Toolkits and Strategies for Incorporating Ethics into Project and Capstone Courses

2025-02-18

As ethical concerns continue to arise around the design of digital technologies, there is an increasing need to incorporate ethics education into project and capstone courses. While students frequently receive instruction in ethical theory and philosophy, they also need practical tools and strategies that they can apply to their class projects and carry with them into their careers. For example, ethical toolkits can provide frameworks and methods for identifying, discussing, and prioritizing ethical concerns in technology design and development. In this session we will invite participants to share their experiences with incorporating ethics into project-based learning. Participants will be able to review and discuss existing toolkits and methods for incorporating ethics into project courses.

TokenATM Enables Automation of Token Economy for Large-Enrollment Courses

Journal of Chemical Education · 2025-11-18

Tokens are an artificial currency that can be exchanged for a limited number of opportunities in a course to meet the desired grading criteria for specific assignments, including deadline extensions and revisions, without instructor penalty. The TokenATM is a Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) cognizant, cross-platform desktop application that automates students’ token transactions via direct integration with the Canvas learning management system (LMS). We describe the development and implementation of the TokenATM in large-enrollment laboratory courses including General Chemistry, Introduction to Biology Research, and Organic Chemistry. Previous token economy management systems, including Google Forms, gated Canvas quizzes, and other online survey tools for each course are described along with relevant technological sustainability challenges. Since the implementation of the TokenATM, manual administrative processing time has transitioned to computer processing time. Statistics on token transactions are provided, and specific use cases for each course type are detailed to demonstrate the flexibility of the application with differing token options and course design. By making the TokenATM code open-access, we aim to provide a foundation for other institutions to individualize their own TokenATM applications for their courses’ needs.

Planning for Long-Lived Missions

2025-01-01

This chapter evaluates planning for long-lived missions drawing on the authors’ two decades of qualitative and historical studies among the planetary science community, including ethnographic immersion among several mission teams and interviews with dozens of participating scientists and engineers at multiple levels of mission hierarchy. We bring into the conversation relevant literature from sociology of science, history of technology, and computer-supported cooperative work.

Social Presence in Virtual Event Spaces

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts · 2022 · 6 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• World Wide Web

It is generally acknowledged that the virtual event platforms of today do not perform satisfactorily at what is arguably their most important function: providing attendees with a sense of social presence. Social presence is the “sense of being with another” and can include ways of knowing who is in the virtual space, how others are reacting to what is happening in the space, an awareness of others’ activities and availability, and an idea of how to connect with them. Issues around presence and awareness have been perennial topics in the CHI and CSCW communities for decades. Nevertheless, the time feels ripe for a new effort with a special focus on larger-scale virtual events, given the accelerated pace of change in the socio-technological landscape and the tremendous potential impact that new insights could now have. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and developers from academia and industry with a shared interest in improving the experience of virtual events to exchange insights and hopefully energize an ongoing community effort in this area.

Excavating awareness and power in data science: A manifesto for trustworthy pervasive data research

Big Data & Society · 2021 · 30 citations

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science

Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science.

Managing healthcare conflicts when living with multiple chronic conditions

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies · 2020 · 23 citations

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science

Data Donation as a Model for Citizen Science Health Research

Citizen Science Theory and Practice · 2019-01-01 · 58 citations

<p class="p1">New computational and sensing innovations, coupled with increasingly affordable access to consumer health technologies, allow individuals to generate personal health information that they are then able to submit to a shared archive or repository. This paper presents data donation as a model for health-focused citizen science, with special attention to the ethical challenges and opportunities that this model presents. We also highlight some existing data donation projects curated by citizen scientists. After describing data donation in more detail, including its relationship to movements like the Quantified Self and research in personalized medicine, we report findings from the Health Data Exploration (HDE) Project’s second annual Network Meeting, which was focused on data donation. These findings include identification of four challenges for the ethical conduct of health-focused data donation research: Participant protection, representativeness, incentives to participate, and governance. We use these insights as a springboard for further discussion of specific issues, pointing both to the current state of the field and our suggestions about potential pathways for addressing some of the challenges.

Privacy Perceptions and Norms in Youth and Adults

Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology · 2019-03-01 · 11 citations

Objective: This exploratory study examines privacy perceptions and preferences among adolescent and young adult (AYA) and adult individuals with an emphasis on health-related information. Method: Participants ( N = 112) completed surveys including measures of privacy concern, consumer control of information, online privacy concern and behavior, and sensitivity of personal information. Results: AYAs ( n = 36) and adults ( n = 76) showed similar levels of general privacy concern; specifically, their ratings of the sensitivity of non-health-related personal data did not differ. AYAs’ ratings of various health information sensitivities were lower than adults’ ratings, and AYAs reported less concern on subscales addressing online and consumer data collection. Conclusion: Discrepancies between AYA and adult responses to different privacy scales suggest contextual integrity at work. That is, AYAs’ and adults’ privacy perceptions differ based on the type of information being shared, and they draw on different norms to govern information flow. AYAs are more likely to feel they have control over their personal information and feel comfortable employing privacy protecting strategies. AYAs are less likely to see online information collection as a violation of an implied social contract. This study highlights differences in AYA and adult attitudes toward privacy and suggests that AYAs care about privacy but perceive certain types of information collection as less threatening than adults. Implications for Impact Statement Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) and adults follow different norms with regards to appropriate information flow. Policymakers, parents, educators, and others who are charged with protecting young people should be aware that AYAs may be more open to information flows that they perceive as appropriate, including health information flows. Healthcare providers who encourage AYAs to use mobile health apps and devices should be mindful of privacy concerns as they work to serve their patients’ best interests.

Visualizing Algorithmic Selection in Social Media

2019-11-07 · 1 citations

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter use algorithms to filter information in order to reduce overload and selectively pick content for users. These algorithms create unique, individual, and isolated bubbles of information that users are not always aware of. We recommend that algorithmic awareness should be the first step in addressing the pitfalls of the filter bubble effect. We conducted an experimental study to investigate how simple visualizations can be used to achieve algorithmic awareness and to understand how it might influence users' behavior. The visualizations did not lead to increased understanding of the algorithm per se, but its presence created interesting effects that will inform future studies.