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Enhancing the social issues components in our computing curriculum: computing for the social good

Published: 25 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The acceptance and integration of social issues into computing curricula is still a work in progress twenty years after it was first incorporated into the ACM Computing Curricula. Through an international survey of computing instructors, this paper corroborates prior work showing that most institutions include the societal impact of ICT in their programs. However, topics often concentrate on computer history, codes of ethics and intellectual property, while neglecting broader issues of societal impact. This paper explores how these neglected topics can be better developed through a subtle change of focus to the significant role that ICT plays in addressing the needs of the community. Drawing on the survey and a set of implementation cases, the paper provides guidance by means of examples and resources to empower teaching teams to engage students in the application of ICT to bring about positive social outcomes -- computing for the social good.

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Published In

cover image ACM Inroads
ACM Inroads  Volume 2, Issue 1
March 2011
78 pages
ISSN:2153-2184
EISSN:2153-2192
DOI:10.1145/1929887
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 February 2011
Published in INROADS Volume 2, Issue 1

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  1. curriculum
  2. ethics
  3. professional societies
  4. societal impact

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