prestigious international institutions, it is necessary to keep in mind the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). These two insti-tutions published an important report about a set of curricula for diverse engineering degrees.

The document pertaining to Computer Engineering (http://

www.eng.auburn.edu/ece/CCCE/CCCE-FinalReport-2004Dec12.pdf) contains two paragraphs, specifically, in the Chapter 2, focused on the profession and its close relationship with ethics:

2.3.2: “Professionalism and ethics are critical elements, since the focus of engineering where design and development makes social context paramount to studies in the field. Computer engineering students must learn to integrate theory, professional practice, and social constructs in their engineering careers. It is incumbent upon all computer engineers to uphold the tenets of their profession and to adhere to the codes of professional practice. The public expects engineers to follow prescribed rules of professional practice and to not engage in activities that would tarnish their image gold that of their practising colleagues.”

6.1: “Professionalism and ethics should be the cornerstone of year curriculum in computer engineering. The focus on design and

development makes social context paramount to one’s studies in the field. Professionalism should be a constant theme that pervades the entire curriculum. Computer engineering students must learn to integrate theory, professional practice, and social constructs in their engineering careers. Computing professionalism should be a major emphasis of the curriculum.”

The importance of the social, ethical, and professional context in computing was at last officially recognized in the long-awaited 1998 report of the IEEE and the ACM institutions that set the project Joint IEEE Computer Society/ACM Task Force in motion, to review the curriculum related to Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Tech-nology and Information Systems. The report argues that under-graduate programs should “prepare students to understand the field of computing both as an academic discipline and as a profession within the context of a larger society”. A key goal, it says, should also be to “expose students to the ethical and soci-etal issues that are associated with the computing field”. What is more, it says, students need to develop “the ability to ask serious questions about the social impact on computing”. In 2001 and 2002 respectively, the works related to Computer Science and Information Systems were completed.

Thus, starting from this serious and formal reference we are going to define a general framework for our study of the teaching of computer ethics.

2.1. The Computer Ethics (CE) curriculum

The corresponding document to the Computer Ethics (CE) curriculum (final report published in 2004) is com-posed of 18 fields: Algorithms and Complexity, Computer Architecture and Organization, Computer Systems Engineering, Circuits and Signals, Database Systems, Digital Logic, Digital Signal Processing, Electronics, Embedded Systems,

Human-Computer Interaction, Human-Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Programming Fundamentals, Social and Professional Issues, Software Engineering, VLSI Design and Fabrication, Discrete Structures and Probability & Statistics. In these fields the subjects to take into account are present, whether they are seen as essen-tial or complementary, within the preparation of the CE curricu-lum on the part of every technical school or faculty. It should be noted that the 18 fields meet the subjects considered specifics within the CE curriculum.

Non technical subjects are included in the field called Social and Professional Issues. Next we are going to deal with this and show the defined units.

2.2. The professional and social units of the CE curriculum

Engineering professionals should be aware of their social responsibility and the inherent public dimension of their work in order to accept the consequences of their professional activity.

In the case of Computer Science degrees, this situation is inten-sifying owing to the use of digital technologies. Thus, it becomes necessary to take into account the diverse ethical, legal, politics, economic issues that interweave with the ICT technologies.

Within the CE curriculum 10 units are defined with a clear social and/or professional profile. The first 9 units are con-sidered as essentials (core), whereas the last one is presented as optional or complementary (elective):

1. History and overview 2. Public policy

3. Methods and tools of analysis

4. Professional and ethical responsibilities 5. Risks and liabilities

6. Intellectual property 7. Privacy and civil liberties

8. Computer crime

9. Economic issues in computing 10. Philosophical frameworks

These units should be the scaffolding when defining subjects corresponding to a certain syllabus. At the same time, it is notice-able that, except for the third unit, all are clearly related to the field under study. Concerning the unit called Methods and tools of analysis, the items to develop are: a) formulation and assessment of ethical arguments, b) identification and assessment of ethical choices, c) understanding of the social context with regard to design and d) identification of premises and values.

The ethics applied to the world of the technology and, in particular, to computing, have been present for several years within international forums, international associations, books, periodicals, congresses and seminars. Suffice to say that the code of ethics and the professional conduct code of the IEEE and ACM institutions, respectively, appeared early in the 90’s (IEEE code of ethics: http://www.ieee.org/about/whatis/

code.html; ACM code of ethics: http://www.acm.org/consti-tution/code.htm).

For this reason, it is advisable to incorporate non-technical practices and contents into all technical degrees involved with the organization, analysis or transmission of information. It is important to emphasize that these non technical contents have been identified within the main international curriculum by the most prestigious international associations.

It is our principal wish to break down barriers in the area of computing trying to correct the current educational conditions where the non technical subjects are perceived as a simple com-plement, amusing and demanding no effort. This often means that students consider the non technical subjects as being unim-portant in their training. For them, these contents are considered an isolated portion of knowledge, distracting from the typical

obligations of the really important subjects; these are perhaps best instanced as the technical.