News/Research

Alum Jenni Higgs Published in Communications of the ACM

19 Mar, 2019

Alum Jenni Higgs Published in Communications of the ACM

"It's About Power" by alum Jenni Higgs and Sepehr Vakil was published in the March 2019 volume of Communications of the ACM. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society and delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. ACM provides the computing field's premier Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources.

Jenni and Sepehr's colum aims to build on and extend the field's understandings of the nature of ethics and equity in computing. Specifically, they argue that issues related to systems of power, which are often absent from conversations around ethics in computing, must be brought to the foreground in K-16 computing education.

From the abstract:

A power-conscious approach to ethics in computing highlights the socio-political and sociocultural contexts in which technologies are developed and deployed. To respond to the highly complex sociotechnical problems of the 21st century and beyond, future computer scientists and engineers need educational opportunities that prepare them to understand and care about the far-reaching ethical and sociopolitical implications of new technologies. Yet, we must also fundamentally rethink who computing education is for. Serious efforts should be made at the K-12 and undergraduate levels to make the knowledge, skills, and tools to critically examine the relationships between power, ethics, and technology available to all. Given rapidly evolving innovations and contexts of computing, we argue for two changes in our approach to ethics and equity in K-16 computing education.

To read more from the article see here!