DLS Talk by Kathi Fisler (Brown)

Speaker:  Dr. Kathi Fisler, CS Professor, Brown University

Title:  Socially-Responsible Computing Education: Views from a Researcher

Abstract:

Efforts to teach ethics in university-level CS have been around since the 1970s. In the last few years, the topic has resurged, with large-scale and publicized efforts at multiple universities. But what do we actually know about how to do this effectively, as informed by education research? The story is complicated by competing framings (e.g., professional ethics, personal ethics, ethical decision-making), differing views of which non-computing disciplines are relevant (e.g., only philosophy, or include sociology and ethnic studies), and questions about whether CS faculty are the right ones to attempt to teach the content at all. This talk will present initial research results and general observations on effective education for socially-responsible computing as we have worked on it at Brown University since 2018. Our work suggests that there are pedagogic designs by which CS faculty can—and should—be the drivers of such education (you’ll see concrete examples). Hopefully, the audience will leave with an understanding of the current landscape as seen through the eyes of both pedagogy and research, as well as some concrete proposals of what we might do next.

Bio:

Kathi Fisler’s journey in CS has gone through multiple research areas (diagrammatic reasoning, formal methods for software design, software security, and the intersection of computing education and programming languages). Her unifying focus has been understanding how people work with and within formal systems, with some work centering the formalism and others centering the people. In the last couple of years, she has gotten interested in what effective and meaningful education might look like for socially-responsible computing, drawing on her formal methods perspective. She is currently a Research Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Computer Science at Brown University. She does substantial outreach work in CS and Data Science education for K-12 through the Bootstrap project. She received SIGPLAN’s Distinguished Educator Award (along with Shriram Krishnamurthi) in 2023. She enjoys a good hike, a good book, and great pizza.

Host:  Ron Garcia, UBC Computer Science