Thread by @cfiesler

#BlackMirrorWritersRoom is a teaching exercise for ethical speculation in computing. @shamikalashawn & I interviewed instructors who have used it, and came away with great insights about benefits, challenges, and cautions in this new #SIGCSE2022 paper! 🧵 cfiesler.medium.com/the-black-mirr…

First, it turns out that (even though sometimes they're shocked to be asked to do it!) the opportunity to be creative and think through ethical issues is really well received by students, even in otherwise technical classes. And what they come up with is amazing!

Though sometimes it was more challenging for instructors to implement the exercise without a lot of scaffolding for the ethical content, and also of course not all students have the same cultural context for scifi or Black Mirror. We're working on helping with these problems...

For example, @SamanthaDalal and I made this exercise for a computer vision class to highlight cybersecurity & related threats, and the exercise for students is based on future news headlines. (Feel free to adapt and use!) #sigcse2022 docs.google.com/presentation/d…

But I think the most important insight in this work is a caution around speculation as an approach for thinking through ethical issues and harms: It is easier for people to imagine futures for and harms to people like them. And "like them" in a CS class is too often narrow.

As one interviewee pointed out, it's common for speculation to be about middle class white people. And it occurred to me (later than it should have) that all of the Black Mirror episodes I was using as examples were about... harms to middle class white people.

But technological harms disproportionately impact marginalized groups. We're creating more scaffolding to bring in e.g. principles of design justice, and in the meantime I've updated the slide deck to encourage instructors to raise this point with students.

This is a problem that we're digging into more in research moving forward, but in general in using speculation as a tool, it's important to avoid reinforcing stereotypes and to consider ways to encourage students/technologists to think broadly about injustice.

And! Lots of participants offered (unprompted) how helpful it was to have come across a teaching exercise that was openly shared, and could be “plug and play” or adapted to fit a particular instructor’s needs. Most heard about it from Twitter!

I've been making an effort to share teaching materials as much as I can, and it's so great to see this effort is worthwhile. I hope this example might encourage others to try this out too with the awesome things they develop for their classrooms. 🥰

If you're interested in learning more or running the Black Mirror Writers Room exercise yourself, you can find everything you need here! internetruleslab.com/black-mirror-w…

And here is @shamikalashawn and my paper “Run Wild a Little With Your Imagination”: Ethical Speculation
in Computing Education with Black Mirror. cmci.colorado.edu/~cafi5706/SIGC… If you're at #SIGCSE2022 we will both be virtually in tomorrow morning's author's corner!

Also because it's #SIGCSE2022 and I'm not there in person to talk everyone's ear off about ethics integration in computing education, if you're interested in more on this topic, here's a bunch of work/resources out of my lab! internetruleslab.com/responsible-co…

Oh also, acknowledgments!!
(1) This study was supported by the Responsible Computer Science Challenge #ResponsibleCS
(2) THANK YOU SO MUCH to the instructors who gave us their time and insights.
(3) My work in this area moving forward is funded by an NSF CAREER & SaTC-EDU 🥰

Oh and also I think I owe some thanks to @doctorow who helped get the word out by writing about this on Boing Boing early on and also called me "a maven in the field of tech ethics education" so remind me to have him blurb the eventual book I write. :) boingboing.net/2018/11/19/bla…