Over the course of the last week I have been attending the first classes in which we have been covering topics related to Ethics,values and conflicts. As a class four activities were conducted in order to cover the topic of conflict ethics and values. The first activity was the peer introduction exercise this was an exercise to get to know the person sitting next to you briefly. We asked a few questions to the person sitting next to us and recorded their answers, then two students(of which I was one) went to the front and told the class the answers to the questions as if they were their peers. Secondly the values exercise was an exercise where given a list of values and life goals we were asked as small groups to come up with 5 values or goals shared by the group. Third the Conflict Types and Intensity Levels Exercise was used to define types of conflicts and the different intensity levels that conflicts can take, we then combined some conflict types and intensity levels and gave examples that relate. The final exercise we did as a class was the Conflict Resolution: 4W Builder exercise in this exercise we were given a task of first coming up with 4 words to teach what a computer is to someone who has never been exposed to such a thing. We first came up with 4 words individually then as a small group and then we tried to do the same as a whole class.
I thought the activities were fun and interesting and the outcome of the exercises yielded some interesting results among the different group sizes in which we conducted the exercises. The Peer introduction was an interesting exercise for me personally as I am not usually one to volunteer to come to the front of the class but it seemed as this was the first introduction to classmates for a lot of people. The class was a bit out of their comfort zones and I in turn felt okay to get out of my comfort zone a bit more than usual. My favorite exercise was the values exercise because it gave different context to the values in different sized groups. We were able to take originally our own values which may have been more self motivated we then can compare that to the values we had as a small group and even further a whole class. This was also a common theme to the 4 word builder exercise in that we started small and tried to come up with unifying values that the whole class felt could represent the situation.
I think the above exercises were appropriate for the the first activities in a computer ethics class because they allowed everyone to both listen and speak, learn introductory concepts, apply those ideas, and then formulate a baseline of how respectful discourse should occur in our classroom setting. We have to know that in a computer science ethics class not every one values or morals are the exact same and that is why I think listening and speaking was an important task in these activities. It allows for a baseline of respectful discourse to be established while not putting any conflicting values against each other.
James Sommerville CP373 Blog 