Table of contents:

1. About this course
   1. Course description
   2. Role in curriculum
   3. Learning goals and assessments
      1. Major goals
         1. GEESE Rubric
         2. Course Learning Goals
      2. How you’ll progress toward these goals
         1. Progress binder
         2. Portfolio
      3. How we’ll assign your final grade
2. Course preview
   1. Part I: Ethics–theory vs. practice
   2. Part II: Finding and using evidence
   3. Part III: Making comparisons, scrutinizing solutions
3. Generic policies for my courses

What to call me	Chris or Prof. Mitsch
When and where (section 01)	DANA 134, MWF 12-12:50pm
When and where (section 02)	BRKI 066, MWF 2-2:50pm
Office hours?	Make an appointment

Learning goals and assessments

Major goals

Ok, now for the big-picture goals I want us to work toward. This course is a bit tricky, in that it is the only course in which the department officially aims to achieve the following student outcomes required to for accreditation, namely Criterion 3 for each of the CAC and EAC:

 4. Recognize professional responsibilities and make informed judgments in computing practice based on legal and ethical principles. (Computing Accreditation Commission)

 4. An ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts. (Engineering Accreditation Commission)

GEESE Rubric

For that reason, we will be using the following rubric for assessing your work at the end of the term:

	Able to make judgments informed by (impact on)…
Performance Levels	Ethical/Professional/Legal	Societal	Economic	Environmental	Global
Outstanding
Satisfactory
Developing
Unsatisfactory

Course Learning Goals

However, you will need certain skills to demonstrate these abilities, and those are the skills I want us to focus on and what I will be asking about for your reflections. They are:

1. Collect and analyze information from varied sources. You will especially need to know how to find reliable and critical information about social, economic, environmental, and global issues with which you are not familiar.
2. Work collaboratively to identify problems and potential solutions. You must be able to work as a team, not as a collection of individuals. This means setting clear expectations for one another and yourself, communicating clearly, and distributing work equitably.
3. Subject proposals to serious and consequential scrutiny, even if it means substantial revision of your methods or even goals. If you come out of this class with one and only one thing, it should be a willingness to seek out and implement criticism of your work. I don’t care about what you decide is the right thing to do, but I do care about how you decide what the right thing is.

In addition to these, I expect you to meet the standard goals that apply to any class: show up, participate, work hard, respect me and your peers, etc.

Also, in case you are unaware, you are officially expected to spend 12 hours per week (for a total of 168 hours per semester) doing work for each one-credit class you take. Since we meet for 3 hours per week, that means you are expected to be doing 9 hours of work outside of class per week.

How you’ll progress toward these goals

Progress binder

At its core, this class is about developing habits and skills related to critical thinking, albeit packaged as ethical decision-making. For this reason, I want us to focus as much as possible on the actual habits and skills required to think critically. The entire course structure is intended to make this as easy as possible for us. However, I want to note one big feature of the course that is meant to help us: you will be submitting a final portfolio consisting of a selection of your work, and you will be submitting a physical copy of this portfolio (see next heading). As preparation for this portfolio, you will be keeping a binder of all of the work that you do in this course, including your readings, writing, weekly or daily reflections, a time log, and anything else we decide is worth adding.

Now, I know this probably seems odd—it’s 2025, why the hell would I have you submit something physical? There are actually many good reasons for doing so, at least to my mind, but the most important ones fall into two broad categories. First, thinking—and by extension, writing or giving a presentation—is a process; being able to easily survey that process will be super helpful for reflecting on it and making adjustments. This is just hard to do when it’s scattered across a bunch of files that you have to open individually, and that’s before we talk about how well those files are organized (spoiler: they never are). Having them physical also makes it easier to move things around.

Second, good thinking takes time, and distractions and interruptions are, by definition, hindrances to good thinking. (I’m not generally a fan of Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, or his take on dual-process theories of cognition, but he at least gets the core idea across: fast thinking is easier, and often encouraged by our environment, but far less reliable.) Our digital lives are hella distracting, so getting off of those is a good idea. There’s also plenty of evidence that working more slowly and not on a screen—even with things as simple as reading or taking notes—is better for learning.

That said, I know this is going to be annoying at first—complain away! But, know that I am going to make you think about why it’s annoying, so be prepared to think critically. Of course, I am also open to evidence that it’s not working—either in general or for you in particular—so if you have a good criticism of this, let me have it! This is the first time I’m trying this, so there will inevitably be some kinks to work out.

Also, please note that this expectation does not invalidate any accommodations you may have or need. Part of the reason I’m spelling out why we are doing this is to make it easier for us to come up with reasonable accommodations should the idea not work for everyone. I’ll also throw out that doing this stuff physically serves as a management strategy for my ADHD: “out of sight, out of mind” is basically how my brain works, so having your binders/portfolios physically staring at me—instead of buried in a learning management system—will make it a lot easier for me to keep track of your work and, ultimately, give you the feedback you deserve. Making each of our needs as explicit as we can will help us find a solution that works for all of us.

Portfolio

To give you a preview, here are some of the things I will expect you to include in your final portfolio:

• Annotated copy of class’s final project
• Slides and transcript or notes for you humanities/social sciences video(s)
• Two peer response packets
  • Self-reflection prior to peer response
• • Summary of peer’s response (written together)
  • Action plan and reflection on peer response
• Reflections on two discussions with relevant experts outside of computer science
• Personal growth packet
  • Explanation of an individual goal(s) you have that will help you make progress on the major course goals and why this is a goal for you
• • Weekly paragraph reflecting on progress toward this goal and setting next goals
  • Final reflection on individual goal
• Three summaries of professor check-ins and action plans
  • One before beginning on the class project
  • One during the class project
  • One final check-in (action plan is for future courses/work)
    • Book here. Note that these are group meetings and there is space for a maximum of 9 groups. Plan accordingly!
• Collaboration plans for partnered and class projects
  • Accountability structure and checkpoints
  • Pre-mortem and action plan
  • Records of work done (e.g., meeting notes, time logs, to-do lists)
• Overall reflection on course learning
  • Explanation of progress toward learning goals
  • Artifacts that illustrate this progress
  • Discussion of your engagement in the class
  • What you’ve learned about your thinking
  • Self-assigned grade that is consistent with:
    • the contents of your portfolio
    • your explanation of learning goal progress
    • illustrative artifacts provided
    • your engagement in class

Okay, so that’s a lot. But don’t panic! I’m sharing all these details now for two reasons. First, having these details now will make it much easier for us to make any tweaks to our class along the way—to keep our eye on the prize, so to speak. So, for example, when we start working on your collaboration goals for your partnered project and y’all find it really tedious, I can point to this to emphasize that we are, in fact, building towards something. On the other hand, it lets you off the hook for stuff you may get hung up on but probably shouldn’t, like knowing “enough” about ethical theories or computer science. So having all these details here is meant to help us focus on what matters not to overwhelm us.

 Second, I have included all of these details to yet again emphasize a super important point about thinking and decision-making: it is an iterative, social, and metacognitively demanding process. Scan through the list again. See how there’s only one bullet point on the class project itself? That’s for very good reason—I don’t want you thinking of your class project as the “product” of your work in this course. If anything, I want you to think of the “product” of your work in this course as the process you go through along the way. Let’s be real here: while it’s possible, your class project is probably not going to change hearts and minds, including your own. The process you go through for that project, however, is one that will have that potential, especially as you refine it after you leave here.

How we’ll assign your final grade

Your final grade will be determined by your progress toward each of the major goals. If you submit good faith attempt at a portfolio that includes everything on the list above, and you submit it on time, you will receive at least a B. Your general level and quality of engagement in class, the depth of your reflection on your learning, and your attitude toward learning will account for the rest of your grade. (Note: having a “good” attitude does not mean not complaining about the class, but it does mean being willing to continue engaging and thinking critically about why continued engagement, even with stuff you hate, is worth your time.)

We’ll talk about this more in class, but at the end of the day, you are in the driver’s seat for your grade: do everything I expect, engage regularly, and make a good effort at assessing your progress, and I won’t complain if you assign yourself an A.

Course preview

Part I: Ethics–theory vs. practice

Module learning goals: Learn the basics of ethical decision-making, including: professional codes of conduct; legal expectations; where ethical decision-making happens; what influences ethical decision-making; how to evaluate individual scenarios.

Time expected: 4 weeks

Part II: Finding and using evidence

Module learning goals: build up resources for group proposal; practice finding and summarizing research.

Your main assignment will be to record a short explainer of one humanities or social science research article you found (two if time allows). You will do this as part of a pair (or group of 3, if necessary).

Time expected: 3 weeks

Part III: Making comparisons, scrutinizing solutions

During our final unit, you will work on a class-wide project. This is meant to get you practice on larger-scale collaborations. These often involve much more specialization than smaller-scale collaborations. This specialization can make it especially difficult to coordinate with your collaborators because you can’t assume everyone knows the same things. Large-scale collaborations are also more demanding when it comes to making changes in response to feedback. Getting practice dealing with these downsides of larger collaborations will be important for your time after Bucknell, basically no matter what you do.

On the positive side, however, larger-scale collaborations allow you to get more done. I’d like us to find a project that feels like meaningful work to all of us. Figuring out what that looks like will require some time, so I’d encourage you to start thinking early about options. In the past, students have done things like lobbied legislators, created a framework for AI use in the classroom here at Bucknell, and recorded podcasts on underappreciated problems in tech.

Time expected: rest of class

Generic policies for my courses

To see the other policies in play for this course, see the page on generic course policies. These apply to all of my courses.